Category: M&A

One and done for tech M&A in August

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

For tech M&A in August, there was one big print and then everything else. The blockbuster transaction, which saw Vantiv pay $10.4bn for UK-based rival payments processor WorldPay Group, accounted for almost half of the $22.7bn spent on tech deals around the globe this month, according to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase.

After the massive fintech consolidation, however, the value of transactions declined sharply. No other deal announced in August figures into the M&A KnowledgeBase’s list of the 25 largest transactions announced in the first eight months of 2017.

The slowdown at the top end of the tech M&A market pushed this month’s spending level to the lowest total for the month of August since 2013. More recently, the value of deals in August came in slightly below the average monthly spending so far this year.

Altogether, tech acquirers across the globe have spent just less than $200bn so far this year, according to the M&A KnowledgeBase. At this point in both 2016 and 2015, spending on transactions had already topped $300bn.

With eight months now in the books, 2017 is on pace for the lowest level of M&A spending in four years. The main reason for the slumping deal value is that many of the tech industry’s most-active acquirers have largely moved to the sidelines, especially when it comes to big prints. IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle all went print-less in August.

In contrast, the rivals to those strategic buyers, private equity (PE) firms, continued their shopping spree. PE shops announced 77 deals in August, an average of almost four each business day. That brings the total PE transactions announced this year to 600, a pace that puts 2017 on pace to smash last year’s record number of deals by roughly 30%. (For more on the record-setting activity of buyout shops, be sure to join 451 Research for a webinar next Thursday, September 7, at 1:00pm ET. Registration is available here.)

Western Digital takes a familiar path into new markets with a pair of deals 

Scott Denne

Contact: Scott Denne, Tim Stammers

Western Digital has printed two different deals that follow the same pattern. The disk-drive giant has acquired enterprise storage vendor Tegile Systems along with Upthere, a developer of consumer cloud storage products, continuing its recent feast-then-famine M&A pace. Those targets mark the first companies it has bought since reaching for SanDisk in a $17bn transaction at the end of 2015.

In Western Digital’s last cycle, it spent $1bn across three acquisitions in the solid-state storage sector in the third quarter of 2013, followed by a 15-month hiatus from the market. Before that string of SSD deals, but after its $4.3bn purchase of HGST in 2011, it had only bought one company – a tuck-in of backup software firm Arkeia.

Like each of the last four private companies that Western Digital purchased, both of today’s targets took minority investments from Western Digital, which led the most recent venture rounds raised by Tegile and Upthere. Both transactions also push Western Digital further upmarket. Upthere sells high-performance cloud storage services designed for pictures, extending Western Digital’s consumer storage business and, since Upthere builds its own infrastructure rather than running on AWS, it brings a technical team that could bolster the acquirer’s ability to deliver enterprise offerings for other cloud services.

With Tegile, Western Digital becomes a full systems provider – a shift that’s been many years and many deals in the making. Purchases of Virident and SanDisk brought it hardware products to sell directly to enterprises, rather than OEMs, and acquisitions of Skyera and Amplidata brought it software IP that could potentially be used to build its own storage systems. If the past is any indication, Western Digital is wise to stick to its patterns – the company’s stock is up 90% in the wake of its SanDisk buy and a year-long streak of beating Wall Street’s projections.

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.

Valassis sees discounts in MaxPoint acquisition 

Scott Denne

Contact: Scott Denne

Coupon distributor Valassis Communications has taken another step in its transition to digital with the $95m acquisition of location-based ad-tech vendor MaxPoint Interactive. In addition to getting Valassis another marketing product to sell to consumer goods providers, the target’s technology could plug a substantial weakness in RetailMeNot, a digital coupon firm that Valassis’ parent company, Harland Clarke Holdings, bought in April.

The sale ends a turbulent and short run as a public company for MaxPoint, which debuted in April 2016 with a stock price that’s more than 3x what it’s getting in today’s deal, which values it at a paltry 0.6x trailing revenue.

MaxPoint enables advertisers to run national campaigns for consumer goods that target prospects at the local level, based on a mix of proximity to retail locations and digital demand signals from particular neighborhoods. As one of the world’s largest distributors of coupons, Valassis hands MaxPoint’s media services business a new avenue for growth. But the larger opportunity is in integrating the underlying technology with its recently acquired online coupon business.

RetailMeNot built a business by distributing digital coupons for retail locations. The problem it’s always had is proving to its retailers that those coupons work – did the coupons drive people to the store or did the store just give discounts to people who planned to come anyway? To operate its media business, MaxPoint developed technology that predicts demand for products within the market area for a physical retail location. RetailMeNot could deploy such demand analysis to optimize when and where it launches campaigns and use it to measure the impact.

Moreover, a partnership between the two companies could enable MaxPoint to deliver coupons to RetailMeNot that are tied to a retail location but funded by product vendors and in doing so provide both retailers and consumer products companies a way to navigate a market that’s rapidly shifting to digital with a shared marketing strategy that they’ve employed for decades.

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.

Private equity does a number on the public markets

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Private equity (PE) is doing a number on the public markets. No longer content with siphoning dozens of tech vendors off the exchanges each year, buyout shops are now moving earlier in the IPO process and targeting companies that may only be thinking about someday going public. These rapacious acquirers are not only harvesting the current crop of tech vendors on the NYSE and Nasdaq, but also snapping up the seeds for next season’s planting as well.

Consider the recent activity of the tech industry’s most-active PE shop, Vista Equity Partners. Two months ago – on the same day, as a matter of fact – the firm ended Xactly’s two-year run as a public company and snagged late-stage private company Lithium Technologies, a 16-year-old vendor that had raised some $200m in venture backing. (Subscribers to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase can see our estimates of terms on the Vista Equity-Lithium deal here.) And just yesterday, Vista Equity once again went startup shopping, picking up software-testing firm Applause.

To be clear, neither Lithium nor Applause would have been considered dual-track deals. Both startups undoubtedly needed time to get themselves ready for any eventual IPO. And while it might seem like a PE portfolio provides a logical holding pen for IPO candidates, buyout shops don’t really look to the public markets for exits. As far as we can tell, Vista Equity hasn’t ever taken one of its tech vendors public. The same is true for Thoma Bravo. Instead, the exit of choice is to sell portfolio companies to other PE firms or, to a lesser degree, a strategic acquirer. (Buyout shops prefer all-cash transactions rather than the illiquid shares that come with an IPO so they can speed ahead raising their next fund.)

The PE firms’ expansive M&A strategies – directed, effectively, at both ends of the tech lifecycle on Wall Street – aren’t going to depopulate the public markets overnight. However, those reductions aren’t likely to be offset by an increase in listings through an uptick in IPOs anytime soon. That means tech investing is likely to get even more homogenized. It’s already challenging to get outperformance on Wall Street, where passive, index-driven investing dominates. With buyout shops further shrinking the list of tech investments, it’s going to be even harder for money managers to stand out. With their latest surge in activity, PE firms have made alpha more elusive on Wall Street.

To see how buyout shops are reshaping other aspects of the tech industry and the long-term implications of this trend, be sure to read 451 Research’s special two-part report on the stunning rise of PE firms. (For 451 Research subscribers, Part 1 is available here and Part 2 is available here.) Additionally, a special 451 Research webinar on the activity and outlook for buyout shops in tech M&A is open to everyone. Registration for the event on Thursday, September 7 at 1:00pm EST can be found here.

Meet the new buyer of your tech company

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

For all the dramatic impact that private equity (PE) firms have had in snapping up huge chunks of the tech landscape, most of Silicon Valley actually knows very little about these buyout shops. (Not for nothing is the industry called private equity.) The little that is known about them probably dates back to Barbarians at the Gate, when the firms mostly operated with a strip-and-flip strategy. That’s not really the approach these new power brokers are bringing to their current tech investments.

In the rebooted strategy for hardware and software vendors, many of the buyout shops have swung their focus from costs to growth. Sure, PE firms still prize cash flow, but in many cases they will be looking as closely at the trend line for MRR as they do EBITDA generation. It’s an approach that has helped fuel five straight years of increasing tech deals by buyout shops, rising to the point now where financial acquirers are putting up more prints than the longtime leaders of the tech M&A market, strategic buyers.

Between direct acquisitions and deals done by portfolio companies, PE firms are on pace to purchase roughly 900 tech companies in 2017, which would work out to roughly one of every four tech transactions announced this year. That’s about twice the share of the tech M&A market that buyout shops have held even as recently as two years ago. More than any other buying group, PE firms are setting the tone in the market right now.

For a closer look at the stunning rise of PE buyers in the tech market, 451 Research is publishing a special two-part report on the trend, ‘Preeminent PE: The New Masters of the Tech Universe.’ The first part of the report takes a look at how financial acquirers sprinted ahead of strategic buyers, and how the current PE boom is different from the previous PE boom before the credit crisis. The second part turns to the strategy and valuations of tech deals done by buyout shops.

Although both of these reports will only be available to 451 Research subscribers, everyone is invited to join 451 Research for a webinar on the activity and outlook for PE firms in tech M&A on Thursday, September 7 at 1:00pm EST. Registration can be found here.

Cisco’s storage M&A reboot

Scott Denne

Contact: Henry Baltazar, Liam Rogers, Scott Denne

Following an impulsive and failed marriage, Cisco has opted for a long courtship for its second commitment in the storage market. The networking giant has paid $320m for Springpath, a maker of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software and a longtime Cisco partner.

Cisco led Springpath’s $34m series C round in 2015 and the next year launched its HCI appliance, HyperFlex, built with Springpath’s software. A patent infringement lawsuit brought by rival SimpliVity may have delayed the consummation of this deal, as its final status is still unclear. As we wrote in an earlier report, HyperFlex sold well and demonstrated an ability to bring new customers to Cisco. In a 451 Research Voice of the Enterprise survey, 18.3% of IT professionals were using Cisco HyperFlex, behind only converged offerings from VMware and Dell-EMC.

By contrast, its last foray into storage was the $415m purchase of all-flash array vendor WHIPTAIL, which offered a product that was meant to compete with several of Cisco’s then partners and had only gained traction with about one-quarter as many enterprises as Springpath has reached on Cisco’s servers, where it is exclusively sold.

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.

An unhappy anniversary for buyout shops

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

A decade ago, the financial world started its most recent journey toward ruin. Although the total collapse wouldn’t come for another year, the first tremors of the global financial crisis were felt in August 2007. At the time, few observers could have imagined that a bunch of bad bets made on shady mortgages could reduce some of the world’s biggest banks to heaps of rubble.

For some financial institutions, the destruction was self-inflicted. But others were simply collateral damage, counterparties to risky trades that they may not have fully understood but took on nonetheless. Whatever the cause, the result, which was just starting to be realized 10 years ago, was that everyone was in over their head.

As banks went into survival mode, the financial system dried up. Lenders, already worried about the bad debt on their books, stopped extending loans. It became a credit crisis, with whole chunks of the economy grinding to a halt. There was also a dramatic – if underappreciated – impact on the tech M&A market: the crisis effectively ended the first buyout boom.

Private equity (PE) firms were just hitting their stride when the crisis took away the currency that made their deals work: debt. Don’t forget that just months before August 2007, PE shops had announced mega-deals for First Data ($29bn) and Alltel ($27.5bn). Both of those acquisitions were $10bn bigger than any tech transaction ever announced by a financial acquirer up to that point.

Those deals turned out to be the high-water marks for PE at the time, with the water receding unexpectedly quickly. Of the 10 largest PE transactions listed in 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase for 2007, only one of them came after August. More broadly, the last four crisis-shadowed months of 2007 accounted for just $7bn of the then-record $106bn in PE spending that year.

The late-2007 collapse in sponsor spending continued through 2008-09, as the recession broadened and deepened. The value of PE deals in both of those years dropped more than 80% compared with 2007, according to the M&A KnowledgeBase. The PE industry’s recovery from the credit crisis would take a long time, much longer than the relatively quick bounce-back in the equity markets, for instance. Overall spending by buyout firms wouldn’t hit 2007 levels again until 2015.

For more on the impact of PE activity in the tech market, be sure to join 451 Research for a special webinar on Thursday, September 7 at 1:00pm ET. Registration is free and available by clicking here.

NetApp taps Greenqloud for hybrid storage push

Scott Denne

Contact: Scott Denne

NetApp’s reach for Greenqloud marks its third deal of 2017 as the storage vendor climbs its way out of a rocky couple of years. With the purchase of the cloud management provider, NetApp turns 2017 into a busy – although thrifty – year for M&A.

According to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase, NetApp has never before bought more than two companies in a single year. The price it’s paying for Greenqloud hasn’t been disclosed, but the target has a modest headcount and raised little funding. In its other two transactions this year – Immersive Partner Solutions and Plexistor – NetApp shelled out less than $30m in cash (total). None of the three warranted a press release – instead they were announced via quarterly earnings calls.

After five years of revenue declines, NetApp’s sales are beginning to level off. In its last quarter (the first of its fiscal year), revenue rose 2% to $1.3bn and its profit increased by 2x. Part of its strategy for getting back to growth and improving margins has been a focus on flash storage with its last major acquisition, SolidFire ($870m).

Another part of the company’s strategy, unusual among storage OEMs, is its expansion of hybrid cloud storage capabilities. NetApp’s desire to push its cloud connections forward drove both today’s deal and its pickup in May of Immersive Partner Solutions, which makes hybrid cloud monitoring software. Greenqloud brings NetApp a team that’s been offering public cloud management since 2010, and its Qstack product gives NetApp the technology architecture to expand its delivery of cloud services.

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.

Microsoft tones its HPC cloud with Cycle Computing

Scott Denne

Contact: Scott Denne, Csilla Zsigri

In an effort to extend Azure into a potentially lucrative corner of the cloud market, Microsoft picks up Cycle Computing, a company that enables HPC applications in multi-cloud environments. Microsoft’s move fits with a larger trend of cloud providers building and buying software assets to attract those applications with the most appetite for compute and storage.

Cycle Computing has more than a decade of experience orchestrating, provisioning and managing HPC and other intensive computing applications across multiple environments. First developed to take advantage of grid computing, it has more recently launched CycleCloud, and joined Microsoft’s Accelerator program in 2016.

HPC is about three to five years behind enterprise computing when it comes to new technology adoption – the applications are generally more sophisticated, and engineers are conservative. Yet the HPC cloud market is accelerating, and compute- and data-intensive applications in areas such as big data, machine learning, deep learning and IoT are also moving to the cloud. We believe that Microsoft is taking advantage of these trends and is looking to use Cycle Computing’s technology to enhance Azure’s current data-processing capabilities and build virtual supercomputers in the public cloud.

By investing in HPC and other data and analytics applications, Microsoft makes Azure fertile soil for new workloads. According to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise Cloud Transformation survey, 21% of data and analytics workloads will move to public clouds in the next two years, a larger share than any category excepting web and media deployments, which, not coincidently, is where Amazon has focused its recent M&A with acquisitions of Thinkbox Software and Elemental Technologies.

Moreover, that same survey showed that IT departments have a greater threshold for price increases for mission-critical data analytics workloads. Almost half (44%) said they would be willing to pay an additional 26-50% to ensure quality of service, compared with just 30% who would pay such an increase for web workloads.

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.

Grand Junction buy shows that Target’s digital strategy goes through its stores

Scott Denne

Contact: Scott Denne

While Walmart is attacking Amazon by air with its Jet.com asset, Target is planning a ground assault. Its acquisition of Grand Junction marks Target’s reentry into the tech M&A market after a nearly three-year absence. And although the price is likely modest – the target only has a dozen or so employees – it aligns with the big box retailer’s expansion strategy.

The deal adds to the list of steps Target is taking to adapt its business to the growth in digital shopping by leveraging its physical assets to improve fulfillment (both in cost and quality of service). The company has worked with Grand Junction on its first experiment with running same-day delivery out of one of its Manhattan locations. It’s also opening a new distribution facility designed to test supply chain and logistical innovations, integrating its existing stores with its digital supply chain and launching 100 new small-format locations.

Even its previous tech acquisition, PoweredAnalytics, expanded its physical capabilities by analyzing data to adjust the in-store experience. Its focus on adapting its physical assets to digital shoppers makes Target’s M&A strategy unique. Walmart, for example, has gone after established e-commerce businesses, starting with Jet.com, to build a niche in online retail in areas like fashion where Amazon hasn’t yet made its mark. Other traditional retailers and consumer goods vendors have bolted on firms that bring them into new markets, such as Barnes & Noble Education’s recent reach for student media provider Student Brands or Whirlpool’s pickup of recipe site Yummly.

Although retailers and consumer goods companies still make up just a fraction of overall tech M&A, their activity has grown as they encounter an accelerating pace of store closures and bankruptcies as shopping shifts to online channels. According to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase, those buyers have spent $4.7bn across 22 tech transactions in 2017, the same pace as last year’s record level of dealmaking.

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.