Pythian Services Acquires ManageServe To Boost SAP Capabilities

The acquisition aligns with Pythian’s ‘love your data’ theme, according to CEO Keith Angell.

New York’s Pythian Services has acquired ManageServe to boost its capabilities with SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) and providing SAP HANA database solutions on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and SAP cloud platforms.

The acquisition, terms of which were not released, aligns with Pythian’s “love your data” theme, according to Keith Angell, CEO of the data, analytics and cloud services company since last June.

Palatine, Ill.-based ManageServe, which has 16 years of experience partnering with SAP, specializes in SAP application hosting, implementation, migration, analytics and end-to-end managed services.

“As we look at managing data and enterprise data platforms for enterprises, we know that a big driver of that data is the ERP systems that enterprises use,” Angell told CRN. “The two largest ERP systems in use are SAP and Oracle. We have had, for a good while, a strong Oracle practice, but we were lacking the skills and experience for SAP. ManageServe is a premier SAP technology services provider, and we wanted to make that move into adding those skills and experience.”

More than one third of Pythian’s enterprise customers use SAP.

An SAP PartnerEdge and SAP-certified application hosting partner, ManageServe has completed more than 80 SAP implementations, 50 SAP upgrades and 80 operating system/database migrations to the major cloud vendors and SAP’s clouds for enterprises across industries. ManageServe also is a global partner in SAP’s Database Migration Factory Program.

“They have a deep experience of managed services migration hosting, and they have an SAP analytics team,” Angell said. “The SAP Business Warehouse and HANA database are critical to companies that run SAP. And mining the data in the data warehouses and HANA database and other back-end databases attached to SAP is a great capability of Pythian helping enterprises get value from their data. ManageServe’s capabilities there match up really well with what we offer. Our ability to expand within ManageServe’s customer base -- and theirs within ours -- is also critically important.”

In addition to its U.S. presence and capabilities, ManageServe has an office in Bangalore, India, to complement Pythian’s office in Hyderabad, India.

“We’ll be bringing those together and continue to expand our presence there,” Angell said.

Adding skills to develop a strong data services company was part of the value-creation plan when New York-based Mill Point Capital purchased the services business of Ottawa’s Pythian Group for undisclosed terms in 2019 to form Pythian Services, according to Angell. A year ago, Pythian acquired Agosto, a Minneapolis-based Google Cloud Premier Partner.

“That’s been a great acquisition,” Angell said. “And now this year…we’re executing the ManageServe acquisition for similar reasons: expand our footprint and service offerings -- in this case, around ERP with a focus on (SAP) Business Warehouse, data and analytics -- as enterprises grapple with the explosion of data every day.”

ManageServe CEO Sabir Kapasi will run Pythian’s SAP line of business.

“His organization will really stay as is and just get the support and enhancements and expansion from Pythian with our global footprint,” Angell said.

In a statement, Kapasi said the combined companies are “extremely well-positioned to help clients optimize enterprise-scale SAP workloads on premise or in the cloud, so they can maximize the business value of their data.”

Angell had previously served as an advisor to ManageServe in 2019 and joined its board in early 2020 before resigning at the end of last year when Mill Point Capital and Pythian took an interest in the company.

Pythian also worked with ManageServe as a partner for the last year.

“They became our partner and services provider as a subcontractor for some SAP work, so we did a kind of try-before-you-buy work with them over the last year as a partner, and it became obvious to us that there was great synergy in working together and similar cultures,” Angell said.

ManageServe’s roughly employees will bring Pythian’s headcount to approximately 370, and Pythian is hiring SAP additional consultants and developers.

Next up for Pythian -- an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Google Premier Partner and Microsoft Gold Partner -- is focusing on its organic growth, according to Angell.

“We’re highly aligned to applications that drive data, and now we have our arms around the major ERP systems that drive data,” he said. “We have partnerships and relationships with many of the data-related vendors, and certainly we have massive relationships and skills around Google, AWS and Azure. Now it’s really the focus on organic growth and executing the expansion of offerings that we’ve put together for the marketplace.”