The Houses of Morgan are in demand for on-demand work

Posted by on December 8, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly It turns out that the advisers for the largest-ever SaaS acquisition are also the busiest in terms of restocking the ranks of publicly traded subscription-based software companies. J.P. Morgan Securities, which banked SAP, and Morgan Stanley, which advised SuccessFactors, are upper left on the prospectuses of no fewer than five SaaS vendors [...]

SuccessFactors works the other side of the deal

Posted by on December 6, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly In one of the quickest M&A turnarounds, SuccessFactors has gone from a seller to a buyer in just a matter of days. The human capital management (HCM) vendor announced over the weekend that it would be selling itself to SAP for $3.4bn in cash, the largest-ever SaaS deal. The ink was hardly [...]

SAP looks to SuccessFactors for success in the cloud

Posted by on December 5, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly After struggling for years to build its own on-demand offering, SAP plans to buy its way into cloud-based software, handing over $3.65bn for SuccessFactors in what would be the largest-ever SaaS acquisition. The deal combines the largest ERP vendor, which has some 500 million users, with the fast-growing human capital management (HCM) [...]

J2: from a fax machine to an M&A machine

Posted by on November 3, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly In reporting third-quarter financial results after Wednesday’s closing bell, j2 Global Communications not only posted record revenue and cash-flow levels but also highlighted the returns it has generated in its recent M&A spree. And the communication services provider, which has some $162m in cash and short-term investments in its treasury, hinted that [...]

RightNow: A seller rather than a buyer

Posted by on October 25, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Ever since it raised $175m in a convertible debt offering last November, RightNow Technologies has been telling anyone who would listen that it intended to go shopping with some of that money. The move more than doubled the amount of cash on hand for the customer service automation vendor. And since RightNow [...]

Oracle buys big, again

Posted by on October 24, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Announcing its third deal in just the past month, Oracle said Monday that it will pay about $1.5bn for customer service software provider RightNow Technologies. The purchase brings the acquisitive software giant even closer into competition with salesforce.com, which has also used M&A to expand its customer service offering. However, true to [...]

Oracle’s unlikely acquisition

Posted by on October 11, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly After spending last week with its customers and partners at its annual trade show, Oracle will be meeting later this week with its owners. The company’s annual shareholder meeting is slated for Wednesday. If the talk at OpenWorld is any indication, the question of M&A is almost certain to come up during [...]

Keynote adds to its mobile monitoring business

Posted by on October 10, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Moving to bolster its enterprise mobile monitoring portfolio, Keynote Systems said Monday that it will hand over $60m in cash for testing and quality assurance (QA) startup DeviceAnywhere. (Additionally, terms provide for a potential $30m earnout over the next two years, although Keynote indicated that any payments would likely be back-end loaded.) [...]

A renaissance of PE interest in Renaissance

Posted by on September 29, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly In 2010, PLATO Learning went private in a relatively straightforward process that took just two months from Thoma Bravo’s announcement of the leveraged buyout (LBO) of the online education vendor to the close of it. Now, privately held PLATO is drawing out – and making more expensive – the LBO of fellow [...]

SaaS giant salesforce.com thinks small

Posted by on September 22, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Just several months after putting money into Assistly in its second round of funding, salesforce.com decided Wednesday to pick up the whole startup for $50m. The purchase should help the SaaS giant extend its customer service offering, Service Cloud, to small businesses. Founded in 2009, Assistly had drawn in more than 1,000 [...]

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