Advisors in EMC-Data Domain: a chorus and a solo

Posted by on July 31, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly It’s often said that there are three types of falsehoods: lies, damn lies and statistics. To that list, we might be tempted to add a fourth category: league tables. That’s in the front of our minds because we just put together our mid-2009 update to the rankings of the busiest tech banks. [...]

Credit Suisse tops mid-2009 league table

Posted by on July 30, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly In the midyear update to our league table, Credit Suisse Securities has emerged as the busiest adviser in tech M&A for the first two quarters of 2009. It was a dramatic rebound for Credit Suisse, which fell out of the top 10 in 2008 after ranking third in 2007. The bank owes [...]

IBM’s ‘Tuesday twofer’ still leaves it behind most years

Posted by on July 29, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly In a highly unusual move, IBM did the M&A equivalent of a ‘Tuesday twofer,’ buying both big and small yesterday. In terms of the high-dollar deal, Big Blue said it will hand over nearly $1.17bn in cash for predictive analytics software vendor SPSS. The purchase of SPSS is the company’s largest transaction [...]

Turning down the trade sale

Posted by on July 28, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly Since the Wall Street crisis erupted last fall, the M&A advice most companies have gotten has been not to sell unless they absolutely have to. That sentiment has quieted overall dealmaking activity, as well as pressured valuations across the board. It turns out that not even promising startups could escape the malaise. [...]

Barnes & Noble: buy and build (but slowly)

Posted by on July 27, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly Nearly six months after picking up a startup that developed an application for reading e-books, Barnes & Noble put some of that technology to work last week as it opened what it is calling the world’s largest electronic bookstore. In early March, Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise for $15.7m, which allows the [...]

Quiet close to Micro Focus-Borland after noisy process

Posted by on July 24, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly After more than two months of back-and-forth negotiations, Micro Focus is set to take home Borland Software. Shareholders in Borland approved the $113m deal on Wednesday and Micro Focus shareholders signed off on it on Friday. Originally announced on May 6, the acquisition is set to close early next week. Along the [...]

With Data Domain done, what’s next for NetApp?

Posted by on July 23, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly, Simon Robinson Data Domain was originally slated to report second-quarter earnings later this afternoon. Instead, the data de-duplication specialist is done as as an independent company, with the acquisition by EMC for the princely sum of $2.3bn closing today. The deal looks even ‘princelier’ when we consider the markdown M&A that we’ve [...]

Adknowledge inks super deal for social advertising dominance

Posted by on July 22, 2009

The serial shopper has picked up incentives-based online advertising vendor Super Rewards. We take a look at what this means for the two companies and the remaining independent startups.

A happy anniversary for Brocade-Foundry

Posted by on July 21, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly As far as Wall Street is concerned, nothing has really happened to Brocade Communications over the past year. Shares in the storage and networking vendor trade exactly where they did this time last July. And yet, there have been monumental changes at the company during that time. Exactly a year ago today, [...]

MathStar saga gets ‘curiouser and curiouser’

Posted by on July 20, 2009

With the clock ticking on a proposed buyout, the company opted for an acquisition of its own. We looked more closely at the deal and found a rather unusual link, one that has been kept quiet until now.

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