Infor Buys Cloudy Software Company Easy RMS

Published: June 18, 2012

by Alex Woodie

It turns out the "new" Infor is a lot like the old Infor in at least one way: a hunger for acquisitions. The new tenant of New York City got back on the acquisition train last week with the purchase of Easy RMS, a provider of cloud-based revenue management software for companies in the hospitality industry based in London, England.

Easy RMS develops revenue optimization software designed to help hotels, casinos, and other companies in the hospitality industry maximize their profits by renting the right room to the right client at the right price at the right time. The EzRMS suite does this by chewing through data about historical demand, rates, and inventory to create a forecast for a given property or a chain of properties. A set of algorithms then generate recommendations on room rates that takes into account expected demand, different room types, cancellations, and no-shows.

The company has racked up more than 1,200 customers in 61 countries since it was founded in 1999, including Best Western, Chumash Casino Resort, Colonial Williamsburg, Radisson Hotel and Resorts, Hooters Casino Hotel, Travelodge Hotels, and Trump Hotel Collection. Customers say they like the product's Web interface, graphical reports, and ease of use.

Infor sees the acquisition meshing nicely into its SoftBrands unit, which sells hospitality software. The SoftBrands unit sells several hotel management systems (HMSs) and property management systems (PMSs), including the IBM i-based Epitome PMS, which it obtained with the $80 million acquisition of SoftBrands in 2009.

In addition to directly interfacing with the SoftBrands' core PMS and HMS suites, Easy RMS will hook into other SoftBrands offerings for managing reservations, housekeeping, engineering, events, sales and marketing, HR, and talent.

"Easy RMS is a perfect complement to Infor," states Infor's senior vice president and general manager of hospitality, Stewart Applbaum. "The cloud-based SaaS strategy fits nicely into Infor's hospitality product strategy to provide customers with state-of-the-art hospitality solutions that help simplify deployment, management, and costs related to managing hotel operations."

Terms of the deal for Easy RMS were not released. It was the first acquisition in nearly six months for Infor, which has completed dozens of acquisitions over the years. But Infor may be poised for more. Even if it doesn't do an IPO (the Facebook fiasco may have put a damper on those immediate desires), it still has money to fuel its ongoing M&A strategy, since it raised more than $1 billion over the last 14 months through direct investments by majority shareholders Golden Gate Capital and Summit Partners and sale of new debt.

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