Contact: Brenon Daly
As a company that has been cast off twice from its larger corporate owners, LANDesk Software might have a special affinity for its latest transaction: the acquisition of Shavlik Technologies, which is being cast off by VMware. The deal adds Shavlik’s technology for managing and securing physical and virtual environments to the systems management vendor’s portfolio. Inside VMware, Shavlik was known as VMware Protect; under LANDesk, the business is called Shavlik Protect.
LANDesk’s purchase effectively unwinds VMware’s acquisition of the security company in mid-2011. At the time, we estimated that the virtualization giant paid about 3x sales for Shavlik. We understand that today’s deal went off at a more representative multiple for divestitures. That said, Shavlik, which never took any outside funding, is known to generate healthy cash flow. (Subscribers to The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase can click on the following links to see our estimated revenue and price for both the original VMware-Shavlik transaction as well as today’s LANDesk-Shavlik pairing.)
The purchase of the carved-out business represents the third deal LANDesk has done since private equity (PE) firm Thoma Bravo carved the company itself out of Emerson Electric in August 2010. (That transaction came almost exactly eight years after another PE shop, Vector Capital, carved LANDesk out of Intel.) On the other side, VMware’s sale of Shavlik is its second divestiture announced in 2013, as the virtualization giant works through a previously announced restructuring.
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