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Prophix to Acquire Sigma Conso

Prophix today announced its acquisition of Sigma Conso, a Belgian-based CPM software and service provider, from Fortino Capital Partners

Authors: Dr. Christian Fuchs and Larissa Baier

Published: 27 October 2021

Today, Prophix, the Canadian CPM software vendor announced it will be acquiring Sigma Conso, the Belgian financial performance management (FPM) specialist. Prophix itself was acquired by Hg, one of the largest specialist tech investors in Europe in January 2021, valuing the company at around $500-$600m. Hg is now accelerating and scaling Prophix’s growth through the acquisition of Sigma Conso, which itself only received a growth investment from Fortino Capital Partners in June 2020. This is the first instance of inorganic growth in Prophix’s corporate history.

From a use case perspective, Prophix and Sigma Conso’s offerings fit together nicely. Whereas Prophix is strongly focused on CPM use cases such as planning, budgeting and forecasting, reporting and analysis, Sigma Conso has its strengths in FPM, offering software for financial consolidation and close, management reporting, intercompany reconciliation as well as specialty solutions for IFRS 16 and iXBRL. Sigma Conso is a cloud-native product that matches Prophix’s future cloud strategy.

The acquisition adds 70 employees and 600 customers to Prophix’s workforce and customer base. With its headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, and local offices in Europe and Asia, Sigma Conso has customers in 20 countries. Its main presence, however, is currently across Europe with the majority of customers in the Benelux region and France, but also in Italy, Spain and other countries.

With the addition of Sigma Conso’s technology and resources, Prophix strengthens its capabilities for consolidation and close, while also extending its global reach with key geographic access to sell Prophix into Europe and Asia. Moreover, Sigma Conso’s solutions could be a valuable addition for Prophix’s existing customer base of over 1,600 active customers of all company sizes and industries in more than 100 countries, mainly in North America. Sigma Conso’s existing customers may also find Prophix to be a valuable extension for CPM, which until now has been addressed with a partner product (Unit4 FP&A).

Overall, we believe the acquisition makes sense and creates various market opportunities for Prophix (new regions, new use cases, etc.), but also potential benefits for Sigma Conso’s customers. By broadening its portfolio, Prophix is closing the gap on competitors such as Board, Jedox, Unit4 and Workday, who also offer integrated financial consolidation and close solutions in their CPM portfolios.

BARC will continue to observe with interest Sigma Conso’s integration into Prophix. At first glance, the two company cultures, company sizes and technological approaches seem to fit very well together for further expansion.

Further Reading

Prophix press release announcing the acquisition of Sigma Conso

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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

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Qlik To Be Acquired by Private Equity Firm Thoma Bravo

Qlik has announced it has entered into an agreement with private equity firm Thoma Bravo to be acquired by them for around 3 billion USD.

Author: Carsten Bange

Published: 30 June 2016

Qlik announced at the beginning of June that it has entered into an agreement with private equity firm Thoma Bravo to be acquired by them for ~3 billion USD. Qlik, founded in 1993 in Lund, Sweden and now headquartered in Radnor, PA, USA has become one of the major BI vendors in the last 15 years: It currently has 2,000 employees, 39,000 customers and 1,700 partners in more than 100 countries, making 612 million USD revenue in 2015. This values Qlik at about 5x revenue and at a similar enterprise value to Tableau, which has surpassed Qlik with very strong growth in recent years, reaching 695 million USD revenue in 2015, but also suffering a 50% stock price plummet in February 2016.

Qlik has appeared to be for sale for a while and the move to de-list from the stock market and become owned by a PE company has become quite normal amongst software vendors: Tibco, Informatica and more recently Dell Software are other prominent examples. 

Qlik’s stock price has remained between 20 and 40 USD for the last 5 years – basically going sideways despite its revenue growth during that period – so its frequent interactions with financial analysts and its large number of shareholders were probably not too pleasant. Qlik has faced some serious challenges in recent years, both organizationally and on the product and marketing side with the transformation from its first product generation (QlikView) to the second generation Qlik Sense. Qlik has returned to calmer waters in the last year since the release of Qlik Sense 2.0 in mid 2015. But its complete transformation to a Cloud software-oriented company is still ongoing, and the freedom to take decisions without the added scrutiny of the stock market might help to re-focus Qlik on business priorities and push it into new areas.

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Cisco Acquires ParStream

Author: Carsten Bange

Published: 27 October 2015

Abstract:
Networking giant Cisco has announced its intent to buy ParStream, a young analytical database vendor based in Germany and the US. This acquisition strengthens Cisco’s ability to build networks with real-time data acquisition and storage “on the edges” of the network in distributed infrastructures.

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Permira Private Equity and Canada Pension Plan Take Informatica Private

Author: Andreas Bitterer

Published: 9 April 2015

Abstract:
In a surprising move, Informatica Corporation, a publicly traded and market-leading provider of data integration, data quality and master data management solutions agreed to be acquired by two private equity firms that will take the vendor private.

Click here to download the full article

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Marlin Equity Partners Acquires Arcplan

Authors: Carsten Bange, Andreas Bitterer

Published: 7 April 2015

Abstract:
German business intelligence software vendor Arcplan has agreed to be acquired by US-based private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners for an undisclosed sum. The Arcplan company and its product portfolio is expected to be merged with Longview Solutions, a Canadian provider of business performance management solutions and another Marlin Equity Partners portfolio company.

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