Francisco Partners finalize acquisition of Kewill

   Francisco Partners, a technology-focused private equity firm, has completed the acquisition of Kewill, a global trade and logistics software provider, marking Francisco’s sixth such purchase in Europe since 2009.
   “We see a significant opportunity for Kewill as long-term growth and increasing complexity in the trade and transportation of goods drives the need for comprehensive software solutions,” said Deep Shah, a partner for Francisco Partners. “Kewill has a robust product portfolio and an impressive client list.”
   Kewill currently operates in eight countries and provides software around customs, forwarding, transportation, logistics, e-commerce, and business-to-business integration solutions. The company recently finished a rigorous program around scalability and performance testing of its global freight forwarding service, Kewill Forwarding, in order to demonstrate the software’s ability to scale with demand.
  The tests were designed to demonstrate that Kewill Forwarding can facilitate a large numbers of users in real-world deployment scenarios that include integration with in-house and vendor systems. The tests were done at the IBM Innovation Centre at Hursley, U.K., IBM’s largest such facility, which lets partners test applications on provided hardware and software.
   Proving such scalability helps software companies gather information around their operations as well as giving them experience they can bring to clients. The tests covered modes and multi-currency and multi-lingual options. Kewill Forwarding uses a single database for its operations and the company said tests showed the single database allows it to support global operations without hiccups around synchronization or performance at peak times.