One view is the company sold because it is continuing to lose money at a rapid. While we are unlikely to learn all the reasons that is one I don’t automatically accept. Wall Street has historically been kind to technology companies that lose money in order to buy market share if their plan makes sense and the street believes management can execute that plan. It’s a possible reason, but I home in on one phrase given by Avalara CEO Scott McFarlane as something to be accepted at face value. In his prepared statement, McFarlane said Avalara “will benefit from their [Vista’s] expertise in enterprise software as we build and improve upon our cloud compliance platform.” I believe that is the driving force, the desire to build an enterprise business. That effort is expensive and requires being able to build the products and sales and marketing organization (and management) structures needed to operate in the enterprise space. To use a hot phrase, it requires scale. Although Oracle’s purchase of NetSuite may have seemed ordained by the heavens (or Larry Ellison, somewhat the same thing), NetSuite’s move upstream was requiring it to build the same corporate systems that Oracle already had. Outside of Ellison’s desire to bring them under one roof, the move made sense in terms of the investment needed. That same reasoning applies to the Avalara deal quite nicely.