Third-quarter M&A: Forget the headlines

Posted by on September 30, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly To get an accurate read on M&A this summer, you have to look past the headlines. Undeniably, there were a few high-profile deals, including the sale of McAfee in the largest deal ever in the security industry, as well as a high-profile bidding war that pushed 3PAR’s valuation into the double digits. [...]

HCM deal flow nears high-water mark

Posted by on September 29, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Dealmaking in the human capital management (HCM) market has surged in recent months, pushing spending to near-record levels. So far this year, we’ve tallied 36 HCM transactions, with an aggregate value of $1.9bn. That basically matches the high-water mark of $2.1bn in the sector set during the first three quarters of 2007. [...]

salesforce.com patches a hole in its Service Cloud

Posted by on September 28, 2010

Contact: China Martens For some time, we’ve been expecting salesforce.com to make a second purchase in the service automation space. It’s a market the SaaS CRM and development platform player took a major step into back in early 2009 following its $31.5m purchase of French knowledge base provider InStranet in August 2008. It now appears [...]

PAETEC’s risky business

Posted by on September 27, 2010

Contact: Ben Kolada As the communications industry continues to consolidate and the pool of desirable targets dries up, the remaining buyers appear to be stretching a bit in their M&A moves. But even within that, PAETEC’s recent pickup of Cavalier Telephone looks to us like the riskiest telecom acquisition we’ve seen in the past year. [...]

Valuations separated by more than the Atlantic

Posted by on September 24, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Comparing the valuations of US tech companies with their European counterparts, we can’t help but notice the fact that the recovery hasn’t been enjoyed equally on both sides of the Atlantic. We noted a few months ago that the strong US dollar had opened the way for some opportunistic shopping on the [...]

OpenTable booking seats at negotiating table in Europe

Posted by on September 23, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Often when a company takes its business to a foreign country, something gets lost in translation. EBay found that as it looked to expand its online auctions internationally, and on a smaller scale, OpenTable ran into some of that as well. Roughly two years ago, the San Francisco-based online restaurant reservation service [...]

IBM and HP bag big game on M&A safari

Posted by on September 22, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly With the news today that Hewlett-Packard is closing its recent pickup of Fortify Software, we wanted to take the opportunity to point out that the deal almost belongs in the minority of M&A moves HP has made so far this year. What are we talking about? Basically, that the tech giant has [...]

A bit of Big Blue inconsistency

Posted by on September 21, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Perhaps Mark Hurd feels vindicated. No, we’re not referring to the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive settling a lawsuit with his old shop. Instead, we’re talking about IBM’s stunning flip-flop with regard to high-profile M&A by itself and rival HP. At the least, Big Blue’s recent comments now appear inconsistent; at the worst, [...]

A Big Blue move into the data warehousing market

Posted by on September 20, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly A little more than three years after Netezza debuted on the NYSE, the data-warehousing vendor is being erased from the Big Board at basically twice its valuation at the time of its IPO. Under terms, IBM is handing over $27 in cash for each share of Netezza, which went public at $12 [...]

Any deals to be done in open source content management market?

Posted by on September 17, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly, Kathleen Reidy Following a massive wave of consolidation that swept through the enterprise content management (ECM) market, the list of significant vendors has basically narrowed to a handful of tech giants. Essentially, it’s just one stand-alone ECM provider with other software companies offering ECM as part of their broader portfolio. All of [...]

keep looking »