The other two are Consona, whose product line includes the Made2Manage manufacturing line, along with a number of specialized ERP packages. Consona is owned by Battery Ventures and Thoma Bravo. And of course, there is Infor Global, which has been gobbling up companies with the backing of Golden Gate Capital. Infor is attempting a hostile takeover of Lawson Software and if these deals all come through a significant amount of ERP revenue will be in the hands of private equity. The Epicor deal is similar in that Apax wants to put the company together with Activant under the Epicor name. Not only is a lot of money under the control of these investors, they have made most of the acquisitions in the last few years, not the public companies. Epicor’s SEC filings show that several private equity firms were interested in purchasing the company. There are also reports of private equity groups looking at investments in channel companies. Given the state of the public equity markets over the last two years, it’s probably logical that the action has shifted. But investment is not the end of the story. Everyone expects Infor to go public someday since it’s estimated to have $2.5 billion or so in annual revenue, but its window was probably closed the recession. The way these guys get repaid is shown by the history of Blackbaud, which was purchased by funds associated with Hellman & Friedman in 1999. Hellman cashed out in 2005. Hellman, incidentally is one of the investors working with Apax as is Thoma Bravo.