TMW Systems Has a Great Third Quarter, Thanks to Maddocks Acquisition

Published: November 6, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Trucking software supplier and long-time i5/OS and OS/400 platform promoter TMW Systems had its first quarter of sales with the combined operations of TMW Systems and Maddocks Systems, the competitor it acquired in early September.

According to the company, which is privately held (more on that in a second), the new-and-improved TMW Systems posted sales of $11.3 million in the quarter, an increase of 27 percent for the combined operations a year ago. Driving sales during the quarter were 34 deals for software licenses to the TMWSuite and TruckMate suites to new customers.

"While our financial reports are interesting, our most significant accomplishment this quarter was the ability to sell and service our customers while we completed the acquisition and executed on our integration strategy," boasted David Wangler, the chief executive officer that was brought into the company in May to run TMW Systems. "Our staff didn't skip a beat, in fact we implemented 37 new TMWSuite and Maddocks TruckMate customers and finished the last month of the quarter with record new license bookings." Of course, the fact that Wangler did not mention any new licenses to the TL2000 suite, which runs on the System i, is a bit disconcerting. The other two suites run on Windows.

Here's something else I noticed as I was doing some background on TMW related to this financial story. Back in September 2005, TMW was acquired by two private equity companies: Wachovia Capital Partners and Peppertree Capital Management. The former is the equity investment arm of Wachovia, the fourth largest bank in America, and the latter being a private equity firm that hails from Cleveland, Ohio, the same state where TMW is located and therefore very familiar. Wachovia Capital Partners has invested over $3 billion in companies since 1988 and manages over $800 million in direct investments today. Peppertree Capital Management is hooked into the state of Ohio's own Ohio Capital Fund, which was created in 2005 to bring $100 million in outside investment dollars into Ohio to try to pump up business there.

This information was not presented as part of the Maddocks deal, and I only saw it accidentally thanks to Google. Yet another System i software developer that has been snapped up by private equity firms looking to invest in profitable high tech.

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