percent of shares in SolveDirect.com Internet-Service GmbH, Vienna, thereby extending its product portfolio in the growth market of "Software as a Service" (SaaS).
SolveDirect serves about 150 customers including Sparkassen Informatik, Allianz, Generali Versicherungen, Media Markt, Karstadt and Hornbach. Furthermore, the company maintains close business relationships with integration partners such as T-Systems, Atos Origin, Siemens Business Services and Hewlett Packard. SolveDirect is expected to achieve sales in the range of EUR 5 million and an EBIT margin of 20% this year. The profitability of SolveDirect is expected to clearly increase following integration into the BRAIN FORCE group thanks to existing distribution channels and economies of scale. BRAIN FORCE has acquired SolveDirect, which in the past has realized excellent results in terms of both sales and profit, for EUR 9 million.
"By this acquisition, BRAIN FORCE completes its IT management software suite which can now be sold as "Software as a Service”. This will reduce sales costs and also implementation times on the customers' premises, a benefit which is of particular importance to SMEs", states Helmut Fleischmann, founder and CEO of the group.
Growth rates of up to 25 percent
SolveDirect is a provider of IT service management software which is fully compliant with the ITIL standard. SolveDirect's product range will complete the BRAIN FORCE IT management suite. This helps BRAIN FORCE to serve particularly medium-sized companies by delivering its software extremely conveniently and flexibly in the form of a service. BRAIN FORCE will take care of the software operation, so that customers need not develop any know-how or resources of their own. "With this capability, BRAIN FORCE has a USP in the highly competitive SME market", underlines Mr Fleischmann. "There's no competitor who can fulfill these requirements, and this is exactly where our growth potential for the years to come is being found!"
A major benefit of the SaaS concept is that the software is offered by sales partners all over the world with no need to build integration knowledge locally. This will considerably speed up market entry in new regions for BRAIN FORCE which can be successfully achieved with much less in the way of upfront investments. As a part of its growth strategy, the group already announced on June 19 the establishment of a new subsidiary in the USA which will be responsible for selling BRAIN FORCE's complete IT management suite to the world's largest IT market.
More information on SolveDirect
SolveDirect holds one of the world's largest service management platforms. Using ServiceDesk SD², the company offers tailored deployment of helpdesk service management functions which is in line with customers' needs and growth targets. With SD.Cube, the company offers a web-based service management platform which is installed by service providers, thereby offering their customers their own support and services on demand. SD.bridge is SolveDirect's web-based data clearing platform which links helpdesk systems between customer and supplier. This software enables automated electronic data interchange which considerably accelerates and simplifies service management processes.