INSIGHTS / News

SETsquared Bath member Zynstra has been acquired for £100m by global enterprise technology company NCR Corporation.

The global enterprise technology company for retail, hospitality and banking industries NCR announced the acquisition of Zynstra for approximately £100m. The acquisition is expected to be slightly dilutive to earnings per share in 2020.

NCR and Zynstra have worked together for several years reflected in the launch of NCR Software Defined Store introduced in January 2019 and in use by companies like Pilot Flying J. This unique, subscription-based virtualisation solution is one of the critical pillars of NCR’s next-generation store architecture for the retail and hospitality industries.

Mike Rodgers, chief information officer at Pilot Flying J said: “We’ve worked closely with the NCR and Zynstra teams and have first-hand experience of their complementary technology and ability to deliver together. Software Defined Store is strategic for us, virtualisation all our in-store systems and is delivering a great return on investment. This combination makes sense and we’re excited about what’s coming.”

By virtualizing back and front office technology, businesses can realise significant hardware cost savings and enterprise technology management can be much more cost effective. For example, with a simple swipe of the screen a device can change from a POS terminal to an inventory management console.

A recent Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by NCR and conducted by Forrester Research of NCR Software Defined Store customers found that an average organisation with approximately 750 retail stores could see a 164 percent return on investment through store virtualisation.

NCR President and Chief Executive Officer Michael D. Hayford said: “This acquisition is another demonstration of our strategy to acquire new companies to enhance product capabilities and extend our leadership in the vertical industries we serve. The addition of Zynstra’s virtualisation technology to our software stack gives NCR even more solutions to help our customers run their store or restaurant end-to-end.”

Nick East, CEO at Zynstra said: “At Zynstra, we’ve built a world-class capability that we know can make a significant difference for our clients. When we started to work with NCR, we realized that our combined strengths made for an unmatched service, with a global reach. I am personally very excited about what it means for our customers and our team and am looking forward to leading the acceleration of our vision for the market.”