3Leaf ends up at Huawei – but will it be staying there?

Posted by on November 30, 2010

Contact: John Abbott Six months ago, I/O virtualization startup 3Leaf Systems disappeared from our radar screens. A little digging around more recently revealed that key staff members had scattered. VP of marketing Shahin Kahn was now at ORION Marketing Group, a consulting firm, with other ex-Sun Microsystems colleagues. CEO B.V. Jagadeesh had turned up as [...]

SAP’s ‘dilutive’ deal and larger M&A implications

Posted by on November 29, 2010

by Brenon Daly, China Martens The jury’s decision to order SAP to pay $1.3bn to Oracle for stealing software and support material stands as the largest award for the theft of IP in the software industry. (As one banker deadpanned: “I think the TomorrowNow acquisition is dilutive.”) But the implications of the three-week trial extend [...]

A severe case of buyer’s remorse for SAP

Posted by on November 24, 2010

Contact: China Martens Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Would SAP still have gone ahead with the $10m January 2005 purchase of fledgling third-party apps support player TomorrowNow (TN) had it had any inkling then of the financial cost more than five years later (a $1.3bn payout to Oracle and a ton of legal fees), as [...]

Buyouts are back

Posted by on November 23, 2010

Contact:  Brenon Daly The pending take-private of Novell underscores just how much private equity (PE) activity has rebounded since the Credit Crisis nearly shut down tech buyouts. The $2.2bn purchase of infrastructure software and SUSE Linux vendor Novell stands as the seventh PE tech deal so far this year valued at more than $1bn. That’s [...]

Not pretty, but it’s done at Novell

Posted by on November 22, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly After holding out for more than eight months, Novell finally accepted on Monday a $2.2bn buyout offer from private equity-backed Attachmate. From the outside, it looks like a case where the buyer – or maybe more accurately, the hedge fund that put the company in play – simply wore down Novell. Under [...]

Ariba ‘mines’ for its latest deal

Posted by on November 19, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly After three years out of the market, Ariba returned to M&A on Thursday with the $150m purchase of Quadrem. Both the current deal and the previous one help bolster the supply-chain vendor’s offering in new markets. In the case of Procuri, which was acquired in September 2007, Ariba picked up a company [...]

Exits lead up and down for General Catalyst

Posted by on November 18, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Talk about a mixed pair of exits. Venture firm General Catalyst Partners is faced with an unusual situation of the sale of one portfolio company almost undoubtedly slashing the valuation of another portfolio company that just filed for an IPO. The trade sale could even derail the offering, although that’s probably not [...]

Trapeze’s long road to an obvious home

Posted by on November 17, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Two and a half years after a head-scratching sale to an unexpected buyer, Trapeze Networks has finally landed where it pretty much should have gone in the first place: Juniper Networks. The networking giant said Tuesday that it will hand over $152m in cash for the WLAN gear maker, with the deal [...]

Blue-sky thinking on a bidding war for Isilon

Posted by on November 16, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Based on the two previous multibillion-dollar deals in the storage industry, we should be bracing for a bidding war around Isilon Systems. Recall that Data Domain last year and 3PAR this summer each attracted after-the-fact suitors that drove up the price on both by more than a few dollars. But in the [...]

Isilon and 3PAR: strikingly similar storage sales

Posted by on November 15, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly EMC’s planned purchase of Isilon Systems comes as the second storage acquisition valued at more than $2bn in just three months. In fact, it lines up rather closely on a number of fronts with the other recent big-ticket storage deal, Hewlett-Packard’s pickup of 3PAR. For starters, the adviser. Qatalyst Partners got sole [...]

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