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IFS and Acumatica Share Leadership Now – Is This a Birth of Another ERP Titan?
IFS AB owner since 2015, EQT Partners acquired Acumatica, another ERP vendor. While IFS and Acumatica are still expected to operate independently, sharing leadership and expertise between two different but successful products has interesting prospects to rival ERP giants like Oracle, SAP, Infor, and Microsoft in the not-so-remote future.
IFS (Industrial & Financial Systems) is a relatively old player in the ERP space (founded in 1983), headquartered in Sweden. It is well known for its field service management (FSM) and enterprise asset management (EAM) capabilities, establishing and claiming good presence in North America while rapidly growing its cloud offerings. IFS has about 10,000 customers in five markets: aerospace and defense, energy and utilities, engineering and construction, manufacturing, and service.
Acumatica is a relatively new and smaller player known predominantly in North America for its integrated business management capabilities like financials, distribution, project accounting, and customer relationship management (CRM), and has about 5,000 customers.
IFS is bound to make about $720 million this year, according to its CEO Darren Roos, while Acumatica’s revenue is estimated at $40 million.
Roos said that Acumatica and IFS will learn from each other. "We (IFS) have a breadth of experience and functional capability that is relevant to the same industries that Acumatica serves,” he said. Acumatica is good at "the ways in which they've enhanced the application to make it easier to use, to make it easier and quicker to deploy."
Our Take
The “near-merger” of IFS and Acumatica under the EQT Partners umbrella is a symbiotic construct, where both companies are set to build upon each other’s success. This new union will allow both firms to leverage one another’s Independent Software Vendor, reseller, and systems integrator networks. This might be a birth of another ERP titan stepping into Tier 1 for ERP market share and competing with the established players like Infor, Oracle, and SAP.
Source: SoftwareReviews, Accessed July 22, 2019