Monday, May 28, 2007

Infor Enters the Public Sector

It's not terribly surprising that Infor acquired Hansen. A public company since it's founding nearly 25 years ago, Hansen had been sold to private equity firm Golden Gate Capital last year. That same firm also owns Infor, so this is a consolidation of assets as much as it is an acquisition.

Hansen has about 350 employees and did a little under $50 million in revenue last year. The government market is growing slightly faster than the ERP market overall, so represents a good opportunity for Infor. I've had a chance to read AMR Research analyst Bruce Richardson's first take on this announcement (via his fantastic "First Thing Monday" email)

Regarding Hansen's offerings he notes:
The products, aimed at city, state, and county governments, are currently sold in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The Hansen product line is particularly strong in revenue management particularly in such areas such as assessments, grants, property taxes, fines, and utility billing.

Of course this is just the view from 30,000 feet, and apparently not a particularly good one. The view of a Dynamics ISV I've chatted with who specializes in public sector (and has competed head to head with Hansen) is that the utility billing is quite weak, tax modules are pretty much still beta code, and that the work order system is actually the true strength of the offering.

Of interest to me is what happens on the accounting/ERP side of a Hansen implementation. Hansen doesn't do that piece and used to be an MBS partner until they elected to OEM financials from Agresso. I wonder what will happen with that OEM relationship. Will Infor end the agreement in favor of one of its ERP packages? That could pose some issues as Hansen is Windows based and much of the mess that is Infor runs best on the iSeries (though you can expect the company will claim integration via it's "Infor Open SOA" program.

Or perhaps this will prompt Infor to make a move to acquire Agresso as well...

2 comments:

  1. That was a great and informative post. In fact, all of your posts are interesting. I was wondering if you write for any other publications or if you have any contact information?

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