Friday, July 02, 2004

SSA adds Arzoon and Marcam to its deck of cards

SSA Global shows no signs of slowing down its acquisition binge. Last month it added Arzoon, a supply chain management vendor, to its collection. Then, just yesterday it picked up Marcam, a well established process manufacturing ERP system from Invensys, from which it also picked up Baan last year.

The analyst community has had good things to say about the Arzoon acquisition, praising Arzoon's functionality for transportation management, global trade management, and supply chain process management. When Arzoon is combined with SSA's previous acquisition of EXE's warehouse management and Baan's CAP Logistics, SSA now has an extensive set of supply chain management solutions, arguably more than Tier I vendors such as SAP and Oracle have. Of course, SSA's solutions are separate point solutions, not yet integrated, so the comparison is really not fair.

With the acquisition of Marcam, SSA's continues to expand its presence in the installed base of IBM iSeries (formerly, AS/400) customers. Unfortunately, Marcam has languished in the hands of Invensys, as did Baan. Process manufacturers need more good solutions to choose from, and hopefully, SSA will be able to breathe new life into Marcam's host-based PRISM system as well as its newer Protean solution.

Related posts
SSA promotes extended enterprise apps, files for IPO
Baan users flock to SSA road show
SSA Global lays out its future in warehouse management systems
SSA's obituary was a bit premature
SSA's strategy: acquire customers and technology on the cheap
SSA Global plans to consolidate product lines

No comments: