Contact: Brenon Daly
For the second time in about three months, 20-year-old infosec vendor Blue Coat has bought its way into the cloud, paying an astronomical multiple for cloud application control startup Elastica in a $280m deal. Paired with its recent purchase of Perspecsys, Blue Coat has rung up a $400m bill in building out an offering to help secure SaaS applications. That makes it the biggest buyer in this nascent market.
We view the pickups of Perspecsys and Elastica as a bit of a portfolio update and refresh ahead of what we expect to be an IPO for Blue Coat in early 2016. As one of the few large-scale infosec providers, Blue Coat has attracted acquisition interest in recent years. Before its take-private in late 2011, the company was rumored to have drawn a bid from HP. More recently, Raytheon was thought to be considering a run at Blue Coat before nabbing fellow PE-owned network security firm Websense instead. Earlier this year, Blue Coat’s original PE owner, Thoma Bravo, sold the company to Bain Capital. (Incidentally, Goldman Sachs worked Blue Coat’s LBO as well as the secondary transaction.)
Subscribers to 451 Research can see our report on this deal – including valuation, market context and integration outlook – on our website later today and in tomorrow’s 451 Market Insight.
For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA