ITRS Buys Capacity Management Firm Sumerian

“We were keen to do an acquisition,” says Guy Warren, CEO at ITRS. “Sumerian was a great fit. We would probably have written the software if we hadn’t come across the company.”

Sumerian’s software complements ITRS’ product suite, Warren says. The technology takes large-scale data from ITRS’ Geneos and other monitoring tools into a predictive analytics engine which recommends optimizations, uses machine learning to predict future issues and quantifies business risks through best-in-class scenario modeling. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Warren noted that Sumerian will benefit from ITRS’ global presence. Established in 19976 and headquartered in London, it has an international client base of over 190 firms, including investment banks, exchanges, trading venues, hedge funds, brokers, and vendors. “We felt we could grow their business much faster if we owned it than if we just partnered with them,” says Warren.

The management team of Sumerian are staying with the company and will assist to manage the transition. Sumerian Capacity Planner will be rebranded into ITRS Insights Capacity Planner in due course. ITRS was established in 1997 and is headquartered in London.

One of the driving forces behind the growing trends for such partnerships and acquisitions is demand from the end-user. Customers can find it hard to maintain integration between all the tools that they use, particularly when they tend to overlap.

“I think all vendors used to be able to sell their products standalone and the customer had to workout how to integrate them,” Warren says. “Most of my customers are very sophisticated and are more than capable of doing that. But increasingly, the discussion I have with customers is [them saying] ‘I don’t want to be doing that integration anymore and maintaining it, why don’t you have partnerships with several companies that I can take advantage of straight away?’”