Contact: Brenon Daly
The next exit for a database security vendor appears likely to be an IPO. Word is Imperva has picked Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank Securities to lead its offering, with a prospectus likely to be filed in the next few weeks. The Redwood City, California-based company is thought to be running at roughly $60m in revenue.
If Imperva does indeed go public, the IPO would cap a run of a half-dozen deals in a sector that has seen purchases by some of the biggest technology providers on the planet. Among the companies that have bought their way into the database security market over the past two years are Oracle, IBM and McAfee. That’s not to say those big players have been paying big prices.
With the exception of Guardium’s sale in November 2009 to IBM, which we valued at $232m, the other transactions have been modest ones. And the most recent deal has been less than modest: BeyondTrust likely paid only a few million dollars for Lumigent last week. In fact, as we tally the aggregate value of all M&A in the database-monitoring space, we suspect that the total bill will be less than the value Imperva creates in its IPO.
For me, if Imperva would go public, it would be half-baked, ill-prepared, and unplanned. It’s not yet the right time. Imperva should still innovate more and re-organize some of its departments, including those who are heading it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m satisfied with Shlomo Kramer’s performance as the corporation’s CEO and President. It’s just that some of its executives are not performing well as expected.
Although the company is a worldwide leader in data security, it should still has to do and achieve what other enterprises has done in the past before committing to its IPO plan.