Category: M&A

Webinar: Tech M&A outlook

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Last spring, respondents to the M&A Leaders’ Survey from 451 Research and Morrison & Foerster accurately predicted a dramatic surge in tech M&A activity. So what do they see coming now?

We’ll take a lively and thought-provoking look at the results from our latest survey in a special webinar on Wednesday, November 5 at 1:00pm EST. To register for the webinar, simply click here.

Among the key findings we’ll be discussing:

  • Nearly half of the respondents expect overall tech acquisition activity, which has been running at a record rate in 2014, to accelerate through the next half-year.
  • The percentage of survey respondents who say the tech M&A market is likely to be busier from now through next spring is three times higher than the 16% forecasting a decline in acquisition activity.
  • The outlook for private company M&A valuations has never been more bearish. A record 34% of respondents project that sale prices for startups will head lower from now through next April, compared with 26% who anticipate prices ticking higher.

Again, the webinar will be held on Wednesday at 1:00pm EST. Registration is complimentary and can be found here.

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

Carpathia to play up fed angle

Scott Denne

Contact: Scott Denne Michael Levy

Carpathia Hosting will again test the market’s appetite by putting itself in play by the end of the year. The colocation and managed services provider has been a consistent target of deal rumors since Spire Capital Partners, its owner since 2008, set out to raise its third private equity fund around the start of last year.

We understand that Carpathia made earlier approaches to potential buyers a year or two ago but felt that the market wasn’t properly recognizing the value of some recently developed, underutilized datacenter space. The company’s 2014 revenue is likely to near $100m and it could fetch $200-250m in a sale, given that the median TTM revenue multiple for vendors in this space for the past two years is 2x, according to the 451 M&A KnowledgeBase.

Carpathia has 10 datacenters in three different US markets with a healthy utilization rate of 76%, according to the 451 Datacenter KnowledgeBase , which makes it an attractive target. The company’s most compelling value, however, is its footprint with the federal government. Though it’s too small to handle large physical deployments from the federal government on its own, Carpathia meets compliance needs and has the experience that would be valuable to larger players chasing federal business, such as CenturyLink, QTS Realty Trust and Verizon Terremark.

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

SiTime’s good timing

Scott Denne

Contact: Scott Denne

SiTime nabs a $200m exit in a sale to Japan’s MegaChips, navigating a market that’s crowded with failed competitors. Time, ironically, seems to be the element missing from earlier attempts by semiconductor companies to break into the timing market.

SiTime designs chips that take the place of the quartz crystals that for decades have provided the timing element in nearly all electronic devices – from high-end communications equipment to everyday consumer electronics. As silicon is smaller, cheaper and more energy efficient than quartz, it’s a large and promising market. You wouldn’t know it looking at SiTime’s peers, almost all of which ran low on capital while waiting for OEMs to get comfortable enough to replace quartz.

Earlier deals in this space have ranged from $6m-25m, typically at a loss to investors. While not the oldest of this group, SiTime had products in the market far longer, having generated revenue since 2008 (last year it posted $15.5m). It was also better capitalized: SiTime raised $79m from investors, including a $25m debt and equity round just last month.

Needham & Company advised SiTime on the transaction.

Acquisitions of timing chip vendors

Date announced Target Acquirer Deal value
October 29, 2014 SiTime MegaChips $200m
August 30, 2013 Discera Micrel $6.1m
March 30, 2012 Multigig Analog Devices $24.2m
April 28, 2010 Silicon Clocks Silicon Labs $21m
January 14, 2010 Mobius Microsystems Integrated Device Technology $20.2m

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase

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

NetApp carves SteelStore out of Riverbed

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

NetApp’s first acquisition in more than a year and a half comes with a bit of a twist. The storage giant is only a few months removed from a period in which hedge fund Elliott Management was stirring for changes at the company. Having largely settled with the activist investor, NetApp has now picked up a division carved out from Riverbed Technology, which is currently being targeted by Elliott.

Terms call for NetApp to pay $80m for Riverbed’s SteelStore cloud storage gateway. The size of the business, which was formerly known as Whitewater, wasn’t disclosed. However, our understanding is that it was generating less than $10m in sales. Only 26 employees are going over to NetApp as part of the deal.

SteelStore was part of Riverbed’s broader portfolio expansion, an effort that hasn’t really paid off for the company. Some 70% of Riverbed’s revenue still comes from its core WAN optimization unit. The slowdown in that business is one of the main drags on Riverbed, which recently forecasted that sales in the current quarter may be flat.

However, according to our understanding of the transaction, it wasn’t driven by Riverbed, which is currently exploring ‘strategic alternatives,’ looking to jettison a non-core business. Instead, we gather that NetApp went after the division. Neither side used a financial adviser.

That dynamic may help explain the relatively rich valuation of the deal. (Though we would note that both EMC and Microsoft also paid princely multiples in their purchases of cloud storage gateways.) Also, price-to-sales multiples tend to get exaggerated by companies posting only tiny revenue.

And to be clear, virtually all of the cloud storage gateway startups are generating tiny sales. In a recent study of IT professionals at midsized and large enterprises conducted by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research service, only 4% of participating companies had deployed cloud storage gateways – a figure that was essentially unchanged from a similar TIP study in 2013. (See our full report .) With the cloud storage market still very much in its early stages, we would argue that a gateway startup is more at home in a storage vendor like NetApp than in a networking provider like Riverbed.

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

Survey: no slowdown in record tech M&A pace

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Even as tech M&A spending sprints along at a record clip in 2014, half of the respondents to the just-completed M&A Leaders’ Survey from 451 Research and Morrison & Foerster expect the pace to accelerate through the next six months. The 48% of survey respondents who say the tech M&A market is likely to be busier from now through next April is three times higher than the percentage forecasting a decline in activity. (451 Research subscribers: See our full report on the M&A Leaders’ Survey.)

Although the bullish forecast in our mid-October survey dropped from the high-water mark of 72% in our April 2014 survey, it essentially matches the level from surveys over the previous two years. For context, however, it’s also important to note that this outlook – with five out of six respondents indicating that dealmaking will either hold steady or pick up – is coming at a record time for tech M&A. Spending on tech transactions around the globe so far in 2014 is higher than the spending during the same period of 2012 and 2013 combined, according to The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase. (451 Research subscribers: See our full report on Q3 M&A and IPO activity.)

Survey respondents were less bullish in their outlook for private company M&A valuations. A record 34% of respondents predicted that sale prices for startups would head lower from now through next April, three times the percentage that said that in our survey just a half-year ago. We would attribute at least part of the deterioration to the fact that there were certainly bigger – and much higher-profile – sales of startups in the early part of 2014. Overall, according to the KnowledgeBase, the first half of 2014 has seen eight of the 10 largest deals announced so far this year, led by the largest-ever VC exit, WhatsApp’s sale to Facebook in February for $19bn.

M&A spending outlook for the next six months

Survey date Increase Stay the same Decrease
October 2014 48% 36% 16%
April 2014 72% 24% 4%
October 2013 50% 43% 7%
April 2013 54% 27% 19%
October 2012 49% 34% 17%
April 2012 59% 33% 8%

Source: M&A Leaders’ Survey from 451 Research / Morrison & Foerster

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

Come big, come small or don’t come at all

Scott Denne

Contact:Scott Denne

In addition to a spirited defense of her tenure at Yahoo during this week’s earnings call, CEO Marissa Mayer laid out in detail the company’s acquisition strategy: buy big or buy small, no middle ground.

According to The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase, Yahoo has bought 46 companies since Mayer’s tenure began in July 2012, and all but eight of them have been pure talent acquisitions. On the call, the company said it has spent $1.6bn on those deals, with just two, Tumblr and Flurry, accounting for $1.3bn of that (Tumblr alone was $1.1bn). Only six other transactions brought Yahoo any tech or products.

The massive amount of talent tuck-ins (most of which are obviously in the single-digit millions or less) is a stark departure from the previous decade of Yahoo M&A, when the company purchased only 47 companies at a median price tag of $88.5m.

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

Progress moves back toward enterprise sales with Telerik buy

Scott Denne

Contact: Scott Denne

Progress Software becomes an aggressive buyer as revenue begins to accelerate. The application development and data infrastructure vendor has announced that it’s acquiring Bulgaria-based Telerik for $263m in its largest deal (and at 4.4x, its highest multiple) on record.

The acquisition is Progress’ third of the year, following just one last year and none in 2012 as the company took a break from buying and divested several of its previous purchases. In an earlier M&A spree between 2005-2008, Progress picked up nine businesses for a median $25m in an attempt to go upmarket to larger enterprises.

The company expects to finish the year with revenue 6-10% higher than last year, compared with 5% growth in 2013, which followed a few years of decline. Now that Progress has refocused its business strategy on its core application development offering, it’s looking to go upmarket again – but with a more cohesive product set – by snagging Telerik.

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

After staying out of the M&A market, Qualys is ready to deal

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Having built a $1bn market capitalization largely on the back of its core vulnerability management (VM) technology, Qualys is now looking to further expand into new markets. And to get there, the company is considering M&A for the first time in its 15-year history.

Qualys, which opens its annual user conference today, has already organically added new offerings to its VM, including Web application security and compliance monitoring. However, that expansion has only come in the past several years. Further, those products currently generate less than 20% of total revenue at the company. Overall, Qualys has moved slowly, hanging a ‘beta’ tag on products for extended periods. (The need to expand its portfolio was something we highlighted during the company’s IPO two years ago.)

Yet when Qualys does make new offerings available, they tend to be well received. At the end of Q2, some 44% of its more than 6,500 customers had purchased more than one product from the company. That’s up from 30% at the end of 2013 and just 20% at the end of 2012. Cross-selling has been one of the main reasons Qualys has been able to accelerate growth in 2014 compared with last year.

Any acquisition by Qualys, which has about $100m in cash, would likely be small. Also, the technology would have to be multi-tenant. (The company’s revenue is entirely annual subscriptions: no licenses and, unlike most other SaaS vendors, no professional services.)

What technology might Qualys be looking to pick up? Mobility represents an obvious market, as a way to help secure the ‘extended enterprise.’ Other areas that Qualys has been developing but could use a boost via M&A include SIEM and compliance automation.

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

Small ball M&A paying off for salesforce.com

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

When it comes to M&A at salesforce.com, starting small has yielded higher returns than going big. The SaaS giant has returned to the ‘buy and build’ strategy with its latest step into a new market with Analytics Cloud. The data visualization offering, which was unveiled this week at Dreamforce, was underpinned by the acquisition of EdgeSpring back in June 2013.

The $134m price notwithstanding, EdgeSpring stands as a small deal for salesforce.com. (We profiled EdgeSpring shortly after it emerged from stealth and a half-year before it was acquired. At the time, it claimed more than 10 paying customers and about 30 employees.)

Certainly, there were bigger targets for a move into the analytics market by salesforce.com, which will do more than $5bn in revenue this fiscal year and says it has a ‘clear line of sight’ to $10bn in sales. For instance, both Qlik Technologies and Tableau Software offer their data visualization software on salesforce.com’s AppExchange. With hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, either of those vendors would have established salesforce.com as a significant player in the data analytics market as well as moving the company closer to its goal of doubling revenue in the coming years.

However, in that regard, a purchase of either Qlik or Tableau would be comparable with salesforce.com’s reach for ExactTarget in June 2013, which serves as the basis for its Marketing Cloud. The deal was uncharacteristically large, with salesforce.com spending more on the marketing automation provider than it has in all 32 of its other acquisitions combined. More significantly, salesforce.com has struggled a bit with ExactTarget, both operationally (platform integration and cross-selling opportunities) and financially (margin deterioration).

In contrast to that big spending, salesforce.com dropped only about one one-hundredth of the price of ExactTarget on InStranet in August 2008 ($2.5bn vs. $32m). The purchase of InStranet helped establish Service Cloud, which is now the company’s second-largest business behind its core Customer Records Management offering. And salesforce.com says the customer service segment is much larger than the market for its sales software.

Those divergent deals are something to keep in mind when salesforce.com buys its way into a new market. If we had to guess, we would expect the company to next make a play for online retailing (maybe call it Commerce Cloud?). If that’s the case, we might suggest that it look past the big oaks like Demandware and focus on the seedlings that can then grow up in the salesforce.com ecosystem.

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

For Symantec, the spinoff is just the start

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

After a decade of uneasy – and ultimately unfulfilling – marriage, Symantec has finally served divorce papers to its ill-matched partner, Veritas. In going solo, Big Yellow will return to its roots as a stand-alone information security company while spinning off the smaller information management (IM) business at some point before the end of next year.

The separation means that Symantec’s long-suffering shareholders will continue to own Veritas, which cost them a record $13.5bn worth of stock nearly a decade ago. (Since the acquisition closed in mid-2005, Symantec stock has returned just 10%, while the Nasdaq has doubled during that period.) Or more accurately, we should say Symantec shareholders will continue to own the lower-valued IM division until it can finally be sold.

There’s little doubt, in our view, that the spinoff is an interim step. It allows the unit to put up a few quarters of stand-alone performance, perhaps even get some growth back in the IM business. But even as it stands, the division generates more than a half-billion dollars of operating income each year. A buyout shop could certainly make the leverage work on a business like that, particularly once it was ‘optimized.’ (Overall, Symantec spends some 36% of revenue on sales and marketing, even as its sales flatline.)

While the IM business is ultimately likely to land in a private equity portfolio, we would note that we heard an intriguing rumor as Symantec was working through this process. The rumor essentially had Symantec trading its IM unit to EMC for its security division, RSA.

On paper, the swap makes sense, allowing each of the tech giants to focus on their core businesses. According to our understanding, however, talks didn’t get too far along because of the valuation (the Veritas business is about twice as big as RSA) and because of the tax hit that the companies would take due to the asset swap. (As it is, the spinoff of Veritas is tax-free to Symantec shareholders.) And now, of course, EMC is under pressure to undertake a corporate restructuring of its own.

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