PPM's new owner plans to acquire more security and compliance players

EDMONTON, Alberta—A Toronto-based equity fund, which purchased PPM in December, plans to use the incident management software provider as a platform to build a larger and more diverse company.

“We have a lot of capital and we're interested in buying and will buy more around the physical security and compliance markets,” Will Anderson, newly named CEO of PPM, told Security Systems News.

Klass Software, the acquisition group of Klass Capital, acquired PPM, based here, for an undisclosed amount, the company announced Dec. 10. Klass Software has been rolled into PPM, so all future acquisitions will be under the PPM umbrella, Anderson, said.

Long-time PPM executives Elaine O'Sullivan, president, and Brian McIlvary, EVP, will stay with PPM.

Anderson said O'Sullivan and McIlvary make a strong executive team and PPM runs a good business.

Anderson will spend one-third of his time working on potential acquisitions, another third working with the existing executive team and the final third getting to know PPM's customers. The latter, he said, will help him make smarter acquisitions.

Anderson was previously with Constella Software, a large publicly traded Canada-based software company. Anderson said the company made between 200 and 300 acquisitions during his time there.

He later worked for Iron Data Systems a company that sold solutions to large government agencies.

Anderson said the PPM acquisition was in the works for a year, and that he already has an acquisition pipeline in place. “I'm working on five different deals … one of which should close in the first quarter,” he said.

Anderson believes there is a growing market for companies that can “track incidents and report them and make them consumable.”

Many government and other regulatory bodies that currently require the kinds of services that PPM offer, Anderson said. He predicts that utilities, commercial businesses and others will have more and more regulation to deal with in the future. “If it doesn't come from industry … stockholders and the C-suite will demand it,” he said.