IT giant boosts application modernisation portfolio for North America expansion
Advanced has acquired Canadian software company Information Balance as part of plans to increase its market share in application modernisation and expand into North America. It’s the second acquisition in just one month from the British IT services and software developer, which bought SaaS company Science Warehouse for £16 million.
Information Balance develops IT solutions to enable large scale application development and migration across mainstream technology platforms. Its core product, an Application Portfolio Analysis (APA) tool, Application Analysis, supports a variety of legacy and application programming languages and multiple database environments. It helps businesses understand the structure of their application code, the business logic contained within and the dependencies throughout the application allowing businesses to optimise their application development to reduce time and effort for changes and to drive development efficiencies.
The acquisition is a major boost to Advanced’s application transformation proposition, which is to help businesses understand, modernise, transform and run applications through successful migration. It allows Advanced to engage with customers earlier in the deal cycle at the application migration stage, enabling it to eliminate the cost of greenfield product development, enter new markets and generate more revenue.
Application Modernisation has been a hugely successful growth area for the business and, thanks to the acquisition, one that will accelerate over the next twelve months. Advanced is already working with large corporates around the world including ProRail in the Netherlands and the Department for Work and Pensions in the UK.
Gordon Wilson, CEO at Advanced, says: “As digital transformation accelerates, IT teams are challenged with navigating between legacy and new technologies while introducing innovative solutions to support key business processes. The addition of Information Balance’s APA tool to our portfolio offers significant value to our customers because Advanced can now support them at every stage of the migration lifecycle.
“Advanced is a growing brand with big ambitions. It’s well established in the UK and we want to replicate this success in North America. After all, regardless of location, all businesses need to establish strong digital foundations and, through our latest deal, they can effectively move their legacy applications to modern environments with minimal risk and disruption.”
Advanced will be adding leading financial services, insurance, telecommunications and retail organisations across North America to its existing customer base.
Gabor Szirmak, CEO at Information Balance, comments: “Our business is built on delivering high quality and cost effective products with a reliable and flexible service – all of which have helped us win and retain our customers. Advanced shares these same values and we are confident the acquisition will only increase that reputation. It also represents a significant step towards Advanced providing extensive capabilities in application modernisation around the world.”
