Equipment rental and mobile SaaS provider Texada Software and equipment dealer SaaS provider Uptake Canada completed a merger this week that will combine the services under a single brand.
The merged company will combine software into a bundled SaaS platform that provides expanded functionality for equipment dealers and renters, Matt Harris, chief executive of Texada Software, told Equipment Finance Connect. He said the bundled software should reduce churn in the global construction equipment market, which was valued at $171.4 billion in 2021, according to market research firm BlueWeave Consulting.
“One of the things that we heard from an industry analyst at the [Associated Equipment Distributors] meeting is that dealerships churn 5% of their customers every month,” Harris said. “If we can provide them with a platform that enables them to engage with their customers not only on what they sell from an equipment standpoint, but the service engagement, repairs or preventative maintenance, or the rental opportunity on additional equipment … that gives the dealership the opportunity to maintain engagement with their customers on a commercial basis consistently.”
The service also aims to increase connectivity and reduce siloing. “We’re connecting and integrating otherwise disparate platforms into a single platform, a single bundle,” Harris said. “By bringing them together, we’re helping the dealerships and the rental houses break down the silos between their businesses and have a more all-encompassing customer engagement.”
The companies announced the merger Feb. 7, but the integration process began late last year, Harris said, with the merged company operating under the Texada Software name.
“The two businesses were merged in early November of last year, so we’ve been working at it for a while and we’ve integrated our organization entirely,” Harris said. “We’re finding a lot of opportunity between our two businesses in our customer base.”
Gauging customer feedback
With the systems and organizations already integrated, Texada Software is able to see how customers are responding to the systems and how the combined software works in different parts of organizations.
“When you look at most of our users across our systems right now, the majority of our users are people not working behind the counter or salesperson in a dealership; they’re everything that goes into supporting those people: the service technicians, the drivers, the delivery drivers, field service, people who are out on job sites fixing their customers’ equipment and mechanics in the shop,” Harris said.
“We really enable these different parts of a dealership or rental house to really function and come together in a single platform,” he said.
The newly merged software allows for increased customization. “As you get into enterprise-level software like ours, there needs to be a high degree of configuration that we enable for our customers,” Harris said. “An inherit component of our platform is the ability to tune it to exactly what our customers want,” Harris concluded.
Texada Software, headquartered in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, has provided rental management services for 40 years, according to the company’s website. Mississauga, Ontario-based Uptake Canada, has provided its SaaS platform to dealers since 2006, according to a Texada release.
Texada Software is a subsidiary of Banneker Partners and was acquired by the San Francisco-based company in April 2022 for $37.2 million, according to Crunchbase.
