Upland Software has announced the acquisition of BA Insight Inc., a provider of enterprise search solutions for global organizations.

With the acquisition of BA Insight, Upland continues to build its knowledge-management product portfolio by giving customers a powerful new way to conduct searches that span their enterprise systems to deliver relevant, personalized and actionable results with a technology that:

• Eliminates the blind spots by connecting search to many different systems and applications;
• Unifies search results with the ability to set up the correct, specialized taxonomies to organize, retrieve and sort the most relevant documents;
• Delivers increasingly relevant results using analytics and machine learning to make each search better; and
• Places a search bar wherever the user wants it so he (or she) can search natively in target applications or across all the applications they use every day.

"Our acquisition of BA Insight was driven by our customers' needs, specifically in the business services, life sciences and legal industries where knowledge workers are spending wasted hours using ineffective enterprise search tools trying to track down the right documents to do their work," said Rod Favaron, president, Upland. "This is because most enterprise search technology does not connect to all relevant sources, is generic in its taxonomy when it should be specialized and never gets better. BA Insight solves these major search challenges facing specialized knowledge teams today."

"Our mission at BA Insight has always been to provide a personalized and connected enterprise search experience that specialized knowledge workers need to do their jobs," said Massood Zarrabian, chairman and CEO, BA Insight. "As we join Upland, we are excited to bring our powerful open and flexible search platform to an extensive enterprise customer base and to a world-class company with a long-term investment in both the knowledge management and document workflow markets."

This acquisition marks the third in Upland's knowledge management product portfolio.

The purchase price paid for BA Insight was $33.4 million in cash at closing (net of cash acquired), paid out of cash on hand, and a $0.6 million cash holdback payable within 15 months (subject to indemnification claims). Upland expects the acquisition to generate annual revenue of at least $8.7 million, including at least $7.5 million of recurring revenue, and will be subject to reductions for deferred revenue discount as a result of GAAP purchase accounting currently estimated at $3 million for the remainder of 2022. The price paid for the acquisition is within Upland's target range of five- to eight-times pro forma adjusted EBITDA and it is expected that BA Insight will generate at least $4.25 million in adjusted EBITDA annually once fully integrated. The acquisition will be immediately accretive to Upland's adjusted EBITDA per share contributing at least $0.1 million of adjusted EBITDA in the quarter ended March 31, 2022, and at least $1.6 million of adjusted EBITDA for the full year 2022 ramping up quarterly as the acquisition is integrated into model across the calendar year.

In other news, Upland has been named in Forrester's New Tech: Account-Based Sales Technologies, Q1 2022 report, which provides an overview of account-based selling technologies. Upland Altify's strategic account planning software was one of 19 vendors included, and only one of seven late-stage technology providers recognized in the report.

"As a leader in the account planning technology space for more than 15 years, we have partnered with global enterprises such as Salesforce, Lumen, UnitedHealth Group and many others to enable the skill set, mindset and tool set for account-based selling in their organizations," said Patrick Morrissey, senior vice president and general manager, Upland. "We're proud to be recognized by Forrester among solutions that help enterprises find the white space and unlock new pipeline to grow business in their strategic accounts."

The vendors were evaluated and differentiated based on the following three weighted criteria: top-ranked competitors, company tenure and full-time employees. From there, Forrester scored vendors against all criteria using progressive point values across maturity stages and divided them into three final groups of late-stage, growth-stage and early-stage vendors.

Altify delivers account planning software natively in Salesforce, combining innovative technology with expert strategy and methodology. Altify helps reveal complex relationships, identifies white space, supports opportunity planning efforts, defines repeatable sales processes, and coordinates collaboration across sales, marketing, customer success and the extended revenue team to make it easier to identify, win and retain business.