Flips and flops for PE shops

Posted by on May 31, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly There are flips that fly, and flips that flop. Consider the two recent exits by private-equity (PE)-owned companies Skype Technologies and Freescale Semiconductor. One deal basically quadrupled the price of the portfolio company, while the other company is still lingering at a value of less than half its original purchase price. Granted, [...]

Imperva impervious to consolidation

Posted by on May 26, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly The next exit for a database security vendor appears likely to be an IPO. Word is Imperva has picked Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank Securities to lead its offering, with a prospectus likely to be filed in the next few weeks. The Redwood City, California-based company is thought to be running at [...]

A tale of two e-discovery deals

Posted by on May 26, 2011

Contact: Nick Patience Last week was more or less bookended with two acquisitions in the e-discovery market, with Autonomy Corp picking up Iron Mountain’s digital assets on Monday and Symantec buying Clearwell Systems on Thursday. Autonomy and Symantec share a market but little else between them. Both are experienced acquirers – having made, collectively, 50 [...]

Citrix targets SMBs with Kaviza

Posted by on May 24, 2011

Contact: Ben Kolada Broadening its enterprise VDI portfolio to the SMB segment, Citrix has acquired Kaviza, a startup offering VDI-in-a-box technology to SMBs. The move follows an initial Citrix investment announced in April 2010, and brings Kaviza fully under its fold. Though Citrix already had an enterprise desktop virtualization product – XenDesktop – the company [...]

BeyondTrust buys beyond its core market

Posted by on May 23, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Announcing its first acquisition since the September 2009 combination that created the current company, BeyondTrust recently picked up the assets of Lumigent. The deal adds Lumigent’s database monitoring to BeyondTrust’s core privileged identity management platform, so the purchase is a fairly logical step into an adjacent market. Terms weren’t disclosed, but we [...]

Heading in and out at Vector

Posted by on May 20, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Some eight months after the opening bid for RAE Systems was announced, it looks like Vector Capital continues to have the inside track in taking private the maker of gas detection monitors. The San Francisco-based buyout firm earlier this week raised its offer for RAE Systems to $2 per share, or roughly [...]

Looking past the losses at Carbonite

Posted by on May 19, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Is Wall Street ready to buy into a company that spends $1 on advertising to bring in just $2 in bookings? That’s one of the key questions around Carbonite, a fast-growing online backup vendor that just filed for its IPO. (We looked at Carbonite’s planned offering in an in-depth report, including projecting [...]

Demandware to test demand in public market?

Posted by on May 18, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly After a pair of billion-dollar deals over the past half-year removed two old-line e-commerce vendors from the Nasdaq, an on-demand startup is rumored to be looking to replenish the ranks on the public market. Several sources have indicated that Demandware has picked underwriters and is set to file its IPO paperwork shortly, [...]

Updata secures a bargain from CA

Posted by on May 17, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly When CA Technologies ‘partnered’ with Indian outsourcing firm HCL Technologies to try to offload its security business in November 2007, we termed the move a ‘kind-of, sort-of’ divestiture that was unlikely to fit well with either party. Three and a half years later, the full divestiture is finally done: CA sold it [...]

Autonomy picks up piece of rock from Iron Mountain

Posted by on May 16, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly, Nick Patience Announcing its first acquisition in almost a year, Autonomy Corp has picked up Iron Mountain’s digital assets in a surprisingly rich purchase of a castoff business. Autonomy will pay $380m in cash for the units, which include backup and recovery, e-discovery and digital-archiving software. The transaction effectively unwinds Iron Mountain’s [...]

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