Contact: Ben Kolada
Those merely glancing at the headlines of Informatica’s press releases would see that on Wednesday the company unveiled the latest version of its cloud-integration PaaS product, Cloud Spring 2013. However, only by reading further would an interested party see that the company has also quietly acquired cloud process automation vendor Active Endpoints. This isn’t the first time Informatica has been shy with its M&A announcements, but recent financial results could give the company the confidence to be much louder with its future acquisitions.
Informatica’s previous small tuck-in of Data Scout only came to light with the launch of Informatica Cloud MDM in September 2012 and the subsequent release of Informatica Cloud Winter 2013. Perhaps that deal didn’t deserve significant attention, as it cost Informatica just $6m.
In fact, with the exception of Heiler Software, Informatica’s dealmaking since 2011 has involved mostly small, sub-$10m tuck-ins. Its median deal size from the beginning of 2011 to today (including Heiler Software) is just $7m. That compares with a median deal size of $55m for the 11 transactions it announced before then.
The turn toward smaller acquisitions, and hiding some of them in product announcements, could be explained to a degree by the unfolding economy in Europe. Europe’s struggling economy eventually hit home and weighed heavily on Informatica’s Q3 2012 profit.
Although Europe is still experiencing economic turmoil, Informatica seems to have been able to cushion the continent’s effect on its top line. After a downturn in profit in the third quarter, the company recently released results that showed better-than-expected revenue in the fourth quarter. (However, net income still came in below the year-ago period.) If future results continue to play to Informatica’s favor, we could see the company becoming more boisterous with its M&A announcements in the future. We’ll have a longer report on Informatica’s acquisition of Active Endpoints in our next Daily 451.
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