Looking to extend its enterprise application integration competencies to the front office, TSI International Software Ltd has acquired Novera Software Inc for an undisclosed sum. TSI says the purchase puts it in a unique position in the market, making it the only company to offer complete front office/back office integration. Its own flagship product, Mercator, enables companies to integrate data from disparate enterprise systems – ERP, legacy and packaged applications – but until now it hasn’t had any offering that integrates that back office data with front office applications, which is where Novera comes in.
Novera’s web integration technology enables organizations to take the integrated back office data and integrate that with disparate front office web-based applications. With the increasing uptake of customer relationship management, business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) applications, enabling back office integration is key and something all vendors, both traditional software firms and the new breed of EAI companies, are working towards. Only last week, Oracle Corp said that the latest version of its ERP application suite, 11i, will come with its front office CRM offerings pre-integrated, and rival SAP AG and others are all trying to do the same.
According to John Hanger, VP product marketing for TSI Software, in order to integrate front and back office data, customers have traditionally had to develop their own proprietary applications, which creates difficulties when it comes to upgrading the core systems, it means they end up having to rebuild the applications again, he said. Hanger says Novera’s software creates a layer of reusable components in between the back and front office, which does away with that problem. Hanger said the products will continue to be sold as standalone offerings for the foreseeable future but the aim is to bring them together within one product, with different add-on options. He said announcements about would be made within the next two to four weeks.
Under the terms of the deal, TSI is acquiring all of the capital stock of Novera for approximately 1.8 million shares of TSI common stock. And all outstanding Novera stock options will be exchanged for around 350,000 shares of TSI’s common stock. The acquisition will be accounted for as a purchase transaction and has been structured for immediate closing, the companies said.
