After a short struggle, ACI has managed to acquire S1. In a big turn of events, starting from the S1-Fundtech merger proposal to today's (3/10) press release, ACI has finally achieved their objective.
This acquisition creates a true payments software giant. Not that ACI wasn't the market leader before; but with this acquisition the new ACI will have the vast majority of the market with all other competitors coming a very distant second.
How does this translate for ACI and S1 customers, both existing and prospect ones? No way to tell at this point. It all depends upon the strategy that ACI will follow in the next few months. Will Base24.EPS be favored instead of S1's Postilion? Or will ACI keep both offerings...for now? Despite the original ACI position, Base24.EPS and Postilion have much more in common than not and it might not make sense to keep both products alive.
This situation certainly is familiar to people that remember what happened to Open/2. Postilion, though, had more traction than S2's Open/2 and ON/2 combination and there are a lot more customers that have chosen Postilion during the last two or three years. I would expect that there are a lot of nervous customers around, wondering how this situation will play out.
