Epicor Software for sale

Epicor Software Corp., owner of the popular Eclipse distribution software package, has been put up for sale by its owner, Apax Partners, a London-based buyout firm. The price for Epicor, which recently moved to Austin, Texas, from the Bay Area, could top $3 billion, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and other sources. The WSJ article said Epicor had 2013 sales of $978.3 million, and that the company now carries $1.3 billion debt.

In 2011, Apax bought Epicor, a provider of enterprise business software solutions primarily for a variety of distribution and manufacturing applications outside the electrical market and merged it with Activant Solutions, which owned Eclipse, Trade Service Systems, Prophet 21 and Prelude systems. A year later, Apax spent $155 million to buy another ERP software company Solarsoft Business Systems that focuses on the manufacturing and distribution markets.