Contact: Brenon Daly
Since being spun off from its parent company less than a year ago, CDC Software has been rolling along with its planned rollup. It has done a half-dozen acquisitions of small, on-demand software companies to help expand its portfolio of ERP, CRM and supply chain management offerings. (It got bigger eyes earlier this year, when it made a short-lived run at fellow public company Chordiant Software.) In general, the technology has come from startups that have been passed over by the market. That’s certainly the case in CDC Software’s latest – and largest – acquisition, the purchase of TradeBeam last week.
Ten-year-old TradeBeam had burned through a mountain of venture backing and had snatched up the assets of three other vendors, but had struggled to actually build its business. (We understand that the company generated only about $9m in recurring revenue in 2009, and that projections for this year called for $10m in recurring revenue. That got the target around $20m in its sale to CDC Software, according to our understanding.)
Still, TradeBeam was able to develop some fairly useful software, thanks to its generous VC subsidy, that should fit well inside CDC Software. The company had two main product lines, which each accounted for about half of overall sales. TradeBeam sold global trade management software, which helps customers handle regulatory compliance and other aspects of the import/export business, as well as supply chain visibility, which provides additional capabilities around forecasting and collaboration with suppliers.
CDC Software’s recent acquisitions are part of a larger plan to slowly but steadily transition its business from selling software licenses to ‘renting’ software through a subscription model. Recurring revenue will still be a small slice of the overall $220m or so of revenue that the vendor is expected to put up this year. But if CDC Software can pull off its SaaS rollup strategy – and couple that with even a smidgen of organic growth – it could very well see a bump in its valuation. The transition to SaaS has certainly put a shine on the valuation of Concur Technologies and, to a lesser extent, Ariba. For its part, CDC Software, which is still majority owned by CDC Corp, trades at basically 1 times sales and 4x EBITDA.