A splashy IPO for Splunk

Posted by on October 20, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly After spending the past two weeks baking off, Splunk has picked Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Securities and Credit Suisse to run the books on its upcoming IPO, according to sources. The offering is expected to raise $150m for the San Francisco-based company, with the paperwork likely coming in January. Splunk will finish [...]

IncrediMail reaches deep for deal

Posted by on August 5, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Almost exactly a year after taking the top spot at IncrediMail, CEO Josef Mandelbaum has announced his first acquisition at the digital media company. And it’s a big one: IncrediMail, which had just $33m in cash in March, will spend $25m upfront and another possible $15m earnout to add startup Smilebox. IncrediMail [...]

Taking care of unfinished business, Oracle snares InQuira

Posted by on July 29, 2011

Contact: Ben Kolada Oracle scratched a lingering itch recently, as it announced that it is acquiring knowledge management and customer service automation vendor InQuira for an undisclosed amount. The announcement comes nearly three years to the day after Oracle was stinted by salesforce.com in its attempt to scoop up InQuira rival InStranet. And although terms [...]

A tale of two e-discovery deals

Posted by on May 26, 2011

Contact: Nick Patience Last week was more or less bookended with two acquisitions in the e-discovery market, with Autonomy Corp picking up Iron Mountain’s digital assets on Monday and Symantec buying Clearwell Systems on Thursday. Autonomy and Symantec share a market but little else between them. Both are experienced acquirers – having made, collectively, 50 [...]

A new era at Google?

Posted by on April 14, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly It’s a new era at Google. After the market closes, Google’s once-and-future king Larry Page will give his first report to Wall Street since returning to the throne at the search company he helped found. Page took over at the beginning of the month, with Google shares trading essentially where they were [...]

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 [...]

Exits lead up and down for General Catalyst

Posted by on November 18, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Talk about a mixed pair of exits. Venture firm General Catalyst Partners is faced with an unusual situation of the sale of one portfolio company almost undoubtedly slashing the valuation of another portfolio company that just filed for an IPO. The trade sale could even derail the offering, although that’s probably not [...]

Google, the not-so-gentle giant, steps into mobile apps

Posted by on November 17, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly, Chris Hazelton In order to grow and foster broad support, technology platforms need to be open and inclusive. Of course, that’s a sentiment that runs counter to M&A, which by definition is selective and exclusionary. (See our earlier report on how selecting a company to buy often means giving a ring to [...]

Is mobile advertising back?

Posted by on November 10, 2009

Google’s monster acquisition of AdMob this week sure seems to suggest so. The high-multiple valuation makes this one of the richer deals in the overall sector and breathes new life into a niche vertical that seemed to be on life support earlier this year.

Is IAC looking to sell Ask.com?

Posted by on November 9, 2009

Recent comments from CEO Barry Diller sure make it sound like the search engine is on the block. A sale of Ask.com to Microsoft might be just the ticket – for both sides.

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