Services & Software

The Services & Software market is a large, diverse, and growing sector with significant opportunities to build market leading businesses. 

We invest in businesses with attractive market dynamics where we see long-term, secular growth and an offering that is highly valued.  Our focus is on businesses which benefit from the digitisation trends and that we can scale organically and/or through buy & build. Within this sector are core areas of specialism are:

• IT Services
• Tech-enabled outsourcing
• Mature software

IT Services

The IT Services market is large and diverse, spanning several verticals, service types and vendor ecosystems.

Future growth will be driven by increasing digititalisation. We carefully select the winning ecosystems. We focus on markets that are still fragmented where we can apply our successful experience in active buy & build strategy tapping into our international network and permanent capital.

Examples of IT services we focus on include Cloud and IT infrastructure managed Services Providers, Software vendor integration and support services or Application and software development / DevOps.

Tech-enabled outsourcing services

We invest in businesses with attractive market dynamics where we see long-term, secular growth, a service offering that is highly valued, backed by a strong combination of people, process, and technology enablement that gives either a cost advantage or a quality of service edge that in return enables a faster penetration.

The high quality of businesses with these characteristics is typically evidenced through strong client relationships, attractive margins, a high level of revenue visibility and business model scalability. Furthermore, many sub-markets are still fragmented offering buy & build opportunities where we have deep experience.

Example sub-sectors include Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC), Human Capital Management or Business information, data & analytics.

Mature software

Software is a fast-growing sector with significant opportunities to build market leading businesses.

Our focus is on horizontal and vertical software in markets or ecosystems experiencing structural tailwinds and that deliver a high ROI to customers. We focus on mature software companies, benefitting from the adoption and increased penetration of their end markets, and where we can help them achieve:

• market leadership namely by acquisition or geographical expansion especially in the US for European players and in Europe for US players
• transformation and enhancement of their revenue model by transitioning their revenue model from “licence” to “Saas / subscription” while moving to Cloud
  Example sub-sectors include Office of the CFO, supply chain, ERP, Human Capital or life sciences.