Modern Systems Announces Intent to be Acquired by Advanced, the UK’s Third Largest Software and Services Company

DALLAS, April 17, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Modern Systems, a leader in application modernization, today announced it has entered into an agreement with the intent of being acquired by , the UK’s third largest software and services company.

Since new leadership took the helm of Modern Systems in 2017, the company has undergone a complete transformation, reaching unprecedented growth and profitability across industries and geographies-- all milestones which culminated in the company being an attractive acquisition target for Advanced.

In 2017, Modern Systems’ focused on rebuilding the company, laying down a fundamental structure of the organization that previously did not exist. Under the new leadership team, with Brandon Edenfield as president and CEO, together with Cameron Jenkins as COO and Regina O’Connor as vice president of finance, the company refocused its offerings on a broader services-led delivery model, while at the same time implementing a number of internal cost cutting and debt reduction measures.

In 2018, the leadership team shifted its focus to initiatives that drove further growth and value, including introducing new products and services to meet growing customer demands and market trends, making improvements to delivery, and focusing on high value partnership strategies to further expand value to a broader set of customers.  In 1H 2018 alone, Modern Systems saw more growth in new revenue than in all of 2017.

“Brandon, Cameron and Regina were clearly instrumental in the success of Clerity Solutions, a rehosting company with a similar business model to that of Modern Systems,” said Scott D. Miller, executive chairman of Modern Systems. “The success that the team had with Clerity resulted in a sale of the company to in 2012.”

“As we looked to progress Modern Systems at an accelerated and methodical growth pace, we needed an experienced team and a proven playbook,” said Miller.  “The Modern Systems’ leadership team has turned the company into an efficient powerhouse recognized by global Fortune 1000 customers, partners and industry pundits alike,” continued Miller. “Today’s news further underscores those achievements.”

Key Modern Systems’ initiatives that drove growth, leading up to the sale to Advanced include:

• Secured larger, repeat and wider solution scope deals with large companies across a myriad of industries, beyond the ‘traditional’ legacy vertical sectors such as financial services.
• Expanded sales, pre-sales, business development, delivery, marketing, and cloud leadership teams around the globe to meet growing customer demands.
• Engineered and introduced new solutions to meet customer and market demands, including the formation of a Cloud Practice and a new assessment offering, ) was introduced on in September 2018, and today is available via all of the major cloud platform marketplaces including , , and Marketplaces.

Advanced has partnered with since 2016, collaborating together on a number of projects, including the Department of Work and Pensions.

Gordon Wilson, CEO at Advanced, says, “The acquisition of Modern Systems is incredibly complementary to our focus in the application modernization market. The combination of Advanced and Modern Systems will broaden the market opportunity, consolidate our ability to deliver a wider set of solutions, and expand our footprint in the U.S. and globally to better address the fast-growing legacy mainframe market. Our companies share a ‘customer-first’ passion and commitment to the modernization market.”

About Modern Systems

Modern Systems is a leading provider of application modernization services, with more than 200 modernization projects completed worldwide during the past 30 years, and 1.5 billion lines of code processed through our tools.  Modern Systems is a global provider of modernization solutions for legacy application source code, data, and platform transformations. Our combined resources, technologies and global reach makes us one of the largest independent legacy application modernization companies in the world.

^{The closing of the acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval at a meeting of the shareholders of Modern Systems to be held on May 21, 2019.}

Michelle Doss

Modern Systems

 

8