![]() It’s a time when many are stepping away from opportunities like this. Our companies combining comes at a unique time. So why has the acquisition happened now? Former Conga CEO Matthew Schiltz, who was appointed after the Insight acquisition and is now stepping back to join the merged company's Board of Managers, provides an explanation for the timing in a Conga blog post on the deal: While there are some similarities in the proposition, how it is sold and delivered are at opposite extremes, with Apttus being much more of a complex, big-ticket implementation while Conga is designed for ease-of-use and quick wins. That disparity in deal size nevertheless emphasizes that, while these two companies offer products that substantially overlap in functionality, they target very different customer bases. The Conga brand is the one with the biggest reach. Given that the combined business is quoting a similar number of customers and yet a $400 million run rate, it's clear that Conga brings the volume business into the merged entity while Apttus brings just a few hundred six- and seven-figure contracts. When I spoke to Conga at the time of its annual conference in early March - one of the last tech industry conferences to take place before the pandemic shutdown made such gatherings impractical - the company was saying that it had more than 11,000 customers and revenues at an annual runrate above $100 million. Sheer numbers make up the other factor in the retention of the Conga brand. Conga brings volume, Apttus has the big deals ![]() SALESFORCE APTUS SOFTWAREA clear-out of much of the previous leadership followed and Holland joined as CEO six months later, arriving after a twenty-year stint at Microsoft's Dynamics business software division. and allegations later emerged of "dysfunction and unprofessional conduct" at the company under his leadership. Shortly before the deal was announced, founding CEO Kirk Krappe had left the high-flying company abruptly. The disappearance of the Apttus brand is perhaps unsurprising in view of the circumstances surrounding the Thoma Bravo acquisition. As well as its Salesforce-native applications, Apttus also developed versions that ran natively on Microsoft's Azure and Dynamics platforms. It too has its own CLM technology but combines that with configure-price-quote (CPQ), revenue performance management and B2B e-commerce to service a customer base of global manufacturing, technology and services companies. It positions itself as a leading player in the middle office - all of the various operations and processes that sit between customer-facing applications like CRM and the back-office ERP systems. The result is what Conga calls end-to-end digital document transformation (DDX) - automated digital collaboration that shepherds a core set of data throughout the lifecycle of interlinked commercial documents such as quotations, proposals and contracts.Īpttus offers much the same, but on a much grander scale and to a much smaller customer base of largely enterprise customers. More recent acquisitions have added AI-powered contract analysis, digital process orchestration and trackable document sharing, while in-house development produced an e-signature add-on. This broadened its footprint beyond the original Salesforce-native Conga Composer, which connects data from Salesforce into automated document creation and workflows.įirst came an expansion into traditional contract lifecycle management (CLM) with the acquisition of Novatus in 2016. While the merger with Conga is the first acquisition Apttus has made, Insight had overseen a number of acquisitions at Conga. Insight remains an investor in the combined venture, which takes the Conga name and will be led by Frank Holland, brought in as CEO of Apttus after the Thoma Bravo takeover. Now Thoma Bravo, the private equity investor whose intervention in September 2018 snuffed out Apttus's dreams of a blockbuster IPO, has snapped up Conga too, which had been acquired by private equity investor Insight Venture Partners in April 2015. ![]() Conga and Apttus each proved the truth of that early boast, initially bootstrapping their businesses until they separately reached a size that attracted external investment. ![]() The combined business becomes one of the biggest players in the Salesforce ecosystem, claiming more than 10,000 enterprise and mid-market customers who bring in annual revenues of $400 million - and adds a new twist to an already tortuous history.Īpttus and Conga can both trace their stories back to the earliest days of Salesforce AppExchange, when the cloud CRM giant first boasted that a new generation of software companies would build their offerings natively on its platform. Two of Salesforce's earliest ISV partners joined forces last week when quote-to-cash vendor Apttus acquired contract lifecycle management specialist Conga in a deal said to be valued at $715 million. ![]()
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