7 March 2002 Business intelligence tools vendor SAS Institute (SAS) has agreed to acquire ABC Technologies (ABC), a US-based supplier of financial management software.

The acquisition is an attempt by SAS to strengthen its portfolio of performance management software that helps organisations analyse the profitability of specific products and services. This is viewed to be a hot area in the current negative economic climate, as organisations feel they can justify investing in software that tracks improvement or deterioration in business performance.

The transaction follows an 18-month partnership between the two vendors to develop activity-based scorecard applications, based on extensible mark-up language (XML).

The attraction of ABC’s software for SAS is that it pulls data from corporate accounting systems to help organisations analyse not only how much money they are spending, but also what it is being spent on. By entering this data into a scorecard format, organisations can more easily track the performance of specific activities, such as procurement, against improvement targets.

The size of the deal was not revealed, but ABC’s revenues for fiscal 2001 of $32 million (€36.4m) suggest it was small. However, ABC’s mid-market customer base of more than 4,300 software installations should complement SAS’s primary focus on large organisations.

Furthermore, the addition of product and customer profitability analysis tools to its customer relationship management software is a vital step towards the company providing a complete performance management suite of products, claim SAS executives.

Chris Pieper, CEO of ABC added, “The integration of activity-based costing with performance management addresses customer pains across many industries.”