IBM has announced plans to acquire Meteorix a leading Workday Services Partner in the US and Canada. The amount of the transaction is undisclosed but is expected to finalise in Q4 2015. Once the deal is complete Meteorix will become part of the IBM Global Business Services Division led its Senior Vice President Bridget Van Kralingen.
The timing of the announcement was timed to coincide with the start of Workday rising 2015, the annual Workday conference being held this year in Las Vegas. One wonders whether IBM may make a similar announcement at the European event to be held at the beginning of December in Dublin.
Why Meteorix?
The strategy that IBM laid out in a supplementary document made clear that this acquisition, besides being carefully considered in itself is part of a wider strategy for IBM to be capable of implementing and supporting Workday implementations globally. Meteorix, was only founded in 2011 but has experienced an impressive growth of customers across the US and Canada, supporting them with more than 200 certified consultants according to the press release though the Meteorix website states 185.
It is this human resource that IBM wants to tap into and with a single acquisition has brought itself a consultancy of senior practitioners for Workday whose HRM and Finance ERP solutions are making inroads into what traditionally would have been SAP or Oracle customers. While Meteorix is based out of Boston and services the US and Canada IBM is still looking to expand further and it is likely that Van Kralingen, recently placed on Fortunes most powerful women list for 2015 will be announcing further acquisitions.
IBM believes that this acquisition alone will see them become the largest Workday service provider globally and with the breadth of their customer reach this could be good news for Workday as well. The risk for IBM is that some of the consultants will fail to appreciate the IBM culture and will look to set up smaller independent boutique workday consultancies. It will be interesting to see how successfully IBM are at retaining the staff. It seems possible that Frank Selldorff, founder and Chairman of Meteorix will not stay in the combined operation as he has venture capital interests and isn’t quoted in the press release.
(Next: What do customers get?)