Private equity's impact on EDI

Private equity has been purchasing vet clinics, dental practices and funeral homes, and people are furious about it. Prices go up, service declines and people get mad, but they’re stuck.

The same pattern has been quietly playing out in EDI for two decades. No one outside the industry talks about it, but given that EDI is the connective tissue of supply chains everywhere, this is surely a factor in today’s affordability crisis.

As the founder of an EDI platform designed to challenge incumbent cost structures, I’m not a disinterested observer. But the receipts are public. Except SPS, every Tier-1 vendor in the market today has passed through at least one private equity owner.

OpenText acquired GXS for $1.17B in 2014 (Francisco Partners had owned GXS since 2002), then Liaison for $310M in 2018, then Micro Focus for $5.8B in 2023. The Micro Focus close came with an 8% workforce cut. Another ~1,200 roles followed in 2024.

IBM bought Sterling Commerce from AT&T for $1.4B in 2010. Support for legacy operating systems including iSeries, HP-UX and Solaris has been progressively dropped since.

TrueCommerce passed from Accel-KKR to Welsh Carson in 2020. Cleo took an H.I.G. Capital growth investment in 2021. New Mountain Capital acquired RedPrairie for $565M in 2010, combined it with JDA Software in 2012, and sold the resulting company, branded as Blue Yonder, to Panasonic at an $8.5B enterprise value in 2021.

A recent example is e2open: 14 acquisitions in seven years, a 50% one-day stock drop in October 2023 after the CEO was ousted, sold to WiseTech for $2.1B in 2025, currently divesting Expedient under an Australian competition order.

Regulators have noticed. The UK Competition and Markets Authority defined the relevant market in 2014 as “EDI VAN infrastructure” and explicitly identified “scope for price discrimination.” Australia’s ACCC chair, on the WiseTech / e2open deal in December 2025: “WiseTech completed the acquisition before the ACCC conducted its review and could reach a decision, despite being aware of the significant concerns being raised.”

Vendors have noticed too. e2open’s incoming CFO, on the October 2023 earnings call: “the internal focus placed on acquisition integration has led to considerable disruption in the sales organization and our customer base.”

It’s not a one-sided story. New Mountain Capital’s founder, writing in HBR, attributes about $5.7B of the Blue Yonder gain to organic growth, not bolt-ons. Consolidation can produce real product investment, not just cost optimization.

But the customer-side pattern is consistent and the mechanism is unremarkable: pricing optimization on sticky, locked-in customer bases. Competition diminishes, roadmaps slow, and prices trend in just one direction.

If you’ve lived through one of these acquisitions on the customer side, I’d love to hear about it.