Mergers, acquisitions, partnerships in July/August 2022

Meeting customer demand

Sivis has acquired Danish identity and access management software company 2ndC.

2ndC is a cloud software provider with a strong foothold in Identity and Access Management. For over 25 years, 2ndC has been supporting its customers with regard to the user lifecycle and the control of identity and access management with the 2ndC Compliance Suite, which is built on a standardized Microsoft platform. Sivis has also been a leading provider of identity and access management software solutions for over 22 years, with a focus on SAP authorizations. Together, the group will combine their strengths to help customers gain better control over their user lifecycle and security requirements.

As a generalist for managing identities from different landscapes, 2ndC perfectly complements Sivis' deep SAP expertise. The combined offering will provide customers with centralized orchestration for identities across the entire IT environment. With a secure solution for identities, the foundation is laid for the customer's employees to have all licenses, work materials and accesses from the first day of work.

“We are thrilled to finally be able to meet the customer requirement for identity management for non-SAP systems.“

Philipp Latini, Managing Director, Sivis

Acquisition successfully completed

All for One Group has acquired all shares in Poet as well as a majority stake in the development company Poet Egypt.

The parties have agreed not to disclose the purchase price. The financing will come from the company's own resources. Both companies welcome the acquisition and the associated expansion of expertise and implementation strength in customer experience consulting services. With this acquisition, All for One is taking a step forward in the expansion of its customer experience division. The 110 experts from the Karlsruhe-based IT service provider and its development company in Egypt strengthen the Group's CX service spectrum, which is served by the subsidiary B4B Solutions. "With Poet Egypt, we will leverage the successful nearshore model and development expertise in other subject areas as well"Michael Zitz, Chief Sales Officer of the All for One Group, commented on the acquisition of the company.

“We will also use the successful nearshore model and development expertise in other areas.

Michael Zitz, Chief Sales Officer, All for One

Part of a big picture

The new alliance of software investor Vertica Capital Partners has set itself clear goals.

The association of seven companies from different areas of IT security will offer a comprehensive service and product portfolio. In addition to Sast Solutions for the German-speaking region and Pathlock, which is named after its international reputation, these are Appsian, Security Weaver, CSI Tools, Xpandion and QSoftware. The strategy of the group of companies with a total of 15 locations in the USA, Europe, Israel and India is to integrate the solutions of all partners in an uncomplicated and comprehensive manner. The operating units, their customer loyalty and their proven contact persons will remain in place. For Sast, becoming part of the merger is a tribute to its expertise and at the same time offers new prospects for expansion.

The company is thus now present in the USA and many other countries. "This highly dynamic growth, opening up international markets and other continents, is difficult for a Hamburg-based medium-sized company to do on its own; together with the Pathlock Group, all these opportunities are now open to us"says Bodo Kahl, CEO of Sast. A broad solution is being developed that can do more than the classic approach that has been common on the market to date. This focuses either on the area of user and access management or cyber security. In the near future, the products will be brought together in an integrated platform.

“This highly dynamic growth is difficult for a medium-sized company in Hamburg to achieve on its own."

Bodo Kahl, CEO, Sast Solutions

Expand competence

After acquiring a majority stake in the 200-employee ISR in April 2022, Cenit is now acquiring an SAP PLM expert.

Mannheim-based Coristo is a proven specialist in the field of SAP PLM: For 14 years, the company has been successfully developing and implementing process and software solutions around core processes that optimally complement the SAP standard. In 2016, Cenit acquired a majority stake of 51 percent in the company. From then on, the Mannheim-based company operated as an independent company of the Cenit Group. The full acquisition of the company, which has now taken place, is a significant step by Cenit on its way to becoming a holistic SAP solution provider. Coristo will continue to operate as an independent company under its own name.

"We are taking advantage of the very good entry point to further develop our joint expertise and at the same time to be able to optimally manage our SAP solutions business worldwide," explains Peter Schneck, CEO of Cenit. "The transformation of the SAP world towards S/4 and cloud is in full swing; in the future, we will offer our customers a much broader range of services for their transformation processes than before." Last but not least, the joint solution offering should lead to more sales.

"The transformation of the SAP world towards S/4 and the cloud is in full swing, and we will be offering our customers a much broader range of services in future than before.“

Peter Schneck, CEO, Cenit

Increased commitment

Esker announced a strategic investment in partner company LSQ. As a first step, the investment will take the form of a five million USD convertible promissory note loan to strengthen the partnership between LSQ and Esker and accelerate the development and commercial expansion of their joint supply chain financing solutions. The partners have agreed to potentially increase Esker's financial investment in LSQ in the future based on the development of the joint business.

Esker announced its official commercial partnership with LSQ in December 2021. This move will enable Esker customers to leverage the LSQ FastTrack accounts payable financing (supply chain financing) and dynamic discounting platform to maximize their financing options, delivering savings in Esker's leading end-to-end business process solution. The LSQ solutions are part of Esker Pay, a fintech suite.

Turnkey supercomputing infrastructure

NetApp certifies EF600 all-flash NVMe storage combined with BeeGFS parallel file system for Nvidia DGX SuperPOD.

The new certification simplifies artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. As a result, it enables faster implementation of these use cases. Since 2018, NetApp and Nvidia have provided hundreds of customers with a range of solutions, from building AI Centers of Excellence to solving AI training challenges. The qualification of NetApp EF600 and Bee GFS file system for DGX SuperPOD is the latest addition to the AI solutions the two companies have developed. "The NetApp and Nvidia alliance has been delivering innovation for years, and the new qualification builds on that momentum"says Marc Kleff, director of solutions engineering at NetApp. "Performance and data requirements are exploding. Nvidia DGX SuperPOD, combined with the Ontap AI platform, ensures customers receive comprehensive support."

"The NetApp and Nvidia alliance has been delivering innovation for years and the new qualification builds on that moment."

Marc Kleff, Director Solutions Engineering, NetApp

Relieve product portfolio

Predictive analytics is part of a successful strategy, NTT Data Business Solutions knows.

NTT Data Business Solutions, the global SAP consultant for the midmarket, has partnered with Soley. The SAP partner offers a software solution that enables portfolio optimization for industrial companies with complex product portfolios and can be easily integrated into S/4 Hana. Founded in 2015 as a spin-off company of the Chair of Product Development at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Soley's customer base today already includes well-known German industrial groups. The company developed a cloud-based software-as-a-service solution for product mining. This enables industrial companies to systematically examine their product portfolio using pattern recognition - a part of predictive analytics - and derive measures from it. In this way, they can sustainably reduce the complexity in their product portfolio and value stream. Many companies are faced with the challenge of flexibly adapting their product range to changes in the market.

The complex interdependencies between products and the value stream require expert knowledge for such decisions. Soley digitizes this process. The solution guides users through a digitized decision-making process and makes prioritized suggestions not only from the perspective of economic efficiency, but also of resilience, sustainability and flexibility. A network analysis reveals critical dependencies between components, products, suppliers, production, warehousing and customers. Thanks to automated evaluation, maintaining the product portfolio with Soley becomes a cyclical process. With constantly refined criteria, companies maintain their product portfolio, get rid of unnecessary ballast and focus on their core business. As a result, up to 50 percent of the component variety can be saved. 

Takeover activity cools down

In the market for technology services, M&A (mergers and acquisitions) activity broke almost all records in 2021. While the number of mergers and acquisitions last year totaled 307 deals, the value of the associated transactions worldwide amounted to USD 51 billion. In comparison, market activity cooled significantly in the first quarter of 2022. With 56 transactions and a total value of US$2.6 billion, the quarterly result is now at its lowest level in the last 16 months. Rising interest rates, high inflation rates and general uncertainty about the state of the global economy have slowed M&A activity since the start of 2022. The market research and consulting company ISG expects the current restraint to continue until the end of the year.