Contact: Brenon Daly, Dennis Callaghan
As a company that has had five different owners in recent years, LANDesk hasn’t necessarily always had the stability and support that’s needed to do deals of its own. But on Tuesday, the systems management vendor, which traces its roots back to the mid-1980s, stepped back into the M&A market with a measured, try-before-you-buy acquisition of existing partner Managed Planet. LANDesk already licensed Managed Planet’s analytics product as part of its larger offering, easing the technical due diligence in the transaction.
LANDesk’s purchase of analytics vendor Managed Planet represents a relatively low-risk – but potentially high-value – return to acquisitions, adding capabilities such as hardware discovery and analytics to LANDesk’s existing offering. Although small, the deal helps LANDesk know more about managing the business of technology, getting metrics on the value and usage of IT assets, guiding future purchases, upgrade decisions, cloud migrations and so on.
The transaction stands as the first one since Thoma Bravo carved LANDesk out of Emerson Electric in August 2010. With the acquisition, LANDesk – and its deep-pocketed private equity owner – appears to be telegraphing that it will continue shopping. We understand that LANDesk is currently looking at another potential purchase that might get done in the next few months.