In supply chain software news, ERP and supply chain software provider Info announced it was acquiring global transportation, visibility and sourcing provider GT Nexus.

The price was a whopping $675 million, a very nice multiple for Infor investors, given it had sales of about $150 million in 2014. Private-equity firm Warburg Pincus owns about 40% of GT Nexus, with its founders and management holding the rest. All will have a big payday.

Infor had sales of about $2.8 billion over the past 12 months, CEO Charles Phillips says. GT Nexus is said to manages more than $100 billion of goods movement for some 25,000 customers. Big-name accounts for the Cloud-based solutions include Adidas Group, Caterpillar, Columbia Sportswear, DHL, Home Depot, Levi Strauss & Co., Maersk, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, and UPS.

The company began operations under the name Tradiant in the late 1990s, and was primarily focused early on in automating various aspects of ocean shipping booking. It changed its name to GT Nexus in 2001, and continued to expand its footprint through both internal develop and acquisitions, notably acquiring TradeCard, a global sourcing vendor, in 2013.

In additional to the sourcing capabilities, GT Nexus is most known for its global transportation management and visibility functions, providing shippers and 3PLs with “control tower” functionality to manage the movement of goods across the world.

It competes in the general category of global trade management, or GTM, against such companies as Amber Road, as well as others in specific areas of its full suite of solutions. GT Nexus has been one of the most vocal proponents of Cloud-based technology from its earliest days.

GT Nexus announced it was looking for a potential buyer in late 2014. Companies as diverse as SAP and Facebook are said to have given the deal some consideration before ultimately passing on the opportunity.

Now, Infor has made its move.

Infor itself is a company built almost entirely on acquisitions, with its roots in a variety of rolled up ERP providers such as SSA, MAPICS, Lawson and others. It has made many acquisitions in the supply chain as well, acquiring supply chain execution providers such as EXE Technologies and Provia among others along the way, some under the SSA brand Inform acquired in 2006.

Early on, the company largely focused on just maintaining that large base of customers across many acquired solutions, but began to change its approach when Phillips became CEO in 2010, after some seven years as an executive at Oracle before that and previously being arguably the world's most well-known enterprise software market analyst while at Morgan Stanley.

(Supply Chain Trends and Issues Article - Continued Below)