Seeking to provide a more well-rounded product suite to its manufacturing customers, enterprise software provider QAD recently acquired FullTilt, a purveyor of product information management (PIM) software.
PIM technology falls under the umbrella of master data management (MDM), which allows a company to aggregate and cleanse information residing in discrete systems across the enterprise.
John Sawyer, a QAD spokesman, said the two companies had worked together informally over the past couple of years, but that QAD reached a point at which officials thought it would make more sense to acquire the technology.
"I think they need to have something like this," said Bob Mick, an analyst at ARC Advisory. Prior to the acquisition, he said, if QAD's customers wanted separate MDM capabilities, "they'd have to go to a third-party solution to pull it off."