Tag: Boomi

Actian persuading Pervasive to go private

Ben Kolada

Contact: Ben Kolada, Thejeswi Venkatesh

After a tough 15 years in the public spotlight, Pervasive Software may have finally found a graceful exit. The data integration vendor, whose revenue has flattened since the turn of the century, today announced that it has received an unsolicited $154m buyout offer from Actian.

Pervasive would be wise to accept the offer, as the Austin, Texas-based company had done little to excite investors during its public lifetime. The company’s annual revenue has been roughly in the $40-50m range ever since 2000, and its shares have appreciated less than the broad, tech-heavy Nasdaq.

The lackluster performance factored into today’s offer. Actian’s bid values Pervasive at 2.3 times trailing sales. The best comparable deal is IBM’s Cast Iron Systems pickup in May 2010, which we estimate was valued at 6.7x revenue. And Boomi took an estimated 20x valuation in its sale to Dell in November 2011, though that target was much smaller. In fact, had it not been for Pervasive’s strong cash balance, the deal value would have been much less palatable. Pervasive held $42m in cash and no debt as of June. That treasury reduces the acquisition’s total cost to Actian by more than one-third.

Pressuring Pervasive’s shareholders to act on the offer, Actian is taking an unusually persuasive tone in its acquisition announcement, blatantly pointing out that its offer is the highest closing price reached by Pervasive’s common shares in the past 10 years. The deal carries a 30% premium to Pervasive’s closing share price on Friday, August 10.

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The rich valuation of integration

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

A lot of attention (and the accompanying financial rewards) around data management has tended to pile up in security, storage, analytics and other well-known market segments. Rather quietly but consistently, data integration has joined the list of richly valued markets as customers use these offering to get at the massive stores of information that run their businesses. The premium valuation is showing up both on Wall Street and, just recently, in M&A, too.

Take the case of Informatica. Shares of the data-integration provider have nearly doubled over the past year, and currently fetch their highest price in a decade. Informatica currently trades at a $3.8bn market capitalization, a rather rich six times its projected 2010 sales of $640m. The company has always stressed that part of its value has been in its independence among the software giants, but Informatica has nonetheless attracted M&A speculation in the past.

Those highly valued (and highly visible) public market vendors have helped drive up the valuation of smaller data-integration startups. For instance, we estimate that IBM paid about $200m for Cast Iron Systems, which we understand was running at about $30m in sales. And just last week, Dell reached for Boomi in a deal that valued the company at more than twice that multiple. (Subscribers can see our full report, which includes our estimates on the revenue as well as the price of Boomi.)