Breaking News: ePS Acquires Tharstern

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Earlier this week, eProductivity Software (ePS) announced that it had acquired UK-based Tharstern Group Ltd. This is monumental news in the segment because both companies are giants in the print management information system (MIS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) spaces. Tharstern has hundreds of print and packaging customers in the UK and Ireland, while growing substantially in North America over the past several years as well. eProductivity Software’s PrintSmith Vision, Pace, Monarch, and Radius MIS solutions are prevalent around the world, especially in the United States.

Right after the news broke on Monday, I had the great fortune of speaking with David Bentley (General Manager of Global Midmarket Print) and Guy Amos (Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy) of eProductivity Software as well as Keith McMurtrie, Managing Director at Tharstern. In the video below, Bentley shared his thoughts on the benefits of this acquisition. “Tharstern is clearly a tremendous product that has been well distributed throughout its market, particularly in the UK with over 550 customers,” he said. “It fits nicely within our portfolio from a team perspective as well as from a technology perspective. It offers us the opportunity to continue to support those customers, to provide our ecosystem throughout the customer base, to help also further support those customers and to expand our footprint within the region.”

The noteworthy mutual benefits from this acquisition I see are:

• ePS will gain significant a customer base in English-speaking Western Europe, Australia, and South Africa, where Tharstern’s presence is stronger than that of ePS.
• ePS will benefit from the developers and knowledge of one of the oldest (since 1984) print MIS providers in the world.
• Tharstern will leverage the ePS engineering experience in migrating solutions into the cloud, an area Tharstern has been recently focusing on.
• Tharstern customers will reap the rewards of future integration with other ePS offerings in the areas of data collection and analysis, scheduling and planning, and warehouse and inventory management.

The greatest challenge I see will be how ePS integrates the Tharstern product into its portfolio. Over the past year, ePS has worked hard to adapt its solutions, many of which came via acquisition, into a consistent architecture and user experience. This delivers many benefits for integration and operability, but it can be challenging for legacy customers who need to learn a new system and lose a well-loved capability or two, potentially.

That said, I am confident that the engineering teams from both these world-class companies are up to the challenge of migrating features, capabilities, and customers to a compatible architecture and interface over the next several years. As Tharstern’s McMurtrie said, “We have a team of incredibly capable, talented people. Not only that, we’ve been around for a very long time so we’ve amassed a huge amount of knowledge, and I think we bring that into the ePS family.”

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