And the Golden Tombstone goes to …

Posted by on December 23, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly We survey corporate development executives every year to get a sense of their shopping plans for the next 12 months. We’ll have a full report on the survey when we return from our holiday break in early January, but the headline finding is that two-thirds of the respondents expect the pace of [...]

The market and Meru

Posted by on December 22, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly Having watched at least three of its rivals get acquired in recent years, Meru Networks is now aiming for the other exit: a public offering. The WLAN equipment maker filed its IPO paperwork on Friday for an $86m offering to be led by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, with co-managers Robert W. [...]

Tech bankers: Business is back

Posted by on December 21, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly Every year, we survey our investment banking contacts to get a sense of what they anticipate for both their business and the overall technology M&A market in the coming year. The results this year seem to fully indicate that the recession that flattened business – and entire institutions – in 2009 will [...]

Kana: bidding while the cash burns

Posted by on December 18, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly The progression from spurned bidder to shareholder activist isn’t all that unusual. But it is unusual when the party smarting is a publicly traded company, and decides to express its agitation through press releases. Yet, that’s exactly how Chordiant Software is venting its frustration over not landing Kana Software, with Chordiant telling [...]

Sailing around the market with Cisco

Posted by on December 17, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly There are a lot of ways to chart the pickup in M&A activity over the course of 2009. In our recently published M&A Outlook, we cover a lot of the empirical indications, including the fact that spending on deals in the second half of 2009 is tracking 50% higher than in the [...]

Microsoft (officially) pals up with Opalis

Posted by on December 11, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly Two months after we first indicated that Microsoft was interested in Opalis Software, the software giant has indeed acquired the runbook automation (RBA) vendor. No terms were disclosed, but when we talked with sources in mid-October, the price being kicked around was $60m. Opalis was thought to be running at about $10m [...]

More businesses on the block at LexisNexis?

Posted by on December 10, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly When LexisNexis announced last month that it was selling off its HotDocs business, it got us thinking about other divestitures that the information provider may be contemplating. More specifically, we wonder if LexisNexis is considering reheating its effort to shed Applied Discovery. Not too long ago, we heard rumors that LexisNexis had [...]

Amex buys into the alternative online payments revolution

Posted by on December 9, 2009

The credit card giant’s acquisition of Revolution Money signals its desire for more of a presence in alternative online payments. We believe this is great news for an industry that to some extent is still struggling to gain relevance.

The wisdom of the crowds

Posted by on December 8, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly As pretty much the only buyers at the table right now, corporate development executives’ views go a long way toward shaping the overall outlook for tech M&A. So it seems a fitting time to survey these shoppers in order to get their expectations for deal flow in 2010. The views of the [...]

What a pair of startup sales tells us about the recession

Posted by on December 7, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly If there was any doubt that the M&A climate has warmed since the beginning of this year, consider the relative exits for a pair of database-monitoring startups. Back in February, when venture funding was hard to come by and wind-down sales were plentiful, Tizor Systems sold to Netezza for just $3m. Fast-forward [...]

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