Spirent secures its testing platform with Mu

Posted by on April 24, 2012

Contact: Brenon Daly, Eric Hanselman A relatively infrequent shopper, Spirent Communications has picked up Mu Dynamics, adding security testing for applications to the company’s performance-testing portfolio. The deal, which is only the British company’s second acquisition in the past half-decade, was announced last week and closed Monday. Spirent paid $40m in cash for Mu, which is [...]

Persistence may not pay off for Vodafone

Posted by on April 23, 2012

Contact: Ben Kolada, Thejeswi Venkatesh After three deadline extensions and interest from competitor Tata Communications, Vodafone Group announced on Monday its latest attempt to acquire Cable & Wireless Worldwide (CWW). Vodafone is offering £1bn, or approximately $1.7bn, to buy CWW. However, its offer has already hit a roadblock. CWW’s largest shareholder, Orbis, which owns 19% of [...]

Splunk soars in rip-roaring IPO

Posted by on April 19, 2012

Contact: Brenon Daly In a rip-roaring debut, Splunk soared onto the public market Thursday in an IPO that created more than $3bn of market value for the data analytics vendor. That’s a heady, double-digit valuation for a company that’s likely to generate only about $200m in sales this year. (Just as we predicted in last week’s [...]

Marketo buys into social marketing with Crowd Factory

Posted by on April 18, 2012

Contact: Brenon Daly Announcing its first-ever acquisition, Marketo said Wednesday that it is picking up Crowd Factory. The deal adds Crowd Factory’s social campaign management technology to Marketo’s marketing automation platform, expanding the distribution of marketing pitches to social channels such as Facebook pages and Twitter. Although terms weren’t disclosed, we imagine that this was a [...]

Columnar database provider SAND Technology puts itself up for sale

Posted by on April 16, 2012

Contact: Matt Aslett, Thejeswi Venkatesh, Ben Kolada Following years of flat revenue and attempts at realigning its business, Canadian columnar database dinosaur SAND Technology has announced that it is exploring strategic alternatives, including an outright sale. The announcement comes barely six months after SAND sold its SAP Information Lifecycle Management product line to Informatica for [...]

IBM reaches into the app layer for Varicent

Posted by on April 13, 2012

Contact: Brenon Daly IBM has mostly stayed away from acquiring application vendors, reaching instead for companies that typically either bolster its sprawling Global Services division or infrastructure software business, particularly in the management layer. Big Blue stepped a bit out of its regular acquisition area on Friday with the purchase of sales performance management (SPM) vendor [...]

Tech IPO market looks to next week’s triple-header

Posted by on April 12, 2012

Contact: Brenon Daly Although the US equity market has been a bit choppy over the past week or so, shares are still generally inching higher. Sure, it hasn’t necessarily been the uninterrupted ascent of the Nasdaq that we saw in the first quarter, which recorded the strongest start to a year in two decades. But the [...]

Citrix consolidates collaboration

Posted by on April 11, 2012

Contact: Ben Kolada, Thejeswi Venkatesh In its third collaboration deal in the past 18 months, Citrix Systems said Wednesday that it will acquire small Copenhagen-based startup Podio. The target provides team collaboration SaaS for SMBs, apparently mostly through a ‘freemium’ model. Its product is used for project management, social information sharing, sales lead management and employee recruitment [...]

Palo Alto puts in its paperwork

Posted by on April 9, 2012

Contact: Brenon Daly, Thejeswi Venkatesh Long rumored to be an IPO candidate, Palo Alto Networks has finally filed its paperwork for a $175m offering. The application-level firewall security vendor has put up astonishing growth in recent quarters, but unlike other early-stage companies, Palo Alto has been running in the black recently. But the real story – [...]

Dell picks up the pace

Posted by on April 5, 2012

Contact: Brenon Daly As a relative latecomer to the M&A market, Dell is making up for lost time. The company on Thursday announced its third acquisition of the week, reaching for Vancouver-based Make Technologies. Both Make and Clerity Solutions, which Dell picked up on Tuesday, produce migration software and will be slotted into the services division. [...]

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