One year ends and another begins … pretty much as the old one left off. While we were eating too many cookies in late December, Nemetschek and Sandvik announced deals; Aras and Hexagon started the year off with acquisitions of their own:

On Tuesday, Aras announced that it is merging with Minerva Group, a long-time Aras Innovator implementation partner. Minerva brings with it PLM functionality, built on the Aras platform, for medical devices and high-tech electronics as well as implementation expertise in automotive, aerospace, defense, and industrial equipment manufacturing, across manufacturing industries — and a presence in the Nordic region and the Netherlands. [Be aware: when I first saw this headline, I thought it referred to Minerva, the Ansys/Aras partnership for simulation process and data management– nope. DIfferent Minerva.] No details were announced but this starts to bring Aras from a toolkit to ready-made applications for FDA compliance and other out-of-the-box capabilities.

Hexagon announced that it has acquired Minnovare for its hardware and data-capture software solutions that “deliver drill-data faster and more accurately … improving the efficiency, productivity and overall profitability of underground drilling operations [to] address deficiencies in existing drilling processes across the resource definition, development and production phases”. Financial details weren’t announced but Hexagon did say that Minnovare has “more than 150 contracted systems in over 90 mining operations worldwide, sold as a recurring revenue package … The acquisition has no significant impact on Hexagon’s earnings and closed in early 2022.” This acquisition expands Hexagon’s already impressive mining offer and underscores how important resource management is in a world that needs to balance extraction (for electronics and many industrial products and processes) with environmental impact.

Sandvik announced that it has acquired Dimensional Control Systems (DCS), makers of dimensional quality management software. Details of the acquisition were not announced, but Sandvik says DCS had revenue in 2020 of about $10 million, 65% of which is software growing at about 10% per year (the rest of DCS’ revenue, apparently, are quality-related services). DCS’ solutions enable customers to validate their metrology (post-manufacturing quality measurement) plans, the point of which is to reduce non-conformance to quality standards — and that, in turn, improves quality and reduces waste, rework, and downtime.

Finally, Nemetschek announced that it is investing in (but not acquiring) Imerso, a Norwegian company “offering a next-generation platform to automate construction quality monitoring through a combination of advanced artificial intelligence (AI), reality capture, and BIM technologies.” Nemetschek representatives said that Imerso “is a perfect fit … We see great synergies, particularly with our brand Solibri. Both companies are on a mission to improve the quality of construction and to create better buildings. Customers can accurately monitor the project’s progress and efficiently improve the results.” Details of the investment were not given.

And looking ahead a bit, PLMish companies are starting to schedule their December-quarter results releases. That’s a good thing — it means that they more or less ended 2021 as they planned to, meeting the modest targets most had set because of the ridiculous amount of uncertainty we’re all feeling. One company’s results do not a trend make, but the Q4 news could be better than expected: SAP last night reported that Q4 cloud revenue was up 28% over last year, with the overall software revenue up 6% (like everyone else, traditional software license revenue was down). Total Q4 revenue for SAP was up 6%. In all, that’s slightly better than the company had forecast. We’ll see what that means in our world soon enough.

That’s it for now — have a great weekend.