When help desk company Peregrine Systems announced it would be buying French asset management specialist Apsylog, Peregrine’s chief executive Alan Hunt immediately flew to Paris to speak at the Apsylog user conference. Apsylog’s 1,200 strong customer base, which includes the likes of GE Capital, Mobil Oil and AT&T Capital, had two questions for Hunt. First they wanted to know whether Peregrine would cut off local support by closing down the company’s Paris headquarters and transferring all development and sales resources to San Diego, where Peregrine is based. And second, they wanted to know whether Peregrine would drop Apsylog products which duplicated its own. While fears that Peregrine would shut Apsylog’s Paris operation proved groundless – Hunt plans to invest in the Paris office to shore up Peregrine’s European presence – he candidly told users that duplicate products would in the short term merely be maintained but not enhanced, and in the longer term phased out completely, as Peregrine moves to merge the best features of Apsylog’s AssetManager suite with its own ServiceCenter helpdesk product. Hunt also plans to trim Peregrine’s own product line, in an effort to streamline the merged product portfolio. Both AssetManager and ServiceCenter users face a rocky road as Peregrine looks to consolidate the two product lines. The overall game plan, which Peregrine will instigate within the next 12-18 months, is to strip out the lease management, warranty management, contract management, change management and problem management features in ServiceCenter and integrate them with AssetManager in a bid to create an all encompassing asset management system, while bolstering Peregrine’s own ServiceCenter helpdesk suites with certain pieces of the Apsylog portfolio. Peregrine will want to retain the 1,200-strong customer base it has acquired and Hunt said the company would try to protect Apsylog user’s investment by products that were due to be phased out by providing a migration path over to either the Peregrine equivalent, or the newly enhanced ServiceCenter offering. The news that Peregrine would purchase Apsylog immediately had a positive impact on the company’s share price, which has more than doubled in the five months since it first sold 2.3 million shares at $9 each in its first public sale of stock.
