Rough start to 2012 as January tech M&A spending drops 70%

Posted by on February 1, 2012

Contact: Brenon Daly As the new year starts, tech acquirers have yet to really reach deep to do any deals. In January, aggregate spending on all tech transactions across the globe plummeted to just $3.5bn – the lowest monthly level since the bottom of the recession in February 2009. Compared to the January 2011 total [...]

PE firms play small ball

Posted by on January 4, 2012

Contact: Brenon Daly After years of writing multibillion-dollar checks in some of the largest tech transactions, private equity (PE) shops dramatically scaled back their purchases in 2011. The single biggest deal last year (The Blackstone Group’s $3bn take-private of healthcare technology vendor Emdeon) only ranked 15th among the largest transactions in 2011. It was the [...]

Survey says: Tech M&A is likely to pick up in 2012

Posted by on December 19, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly After a summer of discontent, the environment for tech M&A in the coming year once again appears welcoming, according to 451 Research’s annual survey of corporate development executives. More than half of the company dealmakers we surveyed indicated they expected to be busier in the coming year than they had been in [...]

Recent Blue Coat shareholders no longer in the red

Posted by on December 13, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Anyone who bought shares of Blue Coat Systems over the past half-year breathed a sigh of relief after the recent buyout of the old-line security vendor. Thoma Bravo’s bid of $25.81 for each share means that buyers since May are all above water. (The offer represents a 48% premium over the previous [...]

Numara keeps flowing along

Posted by on November 23, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Throughout its long and winding 20-year history, the name may have changed for Numara Software, but the business is still the same. The IT service desk management vendor was originally known as Blue Ocean Software, a name that got erased during the three years the company was owned by Intuit. After TA [...]

Big money, behind closed doors

Posted by on November 18, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Who needs to go public when there’s so much late-stage money sloshing around out there? That question hit us in the head this week after two startups announced, separately, that they were each raising $50m in new funding. First, it was marketing automation vendor Marketo saying it pulled in $50m in a [...]

Sterling Partners aids Mosaid

Posted by on October 31, 2011

Contact: Thejeswi Venkatesh Earlier this month, Wi-LAN indicated it would ‘pack up and move on’ if Mosaid Technologies’ shareholders did not accept its sweetened $42 per share unsolicited offer. But in a rather unusual turn of events, it is Mosaid that has moved on. On Friday, the chip technology company announced an agreement with buyout [...]

Cut the CDN already, InterNap

Posted by on October 27, 2011

Contact: Ben Kolada We’ve long covered InterNap Network Services as both a potential target and a datacenter services vendor with disappointing earnings. With what’s likely to be another underwhelming quarter (the company reports Q3 results after the bell today), we take yet another look at what can be done to save this barely floating ship. [...]

Renaissance plays politics

Posted by on October 21, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly It must be election season. That’s what struck us when we saw earlier this week that Renaissance Learning went ahead and accepted a buyout offer that valued the online education vendor at about 10% less than an unsolicited bid. To our ear, some of the material in the proxies filed in connection [...]

Big Blue’s recent shopping spree

Posted by on October 17, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly After a slow start to the year, IBM has dramatically picked up the pace – and the spending – in its M&A program. Big Blue only announced its first deal of 2011 in late March, and then was out of the market for nearly a half-year. But in the past two months [...]

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