Over the last few years I have produced a number of articles and blog entries on two once-independent and occasionally competing products: Agresso Business World (ABW) and CODA Financials. Since early 2008, these two products and their related owner companies have become siblings within the Unit 4 Agresso parent.

Unit 4 Agresso is a Netherlands-based business software company that has grown since its inception in 1980 in great part via several mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The company offers a number of regional products for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) that are deployed mainly in the Benelux region. In addition, the vendor offers local business applications that are sold in Norway, Sweden, the UK, Germany, and Spain.

However, most of Unit 4 Agresso’s revenue is still derived from the Agresso Business World (ABW) product line. ABW [evaluate this product] is a non-manufacturing enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite targeted at upper midsize service-centric enterprises, and Unit 4 Agresso acquired it in August 2000 through a merger with the former Norwegian ERP vendor Agresso.

Agresso Nowadays

Thus, for the rest of this blog post, I will use the shorter “Agresso” name to denote the entire company. Agresso completed the CODA acquisition throughout 2008, which now makes it the sixth largest mid-market ERP vendor worldwide according to IDC. In 2008, the company had about US$ 550 million in revenues and 3,500 employees, and was operating in 19 countries in 3 continents around the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog topic has revisited Agresso’s post-implementation agility capabilities (as to accommodate businesses living in a change — so called BLINC’s), and its devised growth strategy via in-house developments, complementary acquisitions and/or partnerships. Most recently, Agresso expressed the intent to acquire the United Kingdom UK-based competitor CODA, but the analysis of this potential merger deserves a blog post on its own. For now, some other blog posts, such as these one from AccManPro on the merger and on CODA’s recent software as a service (SaaS) forays, should do.

As for the future customer relationship management (CRM) offering, I could quite understand Agresso’s initial temptation for leveraging Microsoft Dynamics CRM [evaluate this product], whose latest version, formerly code-named “Titan” has been completed and released to manufacturing in December 2007. The new version is offered under two product names: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for on-premise and partner-hosted deployments and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live for Microsoft-hosted deployment. Read the rest of this entry »

Writing about failed partnerships in the enterprise applications market is like writing about the sun setting in the evening and to the west, given almost daily occurrences of vendors announcing alliances that never materialize. However, it doesn’t happen every day that a potential high-profile alliance gets called off at the 11th hour and in favor of an overlooked in-house solution.

The protagonist of the story is enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor Agresso, which reported approximately US$225 million  in revenue in 2006. Agresso is the primary operating business of the Netherlands-based Unit 4 Agresso (Dutch Stock Exchange EURONEXT-U4AGR) and has subsidiaries selling its ERP platforms (Agresso Business World and others) around the world.  In aggregate, Agresso is one of the top five providers of ERP solutions for people-based businesses, i.e., professional services and public sector organizations (besides SAP, Oracle, Infor and Lawson Software). Read the rest of this entry »