NTT continues global expansion, bags Netmagic

Posted by on January 25, 2012

Contact: Ben Kolada NTT Communications has made another move in the Indian datacenter services market, this time taking a 74% stake in Netmagic Solutions. Netmagic provides managed hosting, colocation and infrastructure management services, among others, from seven datacenters throughout India. This is the latest in a growing line of transactions NTT has inked that have [...]

Are Internet infrastructure exits interconnected?

Posted by on August 10, 2011

Contact: Ben Kolada Providing further proof that it’s a tough time to be on the market, much less come to market, GI Partners has opted to sell its Telx investment rather than battle through an IPO. The company’s sale to ABRY Partners and Berkshire Partners closes the books (at least for now) on a proposed [...]

In Network Solutions’ sale, General Atlantic gets a bit of both exits

Posted by on August 4, 2011

Contact: Ben Kolada Web.com is acquiring Web hosting and domain name registration vendor Network Solutions in a deal valued at $756m, including the assumption of debt. And we expect that Network Solutions’ owner couldn’t be more relieved. With flat revenue and customer attrition in recent years, Network Solutions’ private equity owner, General Atlantic (GA), wasn’t [...]

China becoming social in public

Posted by on April 19, 2011

Contact: Ben Kolada While talk of social companies hitting the public markets has so far focused on US firms such as Facebook, GroupOn and LinkedIn, the first vendor to do so may actually come from the Far East. Dubbed the ‘Facebook of China,’ Beijing-based Renren filed its prospectus on Friday and will reportedly hit the [...]

Epiq’s expensive e-discovery deal

Posted by on April 7, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Announcing the largest e-discovery deal in some three-and-a-half years, Epiq Systems said earlier this week that it will borrow $100m to acquire Encore Discovery Solutions, a service provider for law firms. (My colleague Nick Patience has the full details on the acquisition.) The rationale is fairly straightforward: Epiq wanted to shore up [...]

eBay bids high for GSI

Posted by on March 28, 2011

Contact: Ben Kolada In its largest deal in the past half-decade, eBay is set to acquire e-commerce vendor GSI Commerce for $2.4bn. The company hasn’t made such a move since September 2005, when it forked over $2.6bn for VoIP provider Skype. And while hindsight shows that eBay certainly overpaid for that property, on an equity [...]

Tangoe lines up for IPO dance

Posted by on April 28, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Back in January 2009, Tangoe made a small acquisition on its way to what we expected would be an IPO. Of course, neither the telecom expense management (TEM) vendor nor any other company was going to make it public in the first few months of last year. But with the recovery in [...]

PE: which door is marked ‘exit’?

Posted by on April 21, 2010

by Brenon Daly, Jason Schafer After chalking up some 17 purchases under the ownership of a private equity (PE) consortium, ViaWest has been bought by another PE firm. Oak Hill Capital Partners will pick up the 11-year-old managed hosting provider, which currently operates 16 datacenters and counts 1,000 customers. Although financial details of the transaction [...]

Intuit-PayCycle: A kind of homecoming

Posted by on June 5, 2009

by Brenon Daly Looking at Intuit’s acquisition of PayCycle Inc, we might note that the alumni network can pay off – and pay off big. Intuit picked up the payroll services startup earlier this week for $170m in cash. We understand that PayCycle generated only about $30m over the previous four quarters, meaning Intuit paid [...]

Preemptive consolidation in financial IT?

Posted by on April 14, 2009

With Fidelity National Information Services’ blockbuster acquisition of Metavante last week described as a preemptive buy, we believe 2009 is likely to be a year of consolidation in the financial IT industry. Who might be shopping?