Well, a few months after Part I of this blog post was published, which focused on Deltek’s pre-New Mountain Capital private equity investment era, the time has finally come for us to analyze why being again publicly traded should (or should not) work better for Deltek this time. If one is to judge merely by the most recent financial figures, it would appear to be working well, but my focus here is on some lingering “softer” issues too.

So, when the new management team took the helm at Deltek in mid 2005, it realized that many good things had happened over the previous two decades at the company, but that one can never be too complacent. Indeed, room for improvements existed in many regards, or at least  some challenges could always be turned into opportunities. 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 »

In the last decade or so of covering the enterprise applications market, I’ve witnessed so many products and vendors disappearing and reappearing under a different name, ownership, etc., but it is for the first time now, at the end of 2007 that I saw basically the same vendor go public for the second time (and in a 10 year timespan). Namely, Deltek (evaluate its flagship product), the leading provider of enterprise applications software designed specifically for project-focused businesses (those with business processes revolving around the engagement, execution and delivery of projects), has done it again. Its common shares begun trading November 1, 2007 on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the trading symbol “PROJ”. Previously, the company, which was founded in 1983, used to be publicly traded under the symbol “DLTK” from 1997 till late 2002/early 2003, when it was de-listed and went private again (for the time being).

I don’t intend to bore you with the financial figures (about the number of shares offered, its current share value, market capitalization, etc.), since many wire alerts have repeatedly already done so. What is more interesting here is Deltek chief executive officer (CEO), Kevin Parker’s statements that the company — which, as mentioned above, was taken public 10 years ago before being taken private about five years later by the founding deLaski family — launched its second initial public offering (IPO) as a means to boost recognition of the Deltek brand. Parker believes that it is an important time to have a broader audience, and the company is thus focusing on expanding globally. Proceeds from the offering will be used to pay down debt, which Parker said will give the company greater ability to reinvest in the company.

In his recent blog post, Ray Wang of Forrester Research is quite positive and upbeat about the IPO, and fully agrees with Parker’s ideas and justifications. Myself, I often tend to mostly agree with Ray, with the difference that one should always mention some caveats too (and please, can anyone show me a single company without some challenges?). On the other hand, a report that preceded the Deltek IPO by a few months (i.e., it was posted after Deltek’s pre-IPO S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] ) was quite negative, berating the S-1 filing (especially the “Description of business” part) as sounding so outdated (so 1990-ish), and without any references to the contemporary trends like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS)/On-Demand, Web 2.0, etc. Also, the article opines that the heydays of the Professional Service Automation (PSA) market (one in which Deltek competes) are far behind us (I might agree with the fact that the PSA acronym might be a “goner”, but not really the market opportunity – certainly not in a services economy). Read the rest of this entry »