Double-door exits

Posted by on April 30, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly When companies look for an exit, there is usually door number one (IPO) or door number two (trade sale). But in some rare cases, it’s not either/or, it’s both. That’s playing out in two very different ways around Symantec’s acquisition of encryption vendor PGP. The purchase by Big Yellow was the first [...]

Palm’s down

Posted by on April 29, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Just two weeks ago, we wrote that we thought Palm Inc would be a tough sell because the cash-burning smartphone pioneer seemed mired in irrelevance, both to consumers and developers. OK, so we were a bit off on that. The company apparently appeared relevant enough to Hewlett-Packard for the tech giant to [...]

Tangoe lines up for IPO dance

Posted by on April 28, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Back in January 2009, Tangoe made a small acquisition on its way to what we expected would be an IPO. Of course, neither the telecom expense management (TEM) vendor nor any other company was going to make it public in the first few months of last year. But with the recovery in [...]

Aftershocks on the tech M&A banking landscape

Posted by on April 27, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly In our report on the 2009 league table, we noted that Wall Street had been rocked by an earthquake in 2008 but that the smaller aftershocks were continuing to ripple across the tech banking landscape. Another one of those was felt Monday, when Thomas Weisel Partners agreed to sell itself to a [...]

A new jersey for Thomas Weisel

Posted by on April 26, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly As a former national cycling champion, Thomas Weisel undoubtedly knows there are races where you can break away from the pack and stick a winning move all the way to the line. And then there are races where no matter how hard you try to turn the pedals, the peloton just swallows [...]

CenturyLink continues to consolidate

Posted by on April 23, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Just a year and a half after a multibillion-dollar consolidation move, CenturyLink was back at it on Thursday with another one twice the size. The telecom service provider announced that it is picking up Qwest Communications in a deal valued at $22.4bn ($10.6bn in equity plus the assumption of $11.8bn in net [...]

salesforce.com puts together pieces on Jigsaw

Posted by on April 23, 2010

by Brenon Daly Just three months after salesforce.com raised $575m in a convertible note offering, the CRM vendor is dipping into its treasury for the largest deal in its history. The $142m purchase price for Jigsaw Data is more money than salesforce.com spent, collectively, on its previous seven acquisitions. (Add to that, there’s a potential [...]

PE: which door is marked ‘exit’?

Posted by on April 21, 2010

by Brenon Daly, Jason Schafer After chalking up some 17 purchases under the ownership of a private equity (PE) consortium, ViaWest has been bought by another PE firm. Oak Hill Capital Partners will pick up the 11-year-old managed hosting provider, which currently operates 16 datacenters and counts 1,000 customers. Although financial details of the transaction [...]

Oracle: two deals, but more than a year apart

Posted by on April 20, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Exactly a year ago today, Oracle announced its unexpected $7.4bn acquisition of Sun Microsystems. If it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, that’s because it really wasn’t. Final approval for the deal dragged on for nine full months, largely because of scrutiny by the European Commission of Oracle owning Sun’s [...]

Disconnected at Palm

Posted by on April 19, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly, Chris Hazelton Palm Inc has lost a key set of hands. In an SEC filing Friday, the troubled company said that the head of its software and services, Michael Abbott, will be cleaning out his desk by the end of this week. (No word yet if he’ll also have to give back [...]

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