Sage 100

JobOps sold to Anania & Associates Email from Ryan Rick: Hello all, I wanted to let all of you know there have been some recent exciting changes within Synergistic and JobOps. Effective March 3, 2014, Synergistic Software Solutions and JobOps were purchased by Anania & Associates Investment Company LLC (AAI) from BDO. There will be a general press release in the upcoming days, but we wanted our Partners to know ahead of any mass notification. This brings up many questions, I know some of which I will hopefully address below: 1.How does this change my current Solution Provider Agreement with Synergistic? It doesn't operations will continue as they have in the past. There will be changes going forward in the ""fine print"" to replace any reference to BDO which will not be necessary until your next anniversary date. 2.How does this affect my JobOps end users? It doesn't. End users will notice no difference as we rely on you, our Partners, to work with them. 3.Who is Anania & Associates? AAI is an investment company located in Windham, Maine whose focus is primarily on manufacturing. Two of the AAI portfolio companies are currently implementing JobOps! Here is a link to their website so you can learn more about them: www.anania.biz 4.What does this mean for JobOps? Quite frankly it means there is a new surge of energy and life to the JobOps product you have worked with for years. 5.Will there be any staff changes at Synergistic? No other than Monte McNally (IT), Traci Portwood (Administrative) and Chuck Wunderlich (YES I said Chuck) are remaining with BDO and did not come over as part of the sale. The rest of us usual suspects are all here at the same location/address with the same phone numbers. One note: Our former email addresses of ""@bdo.com"" will cease to work in the next month or so. I would encourage everyone to change us in your address books to a ""@jobops.com"" address sooner rather than later. I know you will have many more questions outside of the five I list above but wanted to get the great news out and not be overly wordy. If you have questions, please contact me either by email or call my direct line below. We at Synergistic look forward to starting this new chapter with all of you and teaming up to make JobOps stronger not only in the Sage 100 arena but in the overall manufacturing ERP marketplace. As always thank you for your continued support and partnership.

Fascinating...Chuck is not following the product. Knew something was up...but couldn't tie anyone down with details.

This is very positive news, since development has been stagnant for the past few years. I know that Anania owns two companies that are currently using or implementing JobOps, so that seems to be where the connection came from. They have also indicated they want to invest aggresively in development, including going outside the Sage platform. This tells me that a full SQL product may be down the road. It also means that some of those functions that many have been asking for, such as integration with the ACSG multi-bin may get done much sooner.

I wonder if the company acquired it to make sure it didn't go belly up while they depended on their solution

@DebThomas Chuck has been the problem all along. Frishberg was the visionary and when he left that was lost.

Tom's departure was definitely a loss...

Ryan, Stacy, Rhonda, Tonya, Chris, Don, Laura ... that's it.

@JohnHoyt I'm always optimistic (sarcasm), but I doubt it. Anybody know about how many employees that would leave in the company?

Yes - those 7.

Wow, didn't realize it was that small.

Revenue is only a little over $1 million. This probably was a bargain for the buyer, if they are willing to invest and can see potential.

so who is the brains of the outfit now??

Completely agree @JohnHoyt - when Tom left...well, things went wrong and I am hoping you are right that the new owners will invest. While I get that it's to their advantage, I'm not convinced. @MarkChinsky they've been understaffed for a very long time. Product is more complicated with less people to manage it....not a good combination.

Sounds like they bought into the Sage model of management and growing the firm.....

Ryan is the leader/general manager. Now that Chuck is gone, he can truly step into that role. Question is - is he up to it? The rest of the people are technical and have their roles.

And there has been no-one in the JobOps staff (since Tom's departure) that has any vision or understanding of manufacturing in the real world.

I'm hoping that the main contact at Anania will be the great Wizard -- since they have manufacturing there actually might be someone now who knows manufacturing.

If they need a real world manufacturing leader and visionary, they're not going to find it in Minneapolis. Perhaps it will be like Sage, where they can work from wherever.

@JaneScanlan Nothing against Minneapolis, of course!

Synergistic ain't no Epicor!

Actually Epicor did quite well from Minneapolis

Get this, just got a response from Ryan Rick that there is no-one at Anania we can be in touch with ""I cannot. All JobOps related issues and discussions are resolved within Synergistic Software.

Of course. Anania is an investment company. They have nothing to do with the daily operations of their acquired companies. They either bought them to protect their two portfolio clients or see the chance to flip them in a year or two. I think its the prior as a 7 person 1M/year company is way too small for most investment companies.

@JohnHoyt I know you didn't mean the city ... just a very particular area of the city ..... 44.869890 latitude x -93.352085 longitude

At this point Ryan is the guy. With Chuck in the picture, he was no more that an admin manager. If he is going to succeed, he has to become the visionary and get very involved with what this segment of manufacturing needs. I told him that he needs two more programmers right off the bat, if he gets budget. I don't know where you find ProvideX programmers, but if they want to take it to SQL, it's wide open. They would also need two more support/analyst/QC people, if they are going to do this development.

With benefits that's probably $300k to $400k of cost per year. With $1m in revenue the Investment company better have a very long term outlook

I would hope the investment company would know what they are doing, but if they need some business consultants knowledgeable and experienced in the software industry, this group is available to render opinions.