New Partnership Addresses Common Causes for Business Acquisition and Integration Failures

GREENBELT, Md. and DALLAS, April 29, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Deven Software and M&A Partners announced today the formation of a long-term strategic partnership to unite their respective areas of expertise to improve business acquisition and integration success.

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General experience supported by numerous studies, frequently indicate that approximately one-half to two-thirds of corporate acquirers fail to realize the full, intended value of acquisitions. "Even acquisitions based on flawless strategy and comprehensive due diligence often experience substantial business disruption and value erosion due to poorly executed integration of the acquired business, its people, systems, products and customers," states Nick Perdikis, CEO of Deven Software.

"Even among highly experienced acquirers, we see what we call the 'deal count paradox', or the continued difficulty in achieving consistent, reliable integration success – often due to lack of executive-level visibility of what's going on, the inability to effectively coordinate cross-functional requirements and dependencies between units, and frankly, extremely poor process and project management," adds Mark Herndon, President of M&A Partners.

Under terms of the strategic partnership, Deven is extending a private-label software license to M&A Partners for its best-in-class software platform for merger and acquisition ("M&A") professionals, corporate development executives and integration teams. The Deven Enterprise Mergers & Acquisitions ("EMA") platform V12 combines a comprehensive and powerful suite of functionality to support end-to-end M&A activity from due diligence to "integration complete." In turn, M&A Partners will be supporting the deployment of Deven client installations and will be exclusively representing their proprietary version of EMA, the M&A Cockpit™, to its global clients and to all executives trained by M&A Partners through its exclusive integration services sponsorship of the M&A Leadership Council.

According to Jim Jeffries, Chairman and Co-founder of the M&A Leadership Council, "This partnership brings together the best M&A methodologies and the most-highly experienced advisors in acquisition and integration success with the best M&A software solution available to corporate and financial buyers. Every company growing through acquisition realizes sooner or later that M&A is an enterprise competency that must be built, invested in and trained for in order to achieve the intended results." 

The M&A Cockpit™ is available immediately in both On-Demand and On-Premises deployments. In addition to its clean and highly intuitive user interface, the M&A Cockpit™ provides core functionality and highly configurable features including:

• End-to-end capability – Supports complete due diligence and integration processes in one solution;
• Executive-level visibility & accountability – An extensive menu of automated and configurable reports on overall status, milestones, synergies, at-risk items and estimated completion dates, among others;
• Efficient project-team provisioning – Fast, easy creation and provisioning of due diligence and integration team members, task forces, assignments and timelines;
• Real-time project tracking and coordination – At-a-glance and drill-down awareness by project, work stream, task force, individual and cross-functional tasks;
• Automated work-flow and role-base home screens – Provide immediate access and visibility to each respective executive, team leader, team member or subject matter expert based on their specific accountabilities, tasks and timelines;
• Document library – Capture "lessons learned," tools, templates and samples for specific deal-types and requirements.

Future development phases are planned by Deven and M&A Partners to provide additional proprietary methodology, knowledge content and resources such as the M&A Partners' Enterprise M&A Competency Model™ and the MergerMax Value Creation Map™.

"With so much riding on the success of each deal or integration," adds Paul Saldo, CSO of Deven Software, "we view this partnership as an important step to delivering on our vision of improving the success rate and return on investment for the M&A community."

About Deven Software

Deven Software is exclusively focused on bringing its innovative and practical transaction and integration software solutions to M&A professionals, corporate development and post-merger integration teams around the world. Deven Software offers EMA-Transact, EMA-Integrate and EMA-Integrate Plus in a secure SaaS cloud environment or on premise. For more information on Deven Software and the EMA suite of products, please visit http://www.devensoft.com. Product briefings are available by contacting us at [email protected] or 855-DEVENSOFT (855-338-3676).

About M&A Partners

Founded in 1999 with a commitment to discover, adapt and deploy M&A integration best practices for clients across all industry sectors, M&A Partners is the exclusive integration services sponsor of the M&A Leadership Council (macouncil.org). M&A Partners is comprised of senior executives with years of M&A experience – buying, selling, integrating and divesting.  Senior partners have directly led or supported hundreds of M&A assignments of all types from a few million dollars to more than $13 billion in transaction value. According to a Business Week study of 302 mergers over a five-year period, M&A Partners generated the highest shareholder returns (86%) in the study. Product briefings are available by contacting us at [email protected] or

1-855-TO-ACQUIRE (1-855-862-2784) Ext. 700

About the M&A Leadership Council

The M&A Leadership Council is an educational consortium committed to delivering best-in-class executive education and professional development training for the M&A community. Together with its corporate sponsors (M&A Partners, Citrix, Baker & McKenzie, Mercer, Crowe Horwath, Cognizant, Ketchum, Merger Market and McGraw Hill), the M&A Leadership Council has trained over 600 executives from best-in-class corporations from every major industry sector on the "Art of M&A."

Contact Info

Deven Software

Paul Saldo
Chief Sales Officer
Email
301-979-9086
www.devensoft.com

M&A Partners

Mark Herndon
President
Email
1-855-TO-ACQUIRE (1-855-862-2784) Ext. 702
www.mapartners.net

M&A Leadership Council

Jim Jeffries
Chairman and Co-founder
Email
(214) 689-3800
www.macouncil.org

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