Google picks on the pipeline

Posted by on August 31, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly As if the IPO process wasn’t already hard enough, candidates looking to go public have found a new obstacle: Google. For the second time in less than a year, the search giant has swung its considerable market heft against a would-be public company – likely trimming hundreds of millions of dollars in [...]

Winners and losers in data warehousing

Posted by on August 30, 2010

Contact: Ben Kolada Just a month after Greenplum was swallowed by EMC for an estimated $400m, fellow data-warehousing startup Kickfire was sold for probably one one-hundreth of that amount to Teradata. Why did the two data-warehousing vendors – both venture-backed, Silicon Valley startups targeting the same market – see divergent outcomes? The answer to that [...]

A hoarse auctioneer for 3PAR?

Posted by on August 27, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly The back-and-forth bidding for 3PAR moved higher again Friday, as the counteroffer to the counteroffer pushed the value of the high-end data storage vendor to $2bn. In the latest move, Hewlett-Packard lobbed a bid of $30 for each share of 3PAR, topping its offer from Thursday of $27 per share that had [...]

A clear return and ‘cloudy’ outlook for Tripwire’s only deal

Posted by on August 26, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Exactly a year ago, Tripwire made its first and only acquisition in its 14-year history, picking up the assets of Activeworx. The tiny startup added log management technology to Tripwire, an IT configuration and compliance vendor. The deal itself, which only set Tripwire back about $3m, was a fittingly quiet purchase of [...]

Why wouldn’t HP jump the McAfee bid instead?

Posted by on August 25, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly If we had to guess about Hewlett-Packard making an uncharacteristic move and jumping an announced transaction, we would have thought the company would go after McAfee rather than 3PAR. After all, HP has a giant hole in its security portfolio (we might describe it as a ‘McAfee-sized’ hole), while it’s already pretty [...]

Arms race M&A in application security

Posted by on August 24, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly If IBM and Hewlett-Packard basically matched each other’s deal size in the first round of M&A for application security, HP has gone much bigger than Big Blue in the second round. In fact, we gather that the price tag for HP’s recent purchase of Fortify Software is more than 10 times larger [...]

There’s only one 3PAR

Posted by on August 23, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Let’s see, where have we heard this before? A storage company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue finds itself in a billion-dollar bidding war between two tech giants, advised in the process by high-end boutique Qatalyst Partners. Last summer, scarcity value drove the price of Data Domain; today it’s 3PAR. [...]

‘You bought what? For how much?’

Posted by on August 20, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly In both of the largest enterprise IT acquisitions so far this year, the deals are not what they seem. Or more accurately, the target companies were not acquired for what they are. What do we mean? Well, we would posit that Intel didn’t buy McAfee for its core security applications any more [...]

Intel ‘inside’ of largest security acquisition

Posted by on August 19, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly The largest stand-alone security company is no longer standing on its own. McAfee agreed Thursday to a $7.7bn all-cash offer from Intel. The bid of $48 for each share represents a 60% premium over the security vendor’s previous closing price – and the highest price for its shares since early 1999. Intel’s [...]

PE firm Marlin buys BIOS provider Phoenix Technologies

Posted by on August 18, 2010

Contact: John Abbott Perhaps it was inevitable. Following the firing of CEO Woody Hobbs earlier this year and the subsequent divestment of three noncore businesses, BIOS maker Phoenix Technologies has itself been acquired. Los Angeles-based private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners offered $3.85 per share, giving the proposed deal an equity value of $139m. (Phoenix [...]

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