On November 1, 2012, RedPrairie Corporation and JDA Software announced their merger. Under the terms of the agreement, the entities affiliated with RedPrairie will effect a cash tender offer to acquire all outstanding shares of JDA common stock for $45 per share. My initial positive and negative thoughts on the merger were outlined in Part One of this blog series.

Cynical and jaded market observers will see this merger as a déjà vu whereby two software companies that have been unable to perform to their full potential are coming together with the hope things will improve just like that. Read the rest of this entry »

My attendance of RedPrairie Corporations’ RedShift 2010 user conference (for the first time ever) confirmed what I have long sensed about the company’s corporate culture and its install base. That is, the previous blog series on a few supply chain management (SCM) players has, inter alia, expressed my opinions about RedPrairie (formerly McHugh Software), and I believed that these were mostly on target.

However, the recent conference provided a few more eye-opening findings and experiences that cannot transpire through occasional conference calls and brief analyst briefings. In his keynote speech, Michael Mayoras, RedPrairie’s CEO said that the privately held company had a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 20 percent in last 5 years (to estimated ~US$260 million in revenues in 2009). 

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