Soutron Global
, a company that specializes in technology products and services for corporate, law, and other special libraries, entered into a new business arrangement. This transaction combined two related companies, Soutron Limited, based in the United Kingdom and Soutron Global, based in the United States. Bloom Equity Partners gains majority ownership of the company through a new investment. Soutron Global founder Tony Saadat will hold a minority ownership stake in the combined company which he will lead as Chief Executive Officer
(see Jan 2022 press release).
The two companies were previously wholly owned by their respective founders, Graham Beastall and Tony Saadat.
Through this transaction, Soutron, Ltd. will no longer exist as a separate company and will be merged into a new company doing business as Soutron Global, Inc. Graham Beastall, the founder and Managing Director of Soutron Ltd., will retire and leave the company with his ownership acquired by Bloom Equity Partners.
The new company will be headquartered in San Diego, CA with its operations for Europe and the United Kingdom continuing through its London offices. The merger of the two companies will not disrupt sales, support, or development activities.
This merger culminates a longstanding plan to bring the two companies together, according to Tony Saadat. Capital from the new investment by Bloom Equity Partners will accelerate growth and provide resources to expand the company. Soutron Global has already begun to add new employees.
Soutron formed a partnership with HuXam as a distributor for its products in the Benelux region of Europe. (26123) This partnership continues under the new corporate structure.
Soutron Background
Soutron, Ltd was founded by Beastall in 1989. The company initially provided support services for the products of the Sydney Development Corporation. In 1991 Soutron, Ltd. became the distributor for Inmagic in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Soutron Ltd. has a long history of providing technology products for corporate and other special libraries in Europe, based on a succession of partnerships, technologies, and products. Over the course of the company history, Soutron, Ltd. evolved from providing services and support for products licensed from other vendors to creating its own products.
Soutron Global was founded in January 2012 by Tony Saadat to market and support the products developed by Soutron, Ltd in the United States and Canada. Saadat has previously held executive positions with EOS International, now part of SirsiDynix, and SydneyPLUS, now operating as Lucidea.
Graham Partridge has led product development for Soutron since he joined Soutron Ltd. in 2007 as the Director for Research and Development. Partridge has been appointed to the role of Vice President Research and Development for Soutron Global.
See also: Soutron Global: New Competition in Special Library Automation SLN Apr 2012).
Product suite
Soutron Global offers a variety of products in support of corporate information centers, law firms, and other types of special libraries and archives. The Soutron ILS is the company's flagship product. Additional complementary products include a Soutron Archive, the Soutron Digital Media Archive, software for records management, and the Soutron Discovery platform.
More recently introduced products include enquiry management and document summarizer tools based on artificial intelligence technologies. Soutron introduced Ask Soutron in June 2020 as a service that organizations can implement in support of questions and requests from their customers based on natural language processing and cognitive intelligence.
Soutron specializes in providing its products via software-as-a-service, with ninety percent of its clients subscribing to its cloud hosting services.
Competitive Environment
Soutron Global competes in the special libraries sector. Most of its clients are corporations, law firms, or healthcare organizations. This niche has very little overlap with the products used by public, academic, and school libraries.
The special library sector has seen considerable impact through the widespread mergers and acquisitions. As corporations merge, the number of libraries and information centers has declined. Many of these information centers provide research services, information resources, and other services for globally distributed companies. For companies like Soutron Global, the pool of potential clients has shrunk over time, but their requirements for technology products to support their work has become more complex. The model of traditional library management systems has been transformed into knowledge management applications.
A main competitor for Soutron Global is
Lucidea, a consolidated company that has acquired about a dozen companies offering products for law firm and corporate libraries. SydneyPLUS was the original company, which acquired Inmagic, Eloquent Systems, Cuadra Associates that were mainstays in the special library sector as well as others specializing in technologies for law firms, such as LookUp Precision, Law Port, Insite Software, and Questor Systems. SydneyPLUS started doing business as Lucidea in 2013. Lucidea is owned by Ron Aspe, its CEO and founder.
The EOS.Web product acquired by SirsiDynix in 2014 also competes in the corporate library sector, though it is more of a traditional ILS product oriented to smaller organizations.
