Epicor Software intends to promote its newly acquired Progressive Solutions Inc. (PSI) software for building material dealers and mills as vigorously as its existing Catalyst and Eagle systems, Epicor's senior vice president for marketing said today.

Steve Biesczat revealed Epicor's plans in an interview with ProSales one day after Epicor completed its acquisition of Solarsoft Business Systems, which had bought PSI in June and thus brought the maker of the bisTrack (for dealers) and lumberTrack (for manufacturers) systems into the Epicor fold. "They'll have all the products in their bag--Catalyst, bisTrack, and Eagle," Bieszczat said of Epicor's newly merged LBM sales team. "They'll be able to sell Eagle to the smaller operations and Catalyst and bisTrack to the larger operations."

Fears had arisen that Epicor's purchase was largely about buying an audience, but Bieszczat stressed that PSI's products were attractive because they're based on Microsoft systems while Epicor's software used Linux coding.

"Part of the rationale for the acquisition is that there were a lot of people who liked the bisTrack product and a lot of that reason was centered on its 'Microsoftness,'" Bieszczat said, coining a word. "We wanted to offer that choice."

It took just four weeks for Epicor's acquisition of Solarsoft to be completed. While Epicor officials declined to speak publicly during that period, Bieszczat said today that Epicor was busy during the quiet period integrating PSI's roughly 120 staffers--many of them based in British Columbia--into their new company. For instance, PSI sales staff attended Epicor's sales meeting in Las Vegas this week, and Bieszczat said PSI's sales team "will be the dominant head count" in Epicor's LBM sales operation.

Bieszczat also said Epicor will continue to support older legacy products, such as Dimension and V2. In the future, it will encourage--but not force, he stressed--companies on those systems to move to some of Epicor's newer products. He added that Epicor also is "still actively developing" ECS Pro software and "think of it as a go-forward product."