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prevero to be Acquired by Dutch Software Vendor Unit4

prevero has announced it has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Unit4, a Netherlands-based enterprise applications software vendor with operations worldwide. The purchase price has not been disclosed.

Authors: Carsten Bange and Christian Fuchs

Published: 11 July 2016

In recent years, prevero has grown into one of the largest performance management vendors in the DACH region in terms of software revenues. Its growth has been largely organic but was also boosted considerably by the acquisitions of software vendors Winterheller in 2011 and MIK in 2015, the latter of which is still trading as an independent company. Now prevero itself has agreed to be acquired by Unit4.

Unit4 is a provider of enterprise applications empowering people in service organizations (e.g. ERP). With annual revenues of more than Euro 500 million and over 4,000 employees worldwide, Unit4 delivers ERP, industry-focused and topical applications. Thousands of organizations around the world from sectors including professional services, education, public services, not-for-profit, real estate, wholesale and financial services use Unit4 solutions.

In our opinion, prevero’s performance management products fit well into Unit4’s product portfolio. Data-based decision making and data analysis have become more important than ever, not least for Unit4’s ERP customer base. However, until now Unit4 has not had any specific CPM products in its portfolio. Also, from a geographical perspective, prevero has a strong footprint in the DACH region while Unit4 is present in many other parts of Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America. So this deal opens up the potential for selling Unit4’s ERP products to prevero’s 4,500 customers in the DACH region and prevero’s CPM products to Unit4’s customer base, as well as a stand-alone product in the vendor’s 26 markets worldwide. According to both parties a joint offering should be available within 6 months.

Going forward, prevero will be Unit4’s standard platform for CPM and BI. The prevero brand will be retained for the time being with the goal of joint branding over time. prevero’s management team of Alexander Springer and Matthias Thurner and all its 160 employees will become part of Unit4.

Overall, we think the acquisition provides great potential for both companies. prevero in particular will be able to enlarge its customer base in global markets that it probably would never have been able to address itself. Moreover, the development of its CPM products can profit from Unit4’s more substantial development capacities. Unit4 can offer a more complete set of products and also cover the important areas of planning, data analytics and decision support in a sophisticated way. Whether there is cross-selling potential for its ERP solutions into the prevero customer base remains to be seen. Many of prevero’s customers will already have established ERP products and are unlikely to focus on replacing their existing infrastructure.

Further Reading
Unit4 press release announcing the acquisition of prevero