Kudos to the Deltek team for their recent IPO. This public offering showcases how taking a company private can provide opportunities to regroup, reorganize, and recharge. What this means for Deltek:

• New market growth opportunities. The $10M in proceeds from the IPO give Deltek the cash to build off of its base in the UK for International expansion. In addition, the vendor's strength in government contracting, professional services, and construction lends well to related industries such as IT services, architecture, accounting, and transportation services. Deltek can also take the opportunity to expand its partner network.
• Visibility into the growing project based solutions market. Forrester estimates this market to be $6.5B by 2010. As work shifts from product to service orientation, solutions in this Project Based Solutions space gain prominence in the enterprise. Think of a Best Buy who's no longer selling a home theater system but the installation, delivery, and extended warranty. Expect the marketing to crank up from stalwarts such as Epicor, Oracle, Primavera, and SAP.
• Debt repayment. As part of the repayment terms, the company will apply $42.9M to repay about a quarter of their debt and another $3.9M to selling shareholders who've exercised options. This should free the firm up for better growth prospects.
  

The bottom line for end users
Keep an eye on this space if your business revolves around projects. Vendor consolidation is sure to occur, but Deltek will be a major player in this space. Deltek's offerings cover both the .NET world and the J2EE world so platforms should not be an issue. Expect both Oracle and SAP to amp up the messaging if the Best of Breeds do really well.

(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2007 by R Wang. All rights reserved