Exact (company)

History

Exact was founded in 1984 by Eduard Hagens, Rinus Dekker, Arco van Nieuwland, Paul van Keep, Paul Fijling and Leo Schonk. The six had worked as freelancers for Grote Beer ("Ursa Major"), one of the first Dutch companies to produce standardized accounting software. When Grote Beer fired all of its freelancers, Hagens et al. started their own business. Their Exact Software would later, in 1994, acquire Grote Beer, which at that time had an annual revenue of ƒ100 million, expanding Exact's customer portfolio to some 60,000 companies. The former company's name was used as a trade mark until 2000.

Internationally, Exact grew by acquiring Belgian firms Cobul and Cubic (17,000 customers) in 1989. The opening of offices in the United Kingdom and Russia meant that, as of 1995, 20% of Exact's revenue came from abroad. Expansion into the German market soon followed with the acquisition of Pcas, Bavaria Soft, Szymaniak (1997) and finally Soft Research (1999), German market leader in salary software.

In the 2000s, Exact acquired US manufacturing ERP software providers Macola, JobBOSS and MAX. In 2007, Exact purchased Longview Solutions for US $51.5 million. Longview Solutions got sold off to Marlin Equity Partners in July 2014 for an undisclosed amount of money.

The mid-2000s saw Exact embroiled in internal power struggles. In 2004, founder Eduard Hagens returned from ten months of sailing round the world, to find his company reorganized in a decentralized way that didn't suit his vision of how Exact should be led. Hagens clashed with CEO Lucas Brentjens and CFO Bert Groenewegen, leading to the resignation in September and October of that year of Brentjens, Groenewegen, and subsequently the company's entire board of directors. Hagens's "coup" (as de Volkskrant put it) caused a staff drain within the company. The following April, after the resignation of the company's new CFO, Hagens announced his own departure. He was succeeded by Rajesh Patel.

In October 2014, Exact announced a buy-out by Apax Partners. That acquisition was completed in April, 2015 for a sum of €730 million. The acquisition meant that Exact was de-listed from the Euronext stock exchange, on which it had been listed since 1999.

Products

Exact's rise to market leadership was mostly based on its MS-DOS-based accounting package, also called Exact. The company also launched a Windows version of this package, but this was heavily criticized because it never attained the full functionality of the DOS version, leading many companies to stay with the DOS software into the late 1990s.

The Exact package was replaced circa 2000 with a new product, Globe 2000. This Windows NT-based product was designed around a modular architecture dubbed "One-X" that underpinned all of Exact's offerings. Criticism of this software focused on the fact that the One-X architecture was incompatible with the older Exact software, and that it was tied to Microsoft SQL Server, which was considered too heavy of a database management system for the small computers typically used at Exact's small and medium enterprise customers.

In 2005 Exact Online was launched, the company's effort to bring Exact software to the cloud. With this product, Exact initially targeted only the Benelux countries, until in May 2010 it announced a joint venture with Turkish software developer Triodor to market its product in Turkey as an experiment. The trial ended later that year, with Exact citing a lack of results and announcing a sole focus on its Dutch and Belgian markets.