SSA is tweaking its organizational structure to create a "strategic solutions team" to give more focus to so-called "extended enterprise" products. "Extended enterprise" is an amorphous term, but it generally refers to enterprise applications that provide major chunks of functionality outside of the core ERP focus. SSA is using the term as an umbrella to include its offerings for supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), product lifecycle management (PLM), supplier relationship management (SRM), and business intelligence. As I've written previously, SSA has picked up some world class products in these areas, such as EXE's warehouse management products and Baan's SCM, PDM, and CRM products. Without some additional focus on these products they are likely to get lost in the jumble of ERP systems that SSA now owns, such as BPCS, PRMS, Infinium, and a bunch of others.
As far as I can tell from the press release, the extended enterprise products will still be sold by the field sales organization but the "strategic solutions team" will most likely provide product expertise to help sales reps on individual opportunities. The new team will be headed up by Jim Handy, with the title of President Strategic Solutions, reporting to Graeme Cooksley, EVP, who is responsible for SSA's worldwide field operations, marketing, support, and product management.
Interestingly, Handy came to SSA last year from Geac, where he was responsible for the Smartstream and Enterprise ERP businesses. (For more on Geac, see the link at the bottom).
Separately, SSA announced that it has filed with the SEC for a proposed initial public offering. According to the registration statement, SSA would like to raise up to $200M from the offering, with proceeds to be used to repay debt, fund general operations, and provide money for more acquisitions. Also revealed in the filing: for the year ended July 2003, SSA had earnings of $51.9M on revenues of over $294M.
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