Partner Interview
Published March 6, 2026
Constellation Software: Trapeze & Transportation Software Customer Stickiness
inpractise.com/articles/modaxo-building-a-global-transportation-software-portfolio
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Disclaimer: This interview is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. In Practise is an independent publisher and all opinions expressed by guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of In Practise.
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Starting on the actual software that's within Modaxo and the other transportation businesses, could you describe that a little bit? What sort of functionalities are the ones that are most important and the ones that you're covering across most of the portfolio for clients? I'm sure it's a variety of things.
In Trapeze, we had six product areas that we serviced for transportation verticals. The first was route planning. In Modaxo we were almost exclusively public sector; we served cities that ran transit agencies. In Europe and South America, transit is privatized, but they are all transit or transport organizations. One area is scheduling and planning the routes. The other was managing the workforce, essentially ERP for transport organizations. All drivers are unionized or represented, so there are many work rules to manage: scheduling the drivers, scheduling the employees, paying the employees, and the HR system for the employees. What made it different from normal HR systems, payroll systems, or employee scheduling was that you had many work rules for a represented workforce. Having those work rules built into the application was our advantage.
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How much churn is there, and why would the customers generally switch providers? Or is it just an upfront decision?
For us, in our modeling and forecasting, our churn was 18 years. We planned that customers would change systems every 18 years, which is quite long. We did not have a lot of churn; our companies and almost every company we acquired had sub-2% attrition, so very low churn. The switching costs are very high, particularly in the enterprise, because you are dealing with a transit agency that will have several thousand drivers and another several thousand employees. All of them have to be retrained on a new application. It is a costly undertaking, even on the technical side, to move and convert the data into a new system and rebuild all your integrations. There are a lot of factors that lead to very high switching costs. Again, 18 years is what we used in our planning because we just didn't see a lot of churn.
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