Delray Beach, FL-based software solutions provider Ecometry on Aug. 21 merged with San Diego-based GERS Retail Systems to form Escalate Retail, a $100 million company with about 400 employees and 650 clients.
GERS president Stewart Bloom will become Escalate CEO. Ecometry president John Marrah will be president of the combined company, which will retain dual headquarters in Delray Beach and San Diego.
Specifics of the deal were not disclosed. The benefit to clients and potential customers is that the new company can act as a one-stop shop of sorts, marrying Ecometry’s front-end capabilities such as customer profiling and relationship marketing technologies with GERS’s back-end and supply chain functionalities. By implementing the front-end and back-end systems, companies will be able to leverage customer knowledge from demand planning through customer experience.
Escalate customers will also have access to Blue Martini’s customer intelligence platform, says Brian Dean, Ecometry’s vice president of product strategy. In Dec. 2004 Golden Gate Capital bought a 70 % stake in Ecometry Corp. which the private equity firm called Multi-Channel Holdings. The new company acquired Blue Martini in May 2005.
Dean says he evaluated more than 20 companies as possible acquisition targets during the past year. “We want to be more than a platform company,” he says, adding that customers wanted more options than enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and point solutions that are difficult to implement.