Part 1 of this blog series depicted the rise and fall of of erstwhile public software company Click Commerce based in Chicago, Illinois, United States (US). At the end, the article mentioned the July 2009 merger of Servigistics and Click Commerce’s Service Network Services (SNS) division.

The private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners acquired both entities recently with the idea of forming a new combined company to solve the planning, optimization, execution, and analytics challenges associated with delivering post-sale service. The new company, with estimated combined revenue of nearly $100 million (USD), will be headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia (US) and retain the Servigistics name and its chief executive officer (CEO). Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog series expanded on some of TEC’s earlier articles about companies’ need for better links between the plant (”blue collar trenches”) and the enterprise (”white collar ivory tower”). It also pointed out the difficulties in achieving this idea. An obvious solution would be a tightly integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution system (MES) package that would help manufacturers close the gap between the shop floor and the offices by gaining visibility into manufacturing operations, achieving shop floor control, managing product/process traceability, genealogy, and so on. Read the rest of this entry »

Even in such a volatile stock market and under investor/regulatory scrutiny, going public as a means of getting some capital investment is still an option — the most recent examples being Deltek and NetSuite. On the established public vendor side, CDC Software, Epicor Software, Lawson Software and Oracle (if not even SAP too) would be examples of mostly unrelentingly acquisitive vendors in the enterprise applications space.

On the other hand, there has been a general feeling lately of a money crunch in the private equity and venture capitalist (VC) world for those software companies that still prefer to remain privately-held and yet acquisitive. Some of these vendors have been discussed in my recent “ERP Reincarnations” posts, Part I and Part II.

In other words, can the likes of Infor, Consona Corporation and Solarsoft really continue without running out of steam? Namely, besides Solarsoft’s continued acquisition activity of late (including the offer to acquire the United Kingdom (UK)-based Chelford Group, where the SSI-World’s versatile TROPOS product is a part of the business), once seemingly unstoppable Infor and Consona have lately taken a noted break. Read the rest of this entry »

While the Part I of this topic focused on Consona Corporation (former M2M Holdings), this time the discussion continues with the recently minted Solarsoft entity, privately owned by Marlin Equity Partners. True, in Part I, besides Infor, I could have also mentioned as old news the renaming of Verticent ERP Plus (formerly PowerCerv [evaluate this product]) as part of the ASA International parent and SoftBrands (formerly Fourth Shift and AremisSoft), but these companies have not that candidly professed their appetite for more acquisitions.

In any case, in April 2007 Canada-based CMS Software merged with the United Kingdom (UK)-based XKO Software Limited, a provider of specialist enterprise software. CMS has been in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) business for over 20 years, and, naturally, it has always looked for ways to improve the services and products it delivers to its customers. As the market increasingly demands consistent local service delivered on a global basis, the company hoped to enhance its ability to meet that demand via the merger.

But, when CMS and XKO merged they knew that they would eventually need to find a new name for the combined business. Namely, both firms were relatively well known in their local markets but the names have lost their original meaning and communicated little to new customers in new markets. According to the letter sent to all customers and partners, putting together a six-letter acronym didn’t make sense, so the company held an internal contest and the name “Solarsoft” was chosen, as suggested by a member of the staff. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the ERP Graveyard blog might sometimes be slightly deceiving, since not all enterprise resource planning (ERP) products necessarily die there. Some of them might even be resurected under a different name and ownership.

To that end, Infor might even seem like old news today. It’s been five years since its formation (no pun intended here, given its subsequent acquisition of former Formation Systems, with the Infor Optima PLM product as a result). Also, many articles have meanwhile been written on our web site about Infor’s collection/arsenal of once all but deceased ERP products, such as:

• Infor ERP LX (formerly SSA BPCS),
• Infor ERP LN (formerly Baan),
• Infor ERP System21 (formerly Geac System21 and JBA System21),
• Infor ERP Visual (formerly Lilly Visual),
• Infor ERP XA (formerly MAPICS XA),
• Infor ERP SyteLine (formerly MAPICS SyteLine, Frontstep SyteLine and Symix SyteLine),
• Infor ERP Adage (formerly SCT Adage),
• Infor ERP SX.enterprise (formerly NX-Trend),
• Infor ERP FACTS (formerly Aperum) and
• Infor ERP TRANS4M (formerly BRAIN Trans4m).

However, 2007 has seen the emergence of two brand new names in the space — Consona Corporation and Solarsoft Business Solutions. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an update on new TEC vendor ratings and certifications. If you’re currently evaluating or researching ERP, business process management (BPM), or product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, here’s what we have new for you. Reports are available as well as in-depth rating evaluations in the evaluation centers. Here are the new items.

TEC published up-to-date information for version 4 of Omnify’s Empower PLM. Some areas in which the product’s functionality focuses help to integrate product design changes with the production process, product data vaulting and management, and configuration management.

Polymita’s BPM Suite joined our business process management knowledge base. The product focuses in part on modeling, workflow, and security functionality.

If you’re researching ERP solutions for discrete, process, or mixed-mode industries, I’d like to announce that TEC analysts recently certified the Logo Business Solutions’ Unity system.

Finally, to continue on the different variants of ERP systems, a new name recently entered the enterprise software space, Solarsoft. Its products however, have a history represented in the merger of vendors CMS and XKO Software. We’re offering six different reports on these products.