Thanks to the dramatic economic slowdown, enterprise software vendor Infor will almost certainly be forced to cancel its tentative plans to go public in the first quarter of 2009, said company Chairman and CEO Jim Schaper, in a recent interview with Managing Automation.
“There are no [initial public offerings] getting done,” said Schaper, speaking at Infor’s annual Inforum customer conference in Las Vegas. “I don’t anticipate that there will be any IPOs getting done in the near future.”
But the same economic forces that are halting the IPO market are opening other opportunities for Infor. Down markets have driven software company valuations so low that Infor plans to crank up its acquisition engine once again. “We’re going to take advantage of a down market, and we’re going to start acquiring,” Schaper said.
Schaper said Infor would most likely target companies with $200 million or less in annual revenue and whose revenue is growing or at least flat. That’s something of a departure from the first round of Infor’s acquisition binge when the company acquired 19 software companies in four years ending in early 2007, growing from under $35 million to well over $2.2 billion in revenue. At that time, Infor was willing to buy software companies with falling revenue.