Ideagen Continues Streak Of Acquisitions With Purchase Of Integrated EHSQ and Asset Management Solution Provider DevonWay

Ideagen Continues Streak Of Acquisitions With Purchase Of Integrated EHSQ and Asset Management Solution Provider DevonWay

On September 28, Ideagen, a UK-based EHS quality, risk and collaboration software provider with more than 10,000 customers, announced the acquisition of safety, risk, quality and asset management software vendor DevonWay. For Ideagen, the deal marks another step forward in the materialization of a highly aggressive M&A strategy, which has seen the acquisitions of Qadex and OnePlace Solutions already in 2023. Prior to this, Ideagen had made the sizable acquisition of ProcessMAP, a Floridian EHS firm with 165 enterprise customers. At the time, Ideagen CEO Ben Dorks explained that the deal had been struck to exploit cross-sell opportunities – specifically, the sale of Ideagen’s Q-Pulse quality management system (QMS) to ProcessMAP customers and ProcessMAP’s EHS applications to Ideagen’s clients. This string of acquisitions has been orchestrated and financially backed by Hg Capital, a technology-focused private equity firm that acquired Ideagen in a take-private deal in July 2022 for £1.05 billion ($1.15 billion).

The acquiree, DevonWay, was established in 2005 and is led by CEO and President Chris Moustakas. Set up originally as an asset maintenance software solution, the DevonWay platform now sits at the intersection between asset management, health and safety, quality and operational risk, with modules for enterprise asset management (EAM) and computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS), control of work, EHS and quality management. Its clientele is typically found within high-risk, highly regulated verticals in North America, where it has gained particular success in the nuclear and energy utility sectors.

The decision-making process behind the acquisition is rooted in DevonWay’s industry focus, which offers an attractive opportunity for Ideagen to more effectively target customers in higher-risk verticals. The addition of DevonWay fills prominent gaps in Ideagen’s functionality offering, closing the loop between operations, safety and risk use cases. Alongside ProcessMAP, the deal adds breadth to Ideagen’s portfolio – rivalling many of its competitors – in a climate where customers are actively looking to consolidate large swathes of EHS, operational risk and quality software functionality into single platforms. The question of reconciling and integrating overlapping and adjacent functionality is highly relevant to Ideagen.

Ideagen, ProcessMAP and DevonWay all appeared in the Verdantix 2023 EHS software Green Quadrant. Ideagen must monitor its portfolio such that the rationalization of products does not become an ordeal. We have seen successful portfolio rationalizations in recent years – such as that of Cority, which absorbed the likes of Enviance and WeSustain into its CorityOne platform and subsequently received the highest score in our EHS Green Quadrant – and some less successful. If Ideagen is pursuing a single platform play, it will face a period of intense and painstaking product development to provide a harmonized offering for clients. The firm should look no further than Enablon and Sphera, two market-leaders that have expended huge resources on interconnecting their EHS and acquired operational risk as well as ESG solutions.

To learn more about the benefits of consolidating EHS platforms, take a look at this Verdantix report. To learn more about DevonWay’s offering, read this report.