Thoma Bravo has agreed to acquire PROS, a prominent AI-powered pricing and revenue management software provider.
The all-cash deal is valued at approximately $1.4BN and is expected to close during the fourth quarter.
It is Thoma Bravo’s third acquisition in just a matter of weeks, following the roll-ups of Dayforce and Verint in late August.
Yet, PROS brings new capabilities to its portfolio, including CPQ (configure, price, quote), price optimization, and revenue intelligence solutions.
In announcing the deal, Jeff Cotten, President and CEO of PROS, stated that as a private company, “PROS will be more agile and have greater flexibility to invest in innovation and expand our platform.”
It will also gain the luxury of focusing on longer-term goals, like leading the emerging field of agentic intelligence and analytics, as it no longer has to manage for short-term quarterly results.
Nevertheless, what most excites Martin Schneider, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, is how PROs fits into the broader Thoma Bravo portfolio.
“Thoma Bravo continues to build out a sizable portfolio of applications providers outside of its previous concentration in cybersecurity,” he noted. “It will be interesting to see how well they can continue to drive momentum for PROS as a private equity-backed company.
“PROS has been making significant inroads in the hospitality and airline industries, but its recent investments in AI have made its pricing and CPQ offerings for B2B very compelling,” continued Schneider.
When we look at Thoma Bravo’s portfolio, they have the makings of a CPQ and revenue operations powerhouse, considering they are also the majority owners in Coupa and Conga software. How much the company wants to “mix and match” among its portfolio to create new offerings remains to be seen, but they have assembled quite a list of solid SaaS solutions for key elements of the go-to-market tech stack.
To Schneider’s point, alongside its cybersecurity heritage, Thoma Bravo is building quite the portfolio, in revenue operations, as he mentions, but also in customer engagement. In these spaces, other firms in the space are struggling to stand out. As such, its acquisition streak opens the door to some creative combinations.
The Creative Combinations in Thoma Bravo’s Portfolio
Consider Verint. Upon completion of that deal, the analytics software provider will merge with Calabrio, its workforce engagement management (WEM) rival, which Thoma Bravo owns.
But Aisera and Medallia are other obvious connections in the Thoma Bravo stable, as they compete with Verint in the conversational AI and voice of the customer (VoC) markets, respectively.
Thoma Bravo could also mix and match Verint in more intriguing ways. Take UserTesting, for example. Imagine blending Verint’s analytics with UserTesting’s real-time customer feedback and voice-of-customer insights, providing users with a full picture of the numbers and the narrative behind customer experiences, flowing straight into the contact center. Schneider’s colleague, Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, touted this possibility during a recent episode of CX Today’s Big News Show.
Now, layer in Hyland, another Thoma Bravo company, to bring enterprise content management, rich data capabilities, and digital asset management on tap. Nuxeo, Hyland’s content platform, adds commerce-enabled DAM (digital asset management), opening the way for personalized content and shoppable experiences in real time.
Piecing all that together under one brand name would take an enormous effort. Yet, Thoma Bravo is in a position to stitch together a unified customer engagement platform that bring together content, customer voice, video, AI, and live engagement all under one roof.
And with the recent PROS acquisition, Thoma Bravo adds pricing and sales optimization. That’s the kind of end-to-end ecosystem that could reshape how brands understand, engage, and sell to their customers.
