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SSA Buys Epiphany: Ten Things You Need To KnowBy DAVID SIMS TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist Here are ten things you need to know about SSA's purchase of Epiphany: 1. Yesterday SSA Global Technologies announced they were buying CRM vendor Epiphany for $329 million, or $4.20 per share of stock. a. Well, a "definitive agreement" to do that was signed yesterday, subject to shareholder approval, deal to be consummated in eight weeks, yada yada yada. 2. Epiphany's products include sales, service, marketing, and customer analytics, and the apps are based on a similar service-oriented architecture and built using Java 2 Enterprise Edition technology. a. Funny, SSA's stuff is built using J2EE too. 3. Mike Greenough, chairman, president and CEO of SSA Global said "with Epiphany, we expect to enhance SSA CRM." a. In other words, goodbye Epiphany. 4. Epiphany released E6.5 of its CRM suite this May, and said then the next major product rollout will be in the first quarter of 2006. a. Might still happen. 5. Epiphany, which styled itself E.piphany until about 2001 when everything "dot-com" became verboten, overextended themselves a few years ago and never really recovered, even with a nice client roster including Nestle, the Gap, Citibank, and Microsoft. a. Greenbaum thinks "it will quickly become SSA versus Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP." 7. SSA wants to clean up in the midsize space, and is buying up floundering competitors like Baan, EXE, Marcam and now Epiphany to do so. a. They've bought ten companies since 2001. 8. SSA went public on May 26 at $11 a share. a. Shares are now around $13. b. Not bad for business software about now. 9. Epiphany's based in San Mateo, California, SSA's outside of Chicago. a. Hate to have to make that move. 10. Epiphany's 2004 posted sales were $79.3 million. a. For the fiscal year ended July 2004, SSA had sales of $636.5 million.
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