Continuing its buying spree, Agilisys Inc., a supplier of enterprise software solutions, acquired NxTrend, provider of enterprise commerce management solutions.

Earlier this year, Agilisys bought daly.commerce, a purchase that was complemented by the NxTrend acquisition, explained Tom Lynch, senior vice president of marketing for Agilisys.

"From a customer satisfaction and innovative product perspective, [NxTrend and Daly] are the two jewels in North America," Lynch said. "Yet they serve different sub-verticals in wholesale distribution. They don't see each other very often out in the marketplace."

Lynch said that both NxTrend and Daly will be combined into Agilisys' wholesale distribution group, and each will be referred to as "an Agilisys company."

There are no NxTrend location closings expected, Lynch said. As for possible job eliminations, he did concede that there might be "a little bit of redundancy" in some areas. Overall, Lynch said he thinks there will be little changed "because these are very profitable, growing businesses, so it's not like we bought companies that we have to do much to."

NxTrend is based in Colorado Springs, Colo., and serves customers in the electrical, building materials, industrial, plumbing/heating/air conditioning, paper and medical industries. Vice president of sales and marketing Joel Kremke described the sale as "an ideal scenario for us."

"It's a great deal for our customers, which is our primary concern," he said. "But it's also a great deal for our product strategy, and that was what our customers were most worried about. And that's vital to the health of our whole organization."

Kremke has seen competitors bought up in the last two years, he explained.

"There is a lot of consolidation going on in our market specifically," he said. "So I think people had a good idea that something like this could happen. We were owned since '96 by venture capitalists. So it was always in the back of everyone's heads that at some point there would be a financial event. The fact that it was with a company like Agilisys was a relief to everyone."

Lynch implied that Agilisys is not done buying other companies.

"We look at the industry as a whole. And to be honest, it's comprised of a lot of smaller software players with no clear leader," he explained. "So we see this whole market as ripe for consolidation. That's our strategy. I fully expect us to have additional announcements as we move through the year."