Today, global Vendor Management System (VMS) Beeline announced that is has partnered with New York-based investment firm New Mountain Capital. Beeline now follows up a major merger with another significant market event less than two years later. New Mountain Capital will now provide Beeline with substantial resources and financing to continue honing its already innovative set of solutions that help global businesses manage not only the complexities and growth of the non-employee workforce, but also the roadmap to the Future of Work.
By partnering with a growth-oriented investment firm, Beeline will surely be able to expand upon the visions laid out during its most recent user conference. This included Beeline One, the provider’s new unified interface that is essentially the culmination of over a year of work on the “Horizon” project. Horizon is the company’s micro-services approach towards unifying all of the software architecture (artificial intelligence, data, core services, etc.) that runs Beeline’s wide range of functionality, including both the Beeline VMS and IQNavigator VMS platforms. (Be sure to check out our conversation with Beeline SVP of Strategy, Colleen Tiner, about Beeline One).
“We are thrilled about to announce our partnership with New Mountain and about what it means for our clients, partners, and employees,” said Doug Leeby, CEO of Beeline. “New Mountain knows our market well and will be an ideal owner as we grow our business and accelerate our technological and service-related advancements.”
With more significant resources at its disposal, Beeline will also be enabled with the ability to build on various functionality and projects that will actively help its customers thrive in a new world of work. As innovations such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, and other Future of Work-era technologies begin to impact how work is done, Beeline will have additional financial and R&D means to address how not only these new innovations are integrated into the VMS platform, but, ultimately, how they are implemented within their customers’ contingent workforce management (CWM) programs.
“As a long-tenured member of the Beeline team this announcement makes me so happy as it validates the work we’ve done on behalf of our clients and partners since our inception,” said Brian Hoffmeyer, SVP of Market Strategies for Beeline. “We’re passionate about helping our clients manage their entire global contingent workforces and New Mountain will give us even more tools to do just that!”
According to sources, there will be no change to the Beeline executive team or the rest of the organization. While exact terms of the deal were not disclosed, the deal is expected to close sometime next month.
Other thoughts of note:
- Although it will take some time for the immediate ramifications to settle, it will be interesting to see how Beeline tackles its product roadmap in 2019. During its 2018 user conference, the solution discussed (albeit briefly) “Beeline Graph,” an AI-enabled solution (still in development) that tackles the transformation of job descriptions. Could additional resources spark more R&D power into Graph and Beeline Assistant, and possible other AI-led ventures?
- It could be worthwhile for Beeline to use this event as a springboard for expanding its partner ecosystem. As the Future of Work takes hold, additional platforms and solutions will be required to optimize how work is done, and, beyond online staffing platforms, human capital technology, compliance/risk, and Managed Service Providers, could Beeline look for other innovative providers to sweeten its product set?
- On a similar note, the next big leap for today’s CWM solutions is to increase its overall computing power to support next-generation innovations. As VMS technology moves further into the realm of “enterprise software,” it will need a more robust back-end to account for exciting new integrations, as well as the necessary flexibility to support more “pure” AI-led solutions that function in near-real-time. This acquisition could allow Beeline to pour more resources into improving the overall “power” of its platform, enabling it to have the breadth of more traditional enterprise technology, such as ERP and CRM.
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