Kris Oldland talks exclusively to Pål M. Rødseth, CEO Evatic as they announce the acquisition of Tesseract Service Management...

Evatic AS, a leading software vendor within Service Management, have acquired Cranbox Ltd in the UK, the owner of the Tesseract service  management software product trading under the name Tesseract.

Together Evatic and Tesseract will complement each other’s product portfolio and strengthen the product offering within the service management field in the market. Tesseract has its main office in High Wycombe just outside London and an office in Reston, Virginia in the US.

“We believe that the two organisations will complement each other both when it comes to products, industries and geographies”

“I believe that Tesseract are in the best hands going forward”, says Colin Brown, founder and CEO of Tesseract.

“With more than 150 customers in a wide range of industries, there is very little overlap with Evatic both when it comes to customer industries and geographies, and I am confident that the product and the customers will continue to thrive under the Evatic ownership”.

Evatic is a leading European service management software company with the head office in Trondheim, Norway and offices in Sweden, Germany, France, Poland and Singapore.

With a global reach and more than 300 customers in 30+ countries Evatic offers a broad product suit for companies that need to make their services profitable. Evatic is a private company owned by the founders and Viking Venture.

Speaking exclusively to Field Service News on the day of the announcement Rødseth commented “We have known Colin for a good number of years and we were actually having the same discussion about four years ago - before I joined Evatic. But somehow those discussions didn’t end in a conclusion, so we picked up the ball again about six or seven months ago and had a long and fruitful discussion that ended up in Evatic acquiring Tesseract - and we are really delighted with that.”

From an outside perspective there seems to be a lot of synergy between the two companies with each being able to fill gaps in the others markets and solutions. Something that Rødseth was keen to highlight.

“There really is a complimentary side to this, we view the UK as a really interesting market,” he began.

Currently in Evatic we are focussing our business around the copier/print industry - that’s where we have our main customers and we have a system that offers a really specialist contract management tool, which is great for advanced or complicated contracts that a lot of the copy/print guys do. So we have a great system for them.”

“However, we are not as good in the generalist service management solutions, for example repair centres and stock management solutions - that is where Tesseract fits into the picture.”

“We now see this as one company with two different products, one being the Evatic product and one being the Tesseract product.” He added.

“I think we will continue to build the Evatic solution to tailor to industries that require really, really complex contract management solutions - and the key vertical for us there is the copy/print industry.”

Rødseth explained “However, we do have some customers outside of this sector and we are already actively looking at if we can move them over to the Tesseract solution.”

“A lot of the smaller customers that we have would benefit from running a Cloud solution with Tesseract so we hope to have some customer synergies from that. However, the primary reason for the acquisition was geographical expansion into the UK and the US.”

“Where we have our customers today is mainly in the Nordics and we also have offices in Norway, Sweden, Germany, France and Singapore but for whatever reason we have never had a strong presence in the UK. We now hope to build the Evatic brand in the UK now that we have a presence there via Tesseract and similarly we hope to be able to bring Tesseract to the European regions where Evatic is already strong.”

“So hopefully quite soon our sales guys will open their jackets and there’s not only an Evatic or Tesseract logo there but there is both.”

And it seems it will be business as normal for both companies in the short to medium term as Rødseth alluded to there being no loss of the newly acquired Tesseract band.

“The Tesseract brand has been over 30 years in the market it is a very strong brand so we will continue to keep that for the Service Centre and build on that and we will keep the Evatic brand for the document management vertical” he said.

What is clear is that there is a great deal of respect between the two parties, especially from Evatic towards not only the heritage of the Tesseract brand but also towards industry veteran Brown who will be stepping down from his role as MD but will remain working with Evatic in a consultancy role.

“Of course it is not going to be easy to filling the shoes of an industry veteran like Colin, but we will do our best to keep up innovating with Tesseract as we’ve done with Evatic as well.”

“We have 20 + people here that all have experience with the product and there is deep knowledge here within the organisation - we are hopeful towards a very positive future for both Tesseract and Evatic following this change.”

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