Curbstone Acquired by Volaris, Merged with InTempo
February 10, 2021 Alex Woodie
Volaris Group, a subsidiary of Constellation Software, has acquired payment processing software provider Curbstone Corp. and merged it with InTempo Software, the company behind the IBM i-based RentalMan software developed by Wynne Systems. The payment software is being integrated with RentalMan.
Ira Chandler wrote the first commercial credit card software for the AS/400 back in 1993 for the company ROI, but struck out on his own in 2002, when he founded Curbstone. The Ball Ground, Georgia company continued to develop and sell credit card processing software for the iSeries and IBM i servers, acquiring hundreds of customers over the years and adapting to the significant changes in payment systems brought by PCI.
In October 2020, Curbstone announced that the company and its assets have been acquired to Volaris Group, the Mississauga, Ontario subsidiary of Constellation Software, the publicly traded holding group of software companies that is based in Toronto, Ontario. Constellation has acquired over 500 companies since it was founded, including 70 through its Volaris Group segment (one of six segments), and reported revenues of $3.1 billion in 2019.
Immediately upon the acquisition, Volaris Group merged Curbstone with InTempo Software, its Springfield, Massachusetts-based subsidiary. InTempo was created in 2015 through the acquisitions of two providers of software for companies in the equipment rental business, including Solutions By Computer, which Constellation Software had acquired in 2008, and Wynne Systems, which it bought in 2012.
Wynne Systems, of course, is the Long Beach, California developer of RentalMan, the RPG-based ERP system for rental companies. UnitedRental, which owned Wynne Systems and sold the company to Constellation back in 2012, remained a large user of the RentalMan software.
According to Chandler, little will change following the acquisition.
“We have been “merged” into InTempo who provides an IBM i-SaaS-based version of RentalMan from Wynne Systems, our sister company,” Chandler tells IT Jungle. “Everyone at Curbstone came over and is doing the same things we did before, and the direction of the company remains focused on Payments, and we are still passionate about the IBM i platform.”
Being acquired by Volaris will give Curbstone “huge resources” to invest in the product and grow the company, Chandler says.
“We are now formally integrating into the RentalMan product, and that will leverage what we learned implementing the 1,100 locations of United Rentals that uses it,” he says. “We are also developing “multi-tenant” SaaS support so ERP packages that are hosted from multiple customers in one partition can use our transaction processing engine concurrently.”
This SaaS offering is being utilized by IPTOR, the Swedish ERP software developer that was previously known as International Business Systems (IBS). IPTOR had already integrated the Curbstone software into its IP1 offering, and now it’s using it with a pharmaceutical-focused hosted ERP service, Chandler tells us.
“This acquisition has also sped the development of support for ACH bank payments, as well as our support for IVR payments using Paytia and Eckoh,” Chandler says. “Overall, our employees and our customers are going to benefit greatly from this acquisition.”
Chandler remains with Volaris as the product manager of the Curbstone offerings, which enables him to focus on product development instead of running a business. “I am back in a sweet spot, doing what I really enjoy, working with software development, deployment, and implementation,” Chandler says. InTempo General Manager Matt Hopp is a “superb manager who is providing the operational management that he does so well,” he adds.
Curbstone joins a software group that has several IBM i holdings, including Friedman Corp., developer of a specialized IBM i-based ERP system for high-volume, complex to-order manufacturers. Friedman also is home to Varsity Logistics, provider of shipping solutions for IBM i.
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