Descartes acquires Oz Development

Descartes Systems Group, a global leader in uniting logistics-intensive businesses in commerce, announced that it has acquired Oz Development, a leading US-based provider of application integration solutions that help small-to-medium sized businesses (SMB) automate a number of logistics and supply chain processes.

For more than 10 years, Oz has been helping a growing SMB community connect to and integrate with leading enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce and supply chain platforms. Oz’s partnerships with key SMB channels, such as UPS and NetSuite, have helped it build this community to include nearly 7,000 end customers. Oz’s solutions address a number of pain points for e-commerce shippers by automating logistics and supply chain processes, including order fulfillment, inventory management, scanning, and shipping.

“The e-commerce market in North America continues to grow as consumer buying patterns and expectations evolve,” said Ken Wood, executive vice president of product management at Descartes. “A large portion of this growth in the market is being addressed by the SMB community, where companies typically don’t have a fleet of vehicles and rely on third parties, such as UPS, for the final-mile delivery. By combining with Oz, we can better address this segment of the retail community and extend the reach of our Global Logistics Network to drive more logistics messaging and application adoption.”

“We welcome the Oz employees, customers and partners to the Descartes community,” said Edward J. Ryan, Descartes’ CEO. “The Oz team brings deep domain expertise to Descartes for supply chain challenges in the SMB market. We’re excited by the opportunity to leverage this domain expertise to expand beyond what Oz does today and to provide Oz’s customers with access to the complementary solutions available on Descartes’ Global Logistics Network.”

Oz is headquartered in Westborough, Mass. The purchase price for the acquisition was approximately $29.5 million, which was paid in cash.