CCH Buys SpeedTax

CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business, has acquired cloud-based sales tax automation service provider SpeedTax, allowing it to continues its expansion in the corporate market—particularly small  to medium sized enterprises and CPA firms that serve them that are looking for a pure SaaS offering.

CCH had been seeing growing demand for a SaaS offering from SMEs and found that SpeedTax could immediately meet those needs, as well as future demand, according to CCH president and chief executive Mike Sabbatis.

“A couple months ago, we reorganized and focused more on the corporate space, and this [acquisition] is a good indication of where we want to go in the corporate space,” said Sabbatis. “It’s a technology that will help take some of our older technologies into the future. A lot of companies are trying to take premise-based systems to force-fit their applications into the cloud. SpeedTax started in the cloud and understood the data center side, and the commerce side, and now enables us to take that and extend it for our own products and services.”

Sabbatis also realized that CCH competed somewhat with SpeedTax, particularly with its own hosted offerings, including its CorpSystem Sales Tax Online and Sales Tax Office, which he sees as more “large enterprise focused,” whereas SpeedTax will help CCH reach more of the SME market.

While specific details of the deal were not revealed, Sabbatis did mention that CCH was “bringing a number of core employees over,” and that they will merge in with corporate business unit.

From SpeedTax’s point of view, the CCH buy will enable the company to continue to grow its products and services in a way that it was not previously able to do without “proper funding,” according to SpeedTax CEO Anton Donde.

“I honestly believe that over the last couple of years we had the best SaaS product in our space, but the frustration was we hadn’t had the financial strength to leverage that in the market, CCH brings that as well as context and credibility. The combination is going to be incredible,” said Donde. “I had met with most of our competitors and had various conversations, but one company I got close to was CCH so this did evolve somewhat naturally. We both realized after talking for a while it was a really good fit.”

Donde declined to reveal specific details of his plans and deferred to Sabbatis’s comments on the future of his staff. SpeedTax has 15 employees in its Laguna Hills, Calif., office.  SpeedTax was founded in 2007 by Donde and CIO Morris Karolicki.

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