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 [...]

Taleo targets Europe, acquires Jobpartners

Posted by 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 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 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 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 [...]

Laying out a dual track for Conerstone

Posted by on December 2, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly If current IPO candidate Cornerstone OnDemand is looking for a company to model itself on – at least in terms of the offering and after-market trading – it could do a lot worse than SuccessFactors. Both vendors sell human capital management (HCM) software, and both sell it on a subscription basis. Further, [...]

Is GeoLearning the next to go?

Posted by on October 15, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly While the employment market may still be sluggish, the market for software that helps companies with their employees is bustling. We recently noted that both the number of deals and spending in the human capital management (HCM) market so far this year is rivaling the records set when the overall M&A market [...]

HCM deal flow nears high-water mark

Posted by on September 29, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Dealmaking in the human capital management (HCM) market has surged in recent months, pushing spending to near-record levels. So far this year, we’ve tallied 36 HCM transactions, with an aggregate value of $1.9bn. That basically matches the high-water mark of $2.1bn in the sector set during the first three quarters of 2007. [...]

Wall Street job pays off for Salary.com

Posted by on September 2, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Strictly from the view of the corporate treasurer’s office, Salary.com got paid while on Wall Street. The compensation management vendor went public at a valuation that – in rather short order – would never again be available to the company. The outsized chunk of money that it raised in its early 2007 [...]

salesforce.com: All dressed up and nowhere to go

Posted by on January 20, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly, China Martens We noted late last week that it has emerged recently that salesforce.com did indeed make an (unannounced) acquisition to help bolster its upcoming enterprise collaboration product, Chatter. The purchase of GroupSwim, which had just 30 customers, was undoubtedly a tiny one. That’s been the case in the five previous buys [...]

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