Business Objects announces its intent to acquire Cartesis
A French leader strengthens its leading position in the BI market
We were very happy to see one of our long standing customers being acquired yesterday by Business Objects, a worldwide leader in BI.
From a top level standpoint, it shows that France can have great success stories in the software world; analyzing one level deeper, this great success relies on an excellent synchronization of 4 major factors involving a controlled level of risk:
Leadership: Didier Benchimol was able to set-up quickly a world class management team and to transform a service driven company into a leading international software company.
People: Cartesis built its reputation on the talent and recognized expertise of many key people with complementary values:
- In product: the internal architecture relies on the Integrated Data Model that provides numerous benefits for the CFO of continuously evolving large companies.
- In Sales: a strong application culture convinced many Fortune 500 companies that there is “value” outside of SAP, Oracle, etc.
- In Consulting: financial consultants were the preferred consultants in the finance department of large companies.
Market: The underlying market for performance management and governance control is a strong market, driven by the reinforcement of financial regulations (Sarbanes Oxley, etc.).
Investment: Gilles Rigal (Apax Partners) lead a consortium of investors and structured the deal in an LBO at the end of 2003 – at this time, it was quite innovative for software companies to be financed with debt.
Main points of the deal:
- Industry’s broadest platform delivering business insight and performance management for both the CFO and CIO
- Total transaction value of €225M (~$300M) in cash
- Expected to be neutral to slightly accretive to earnings for the first full year post closing and accretive thereafter
- Expected to close within 90 days
Congratulations to all the players who were involved in this great French success!
Comments from blogs we like:
Jacques Froissant's Altaïde
Julien Codorniou's Le Codorblog
A few links for more information:
Interview of Bernard Liautaud on Rodrigo’s blog
Cartesis announcement
Business Objects announcement
Journal du Net (en francais) - BPM: Business Objects doit-il racheter Cartesis?
Boursorama (en francais) - Business Objects: conclut l'acquisition de Cartesis
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