The planned union between major Sage North America partners SWK Technologies and Information Systems Management(ISM) is temporarily on hold as both organizations work to solidify their respective year-end businesses and expect to resume merger conversations in the new year.

Jeffrey Roth

SWK, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SilverSun Technologies Inc. and recent NetSuite partner, signed a letter of intent in early October to acquire ISM, effectively solidifying a more national presence and adding more than $6 million in revenue.

SWK had anticipated the closing of the acquisition of ISM on or before January 1, 2013 and talks between the two firms had apparently been going smoothly, with organization charts being formed and strategic planning meetings taking place over the past month. Both parties however claimed they needed some additional time to focus on their individual businesses and intend to resume the process in 2013.

“[ISM chief executive] BJ O’Reilly and I have agreed to put the deal on hold for now. There are a few hurdles that we are unable to resolve within the timeframe that we had originally established,” said SWK president Jeffrey Roth. “With year-end so busy for both firms, we are deferring any forward movement on the transaction for now as we’re both very busy and it’s a difficult time to finalize things.”

Without going into much additional detail, O’Reilly also noted that while he does expect deal conversations to resume, his firm’s own business is currently taking priority.

“We’re still working together strategically, but we’re both running busy organizations and closing some big deals now and haven’t been able to devote the time we need to finalize things,” said O’Reilly. “We agreed to pick things back up, probably in January, and see what makes sense. We each announced to our teams that we are putting it on hold and focusing on our customers right now, the things that still need to be resolved aren’t going to be within the original time frame we set out so this is best for now.”

Both SWK and ISM are in the top 50 of the 2012 Accounting Today VAR 100 list, which reported $10.5 million and $6.75 million in gross revenues, respectively.