Exigen Group today announced that it has acquired Portera’s professional services automation (PSA) business.
In a statement released today, Exigen Group said the addition of Portera’s ServicePort suite to its portfolio is part of the company’s strategy to develop business process utilities that are designed to enable firms across the services industry to lower their total cost of operations.
Portera’s ServicePort suite is a subscription-based set of Web services designed to help service organizations better manage their operations. The suite combines resource management, task tracking, accounting, collaboration and reporting capabilities that are accessible through a standard Web browser.
Portera recently celebrated the three-year anniversary of its ServicePort. The company also reported that it signed 121 new deals and grew revenues by more than 125 percent in 2001. Its client list includes Agilent, Apple, Booz-Allen & Hamilton, British Telecom, Lockheed Martini, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Raytheon and Siemens.
“All service businesses must effectively manage and account for their people-intensive operations. This is why professional services firms have been using PSA solutions to manage their operations for years,” said Greg Shenkman, CEO of Exigen. “Exigen Group is taking the activity-based costing capabilities of Portera’s ServicePort suite and reapplying them to services industry cost centers as part of our ongoing efforts to help services firms effectively track and minimize their total cost of operations.”
“This deal enables us to apply the benefits of our solution to a broad range of new customer segments,” said David Knight, general manager of Portera’s PSA business. “It also provides the opportunity to combine Portera and Exigen Group’s technical, operational and industry expertise to bring new and innovative service industry solutions to market.”
In addition to offering the ServicePort suite as a stand-alone solution for professional services automation, Exigen Group announced that it will incorporate ServicePort capabilities into its Business Process Utilities (BPU) for insurance, telecommunications and financial services firms.
Exigen’s BPU model is designed to allow firms in a given industry leverage a shared infrastructure to lower the cost of non-differentiating business processes. In addition to the ServicePort suite, Exigen reports that will benefit from Portera’s deep expertise in multi-tenant hosting operations and delivery of enterprise software over the Internet.
“Companies have traditionally approached business infrastructure on an individual basis, resulting in highly duplicative operations and wasteful spending across a given industry segment,” said Shenkman. “The BPU model looks at business infrastructure from the industry level, creating economies of scale and operational cost savings that no single company could achieve on its own.”
Financial terms of the acquistion were not disclosed.
Portera is currently listed as a Top 20 Provider by ASPnews.
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