And the Golden Tombstone goes to …

Posted by on December 23, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly It’s time to once again hand out our annual award for Tech Deal of the Year, as voted by corporate development executives in our recent survey. For the second straight year, the voting came down to a tight race between two transactions. For 2011, Google’s planned purchase of Motorola Mobility just edged [...]

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 [...]

SuccessFactors pays a peak price for Plateau

Posted by on April 27, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Plateau Systems certainly got a peak price from SuccessFactors. At $290m, the cash-and-stock acquisition is the largest purchase of a privately held human capital management (HCM) vendor. In fact, the pending purchase of Plateau is larger than a half-dozen acquisitions of public HCM companies we have recorded in recent years. Similarly, the [...]

Echoes of Oracle in Infor’s reach for Lawson

Posted by on April 26, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Now that Lawson Software has agreed to a sale to Infor Global Solutions, it’s perhaps worth speculating about just how much Charles Philips learned about the art of M&A during his previous job. Philips, of course, currently serves as CEO of Infor after seven years at Oracle, which has a reputation as [...]

Multiples match on Lawson and Epicor

Posted by on April 6, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly If nothing else, we now know the clearing price for ‘vintage’ ERP companies. (Or more accurately said, we know the proposed clearing price.) That’s at least one conclusion we can draw from the highly unusual situation where there are two deals going on simultaneously for two of the industry’s larger players, Epicor [...]

Apax goes double or nothing in big software bet

Posted by on April 5, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Apax Partners is going double or nothing in the latest addition to its software portfolio. The buyout firm plans to spend a total of $2bn to put together a pair of old-line ERP vendors, Epicor Software and Activant Solutions. And it is very much a ‘paired’ deal. In fact, according to terms, [...]

Lawson: silence, suitors and synergy

Posted by on March 31, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly If Lawson Software had held its scheduled call later this afternoon to discuss its third-quarter earnings report, we suspect that attendance would have been a bit higher than usual. Instead, the old-line ERP vendor scrapped it, citing the two-week-old unsolicited offer from industry consolidator Infor Global Solutions. (Those sorts of things tend [...]

Lawson ‘Infor-med’ of unsolicited offer

Posted by on March 14, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly In the middle of last year, we penciled out a takeout scenario for Lawson Software that gave the old-line maker of ERP software an equity value of about $1.7bn. Turns out we were off by just $100m. On Friday, the acquisitive, private equity-backed rollup machine Infor Global Solutions floated an unsolicited $1.8bn [...]

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 [...]

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