Second time’s a charm for I-many?

Posted by on April 30, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly As it reported its first profit since going public in 2000, I-many also said Wednesday that it will be going private in a $36m buyout by LLR Partners. The Philadelphia-based buyout shop – led by Greg Case, who joined LLR from Apax Partners last fall – offered 43 cents for each share [...]

Sales of tech assets are on the rise

Posted by on April 30, 2009

They have hit record levels as firms divest and venture investors hold back on additional funds for their portfolio companies. About one out of every three deals so far this year has been an asset sale – twice the level seen in the same period last year.

Going it alone can be expensive

Posted by on April 28, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly, Henry Baltazar Wall Street hasn’t been particularly supportive of tech companies that turn down unsolicited offers and opt to go it alone. Shares in a number of the targeted firms are currently changing hands at less than half the level that the would-be suitors were willing to pay for them. To wit: [...]

A bid and a raise for SumTotal

Posted by on April 27, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly The sum total of all interested parties in SumTotal Systems may well be greater than the two that have already disclosed themselves. At least that’s the thinking among investors – or rather, speculators – in the learning management software vendor. Recall that earlier this month, Vista Equity Partners tossed the struggling company [...]

‘Animal spirits’ stir M&A market

Posted by on April 24, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly The M&A market is back. OK, not really. But looking at this week’s deal flow, one could forget that spending on acquisitions plummeted 85% in the first three months of the year. (We recently noted that Q1 2009 was the first time since we began tracking tech M&A in January 2002 that [...]

Credit Suisse: Leaping up the league table

Posted by on April 23, 2009

by Brenon Daly While most of the focus of Oracle’s mammoth purchase of Sun Microsystems has been on the impact on the tech landscape, we’d like to note that the pending transaction is also likely to radically reshape another market: tech banking. True to form, Oracle didn’t use an outside adviser, while Sun tapped George [...]

Where might Omniture shop next?

Posted by on April 22, 2009

After buying up its major rivals, there are few traditional web analytics companies left for the vendor to pursue. Nonetheless, with plenty of cash to buy and an aggressive stance on M&A, we wonder where it could shop next.

A somewhat secure M&A market

Posted by on April 21, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly With RSA set to open later this week, we thought we’d take a look back on deal flow since the trade show closed last year. Over the past year, we’ve seen some 83 acquisitions of security companies, with total spending of about $4.2bn. While that’s down from the comparable year-earlier period (April [...]

Oracle-Sun: a system on the cheap

Posted by on April 20, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly Oracle’s big step into the hardware market comes at a relatively small price. In buying Sun Microsystems, Oracle is paying just one-tenth the valuation that it paid in its other multibillion-dollar acquisitions. The difference: the other purchases added software vendors with increasing sales and solid profitability, while Sun provides neither of those. [...]

Symantec goes box shopping?

Posted by on April 17, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly After holding off for some time, Websense finally rolled out its first secure Web gateway appliance earlier this month. Now we’re hearing that another major security vendor is about to get into the box business. Only this time, it’ll be through acquisition, rather than internal development like it was at Websense. Several [...]

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