Acquisition Broadens ACOM Portfolio
With its acquisition of Formula One Systems Inc. (Duluth, Ga.) in February, and several partnerships on the horizon this year, ACOM (Long Beach, Calif.) is looking to provide the AS/400 market with unified solutions that combine the functions of electronic forms and laser check processing.
While e-forms and check processing dovetail nicely in the enterprise's ongoing efforts to decrease administrative costs and streamline payroll management, ACOM also has plans to offer its specialized solutions as value adds for larger ERP vendors, according to Gregory Church, VP of marketing for ACOM.
ACOM is positioned more as a turnkey solution, while Formula One's offerings are more modular, Church says. Combining what the two companies do best is a way for the AS/400 market to work with a single vendor to meet its forms and check disbursement needs.
Though ACOM has acquired all of the stock and assets of Formula One, the Duluth, Ga., developer of e-business forms software is expected to continue operating as an independent subsidiary of ACOM. Each of the two companies will, however, share certain management and functional activities and cross-contribute to each other's products, technology and marketing efforts.
"With the acquisition of Formula One, ACOM's ability to supply a broader range of electronic forms software to our customers' companies has been increased dramatically," says Patrick McMahon, president of ACOM. "ACOM has been primarily a systems integrator, providing superior hardware/software MICR [Magnetic Ink Character Recognition] laser check processing solutions for accounts payable, payroll and other security-critical financial applications." ACOM solutions are designed to be host-resident in the AS/400 and Microsoft Windows environments and are compatible with financial management software residing on a variety of computing platforms.
"Formula One's array of electronic forms software, particularly for the AS/400 environment, enables us to offer a more complete range of business solutions to our customers, adding variety and comprehensiveness to the security, efficiency and control that are fundamental to our systems," McMahon adds.
Formula One expects the acquisition will enable the company to achieve "greater penetration of its market, in which the company's focus has tended to be forms-specific rather than application-specific," notes Richard Voss, president of Formula One.
"Formula One has been extremely successful with its EZPrint/400 software product, which enables users to design and merge electronic forms, checks and labels with variable data stored on their AS/400 computers," Voss says. "By combining with ACOM, we have immediately broadened our AS/400 product scope with a powerful, badly needed vertical application with enormous market potential."
Moving forward, ACOM plans to broaden its relationships with enterprise resource management (ERP) solutions providers in the AS/400 market such as J.D. Edwards, Infinium Software Inc. and Lawson Software, according to Church. ACOM has already been named a Lawson Software Global Affiliate Integrated Network (GAIN) alliance partner and currently has a relationship with Infinium whereby ACOM provides secure check and document processing solutions to current and future Infinium Software customers.