Putting a premium on growth
Posted by Brenon Daly on February 10, 2012
Contact: Brenon Daly Over just the past two months, the two largest stand-alone human capital management (HCM) providers have been gobbled up by two of the largest software vendors. Back in December, it was SAP reaching across the Atlantic for SuccessFactors, while just yesterday Oracle announced its plan to take home Taleo. Both of the software [...]
SaaS, SaaS and more SaaS
Posted by Ben Kolada on February 9, 2012
Contact: Ben Kolada Oracle today announced the $2bn acquisition of Taleo, and SAP is getting closer to completing its $3.6bn purchase of SuccessFactors. Both announcements come less than a month after Oracle closed its $1.5bn RightNow Technologies buy. These transactions are the largest we’ve seen in the SaaS sector. However, we doubt they represent the [...]
Sizing the SaaS M&A market
Posted by Ben Kolada on January 31, 2012
Contact: Ben Kolada Traditional IT service providers, accustomed to an on-premises model of delivering products and services, have been rapidly buying into the SaaS sector to fulfill enterprises’ demand for SaaS offerings. The result has been a rapid increase in both the volume and value of SaaS deals announced. The most notable are Oracle’s RightNow [...]
And the Golden Tombstone goes to …
Posted by Brenon Daly 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 [...]
The Houses of Morgan are in demand for on-demand work
Posted by Brenon Daly 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 Brenon Daly 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 [...]
Taleo targets Europe, acquires Jobpartners
Posted by Ben Kolada on June 21, 2011
Contact: Ben Kolada In its first acquisition outside North America, Dublin, California-based Taleo announced today that it is buying European HCM vendor Jobpartners for €26m ($38m). While the price is a fraction of the $145m in cash that Taleo held at the end of March, it’s a fairly rich value for what we understand was [...]
SuccessFactors pays a peak price for Plateau
Posted by Brenon Daly 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 [...]
Cornerstone: the newest — and priciest — HCM vendor
Posted by Brenon Daly on March 17, 2011
Contact: Brenon Daly So much for the ‘debut discount.’ Cornerstone OnDemand hit the market Thursday at an eye-popping valuation, going against the recent trend toward conservative pricing for new issues. The human capital management (HCM) vendor priced its shares at $13 each, above the indicated range of $9-11 each. (Goldman Sachs & Co and Barclays [...]
Lawson ‘Infor-med’ of unsolicited offer
Posted by Brenon Daly 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 [...]
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