ePartners – one of my larger portfolio companies – announced today that they have closed a $25 million financing led by Needham Capital Partners. As part of this financing, Howard Diamond became the CEO. I was a (very happy) investor with Needham in Howard’s prior company – Corporate Software (now Software Spectrum) – which was acquired by Level 3 in 2002.
ePartners is one of the largest Microsoft Business Solution (MBS) partners and my investment was the result of a merger between EYT and ePartners in mid-2004. With this financing – which Howard has been working on for several months – ePartners is well capitalized and positioned for another major round of growth. We like to think that our timing is good as many of the investments that Microsoft has made in MBS over the past few years is starting to pay off – and our strong second quarter results reflected this.
Since I had an homage to Btrieve in an early post, I’d be remiss if I didn’t reminisce about the old Great Plains logo (ah – the relaxing wheat fields blowing in the wind on a white background, trips to Fargo North Dakota in December, and a calmer (well – maybe not) world.) And – of course I’d also be remiss if I didn’t tell you to drop me an email if you have any ERP / accounting, CRM, or Sharepoint needs, especially if you are tired of huge total cost of ownership associated with being an Oracle, PeopleSoft, or SAP customer (yes – plenty of folks are replacing their expensive ERP systems with Microsoft MBS products.)