NAPA -- The Elypsis Winery suite of software to manage the making and selling of wine is back under Napa Valley ownership, less than a year after the quarter-century-old company that created it merged with a Danish software developer.
Napa-based WineDirect on Wednesday said it acquired the Elypsis software from Denmark-based Admiral IT, which merged with Elypsis on Oct. 1. The 15-employee Elypsis team will remain in downtown Napa until year-end then move to WineDirect's south Napa offices, according to a spokeswoman.
WineDirect has made key acquisitions in the past few years to become a provider of not only technology for selling wine directly to consumers and trade accounts via the Internet and phone but also the fulfillment services to get the wine there.
"Our vision is to offer wineries a unique 'one-stop-shop' for their Direct-to-Consumer technology needs, which in turn allows them to improve operational efficiency and customer service," said Joe Waechter, president and chief executive officer of WineDirect. "We offer customers a scalable and feature-rich DTC platform and confidence in knowing their e-commerce, POS, order fulfillment and ERP will continue to work seamlessly in the future."
In mid-2009 under its former name Inertia Beverage Group, the company acquired the assets of troubled North Coast direct-to-consumer fulfillment giant NewVine.
In 2010, WineDirect acquired Oakland-based Call For Wine, a telesales company started in 2004 and representing client wineries in sales of wine to consumers.
Call for Wine, which has 20 sales representatives in Oakland, added a second location in June of this year. Using space in WineDirect's Napa headquarters, Call for Wine based representatives there to support calls for 30 winery clients and has space there to double that support when necessary, according to a spokesman.
Among the stated goals of the Call for Wine expansion was to allow the representatives to be closer to client wineries for training on the brands being sold.
Also in June, WineDirect merged with Canada-based Vin65, a top developer of wine e-commerce and point-of-sale software.
The addition of Elypsis Winery software gives WineDirect enterprise resource planning, point-of-sale transactions and customer relationship management solutions that have been major players in the wine business since introduced in 2000. The modules allow management of online sales, finances, call centers and order fulfillment.
After the merger with Admiral IT, Elypsis founder Harvey Grant remained in the software developer's Napa office along with his sons, Jeremy Grant, head of ERP Solutions, and Ryan Grant, head of Retail Solutions.
"This is a great time to partner with an innovative company like WineDirect, with whom we share a vision for continuing to support our customers in their efforts to improve operations," said Harvey Grant. "We look forward to jointly helping wineries drive growth."
