Tag: SYMC

Unexpected partners in e-discovery dance

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

After a flurry of more than a half-dozen e-discovery acquisitions from mid-2007 to mid-2008, deal flow has dried up in the sector. Buyers during the active period included companies that, broadly speaking, have an interest in storing, managing and searching electronic information, including such tech giants as Seagate Technology, Iron Mountain and Autonomy Corp. Collectively, spending on all the e-discovery deals in that one-year period topped $800m.

And then, like the rest of the M&A market, e-discovery activity dropped off dramatically. In this vacuum, rumors started bouncing around. The main one, which we noted last October, had Symantec looking closely at Kazeon. The two companies have been partners for a year, with Kazeon able to integrate with Symantec’s Enterprise Vault and Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator. (We also did a broader matchmaking report on the sector right around that time.)

And while a pairing between Kazeon and Symantec may well have made sense, the e-discovery vendor ended up selling to EMC on Tuesday. (Terms were not disclosed, but one report put the price at $75m. We think that may well turn out to be a bit higher than the amount EMC actually paid, particularly since we understand that Kazeon was only running at about $10m in sales.) So we were a bit off on our pairing for Kazeon, just as we were off on our assumption that EMC would reach for its longtime e-discovery partner, StoredIQ. Undeterred by that, we find ourselves nonetheless wondering if StoredIQ will end up at Symantec. There’s certainly some logic to that pairing. But then again, that was also true for the other deals we came up with that never got signed.

SaaS deals echo in security industry

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

There are more than a few echoes of Symantec’s purchase of MessageLabs last October in McAfee’s reach last week for MX Logic. In terms of strategy, both acquisitions added millions of end users of on-demand security to the two largest security software companies, which have been slowly looking to increase that side of their business. MessageLabs had attracted more than eight million users at 19,000 customers, while MX Logic brings more than four million users at 30,000 customers.

As far as deal terms go, both buys were done at a similar valuation. Symantec paid 4.8 times trailing sales for MessageLabs, while we estimate McAfee is paying closer to 4 times trailing sales for MX Logic. (If we include the potential $30m earnout in the price, the multiple hits 4.9 times MX Logic’s trailing revenue.) And, we would add that both deals stand as the largest security transactions of their respective years, with the sales of these private software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies eclipsing the prices paid even for public vendors. Symantec shelled out $695m in cash for MessageLabs, topping McAfee’s $497m pickup of Secure Computing as the largest security deal in 2008. So far this year, McAfee’s $140m purchase of MX Logic is the industry’s biggest security transaction, slightly ahead of the contested take-private of Entrust for $124m.

We also suspect that both SaaS acquisitions will pay dividends for Symantec and McAfee. (We have heard from several sources that Symantec is particularly high on its reach across the Atlantic for MessageLabs.) Undoubtedly, these deals will deliver a higher return than the other large SaaS security acquisition, Google’s pickup of Postini. Done two years ago, that buy handed Postini a valuation that’s twice as rich as either MessageLabs or MX Logic. But unlike the moves by Symantec and McAfee, Google didn’t snag Postini for its security offering. Instead, the search giant had the ill-conceived notion that a startup could serve as the platform for its push of Google Apps. Not surprisingly, that idea hasn’t panned out. We certainly haven’t heard much about Postini in the two years since the search giant bought it.

Just how far has the CDP market fallen?

Brenon Daly

by Brenon Daly, Henry Baltazar

In the days before the big storage vendors turned continuous data protection (CDP) into a feature rather than a stand-alone product, investors in CDP startups could still make decent returns. Both Kashya and Topio raised about $20m in VC backing, and ended up exiting for eight times that amount. Kashya sold to EMC for $153m in cash in May 2006 while Topio, which wisely blended CDP with heterogeneous replication in its offerings, went to NetApp for $160m in cash a half-year later. (Of the two deals, NetApp-Topio has been the underwhelming transaction. NetApp recently shuttered the SnapMirror for Open Systems product line that it picked up with Topio.)

Since those paydays, however, CDP valuations have plummeted. Symantec acquired assets of Revivio for an estimated $20m in November 2006, while Double-Take Software handed over just $8.3m for TimeSpring Software in late 2007. But even those deals seem rich when we consider BakBone Software’s recent reach for CDP startup Asempra Technologies. Under terms of the deal, BakBone is shelling out just $2.1m for Asempra, which had raised $36m from its backers. To add insult to injury, BakBone is paying for the acquisition mostly in equity, with $1.7m of the price tag covered by its illiquid, Pink Sheets-traded paper. We would note that Asempra’s owners are getting 3.8 million shares of BakBone, which typically only trade about 30,000 shares each session.

Select CDP transactions

Date Acquirer Target Price
May 2009 BakBone Software Asempra Technologies $2.1m
December 2007 Double-Take Software TimeSpring Software $8.3m
November 2006 Symantec Revivio $20m*
November 2006 NetApp Topio $160m
May 2006 EMC Kashya $153m
March 2006 Atempo Storactive Not disclosed

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase *451 Group estimate

A somewhat secure M&A market

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

With RSA set to open later this week, we thought we’d take a look back on deal flow since the trade show closed last year. Over the past year, we’ve seen some 83 acquisitions of security companies, with total spending of about $4.2bn. While that’s down from the comparable year-earlier period (April 2007-April 2008: 90 deals worth $5.2bn), the drop-off in security M&A has not been as steep as the overall decline in tech deals. In fact, the number of security transactions slipped just 7% from the previous year, compared to an 18% drop in the number of total tech M&A. Spending on security deals also fell less than the overall market.

Moreover, there are a number of trends that have emerged since the last RSA event that suggest security M&A may well remain healthier than the overall market. For starters, the big shoppers have done big deals. By our tally, Symantec has inked the largest security transaction since the end of last year’s RSA, paying $695m in cash to bolster its on-demand offering with MessageLabs. And McAfee checked in with the second-largest acquisition. Its $497m all-cash purchase of Secure Computing was its largest deal in a decade, and its only acquisition of a public company in at least seven years (excluding the pickup of Bulletin Board-listed Citadel Security Software in 2006).

In addition to the strategic vendors, we’re also seeing financial buyers – both through funds and PE-backed companies – looking to do deals. For instance, Sophos went back to its investors to help finance its $341m acquisition of Utimaco, the largest purchase by a privately held security company of a public counterpart. Also, Vector Capital took home Aladdin Knowledge Systems and, more recently, Thoma Bravo has a pending $114m offer for Entrust. Certainly there have been a few scrap sales, but that’s to be expected in an over-funded market like security. Overall, deal flow remains comparatively healthy in the security sector.

Symantec goes box shopping?

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

After holding off for some time, Websense finally rolled out its first secure Web gateway appliance earlier this month. Now we’re hearing that another major security vendor is about to get into the box business. Only this time, it’ll be through acquisition, rather than internal development like it was at Websense. Several market sources have indicated that Symantec has purchased Mi5 Networks, a security appliance startup based in Sunnyvale, California.

The acquisition is expected to be announced at next week’s RSA conference, according to a source. If indeed the deal goes through, it will be Symantec’s first since picking up MessageLabs for $695m last October. Obviously, the purchase of five-year-old Mi5 would be much smaller. (We weren’t able to learn terms of the deal.)

Mi5 has raised just $3.5m in venture backing from Labrador Ventures, First Round Capital and several angel investors. Among the company’s early backers is Sunil Paul, who founded Brightmail. (That’s right, the very same company that was run by current Symantec CEO Enrique Salem.) And finally, there’s an even more direct link in the rumored pairing: Mi5 is currently headed by Doug Camplejohn, a former executive at Vontu, which Symantec acquired in late 2007.

Spring cleaning

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

For many tech companies, it’s time for a bit of spring cleaning. Specifically, there’s been a fair amount of sweeping out of corner offices. Last week saw Time Warner turn over the reins of its struggling AOL unit to a former Google sales executive. (Yes, we share the puzzlement around Tim Armstrong’s move.) Today, Internap Network Services got a fresh face at the top as wheeler-dealer Eric Cooney had his first day as chief executive at the beaten-down networking company. And in just two weeks, John Thompson ends a decade-long run as CEO of Symantec, turning over the security and storage giant to current COO Enrique Salem.

Amid all these moves, we wonder if the sweeping changes in companies’ executive suites will be accompanied by some sweeping out of companies’ portfolios. In the case of AOL, we’re pretty sure that the new appointment will hasten a sale of the unit. (My colleague Thomas Rasmussen noted last summer the concerning ‘lack of urgency’ at Time Warner over AOL, even as subscribers continued to plummet.) When Symantec announced last November that Salem would take the top spot, we speculated that NetBackup, Symantec’s backup and recovery unit, could find its way onto the auction block.

But what about today’s appointment at Internap? We wonder if the new leadership might not take a fresh approach to its underperforming content delivery network (CDN) unit. Internap’s big move into CDN came in October 2006, when it paid $217m in stock for VitalStream Holdings. Internap has acknowledged that it overpaid for the company, writing down a chunk of the purchase price.

And, as my colleague Jim Davis noted in a Tier1 report last week, the performance of Internap’s CDN business has lagged that of its rivals. In fact, Internap’s CDN unit has posted revenue declines for three straight quarters. We would hasten to add that the company’s just-appointed CEO has a solid M&A record behind him. In his previous post as head of Tandberg Television, Cooney oversaw a number of acquisitions before selling the company to Ericsson in early 2007. Could he be planning some dealmaking around Internap’s CDN business?

Dealing with a legacy

Brenon Daly

Justly or not, acquisitions go a long way toward shaping a CEO’s legacy. (If you don’t believe us, just ask Jerry Levin, who sold Time Inc for what turned out to be a pile of wampum, in the form of overinflated AOL equity.) With Monday’s announcements that two major tech CEOs are on their way out, we pause to look at how deals – or lack of deals – will shape their respective legacies.

Let’s start with Symantec’s John Thompson, who will leave the storage and security giant by the end of its current fiscal year next April. Under his nearly decade-long leadership, Symantec shares rose some 500%, compared to a flat performance over the same period in shares of rival McAfee and a 40% decline in the Nasdaq. However, the one blemish on his record is Symantec’s largest-ever deal, its $13.5bn purchase of Veritas. (Thompson guided Symantec through more than 40 other acquisitions during his tenure.) Symantec shares peaked at about the time the company announced the deal, and have given back most of the gains they had piled up since mid-2003.

And then there’s Yahoo’s once-and-future king, Jerry Yang. We’re guessing history will be less kind to the man who turned down Microsoft’s offer of at least $31 for each share of Yahoo. Shares of the foundering search giant briefly dipped into the single digits earlier this month. However, they jumped almost 10% on Tuesday as Wall Street applauded the imminent departure of Yang, who has overseen the incineration of some $20bn of shareholder value since he reassumed the top spot at Yahoo in June 2007.

Aside from the ‘relief rally’ for Yang’s move, Yahoo shares also got a boost from speculation that the turnover in the corner office makes a deal with Microsoft more likely. We have our doubts about that. Instead, we’d focus on what the CEO change at Symantec means for deal activity. Our bet: Incoming CEO Enrique Salem will unwind several large chunks of the Veritas business, perhaps starting with NetBackup. As recently as last summer, Thompson said ‘nothing’ from the under-performing Veritas portfolio was for sale. Salem will set the company’s line on that in the future, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see NetBackup or other storage assets find their way onto the block.

Symantec-Veritas without the strings

Brenon Daly

Where Symantec purchased, McAfee will partner. Having watched its major security competitor get bogged down with a storage acquisition, McAfee has opted for a low-risk partnership to tie its security products with storage. The largest stand-alone security vendor said Tuesday that it has struck an alliance with data management software provider CommVault. The initial integrated product, which will put CommVault’s storage resource management tool into McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator console, will be available next year.

With modest integration and no bundled products planned, we would characterize McAfee’s loose partnership with CommVault as ‘Symantec-Veritas lite.’ And the two sides have reason to be cautious, given the struggles Symantec has had with its $13.5bn purchase of Veritas. (Although he continues to back the deal, Symantec CEO John Thompson has said the market considers the combination a ‘purple elephant’ and is uncertain of how to value it.) Since the transaction was announced in December 2004, Symantec shares have lost about half of their value, compared to a 20% decline in the Nasdaq and a slight 5% dip in McAfee stock.

Take the next exit

Brenon Daly1 Comment

In addition to clobbering existing stocks, the recent financial crisis has thinned the ranks of companies that we had expected to offer up stock in the coming months. In the past week alone, two companies that we had short-listed as IPO candidates (back when there was an IPO market) both got swallowed in trade sales.

On Wednesday, MessageLabs took a $695m offer from Symantec to help establish Big Yellow’s on-demand security offering. We understand MessageLabs had put together its underwriting ticket, and was planning to hit the market once the IPO window opened again. The IPO track was a distinct change from the path rumored for MessageLabs for more than two years. Several sources have indicated that MessageLabs had been shopped widely, with Trend Micro considered the most serious suitor at times.

And last week, we had to take LeftHand Networks out of the ‘shadow IPO pipeline’ when Hewlett-Packard came calling with a $360m offer. For more than a year we have noted that, pending the return of the market for new offerings, LeftHand appeared set to join the IPO parade of storage vendors (a half-dozen storage companies have gone public in the past two years). Instead, LeftHand sold, in a deal banked by Merrill Lynch. Incidentally, Merrill Lynch also banked the sale of another company that had its eye on the public market: Postini, a direct rival to MessageLabs, went to Google for $625m in July 2007.

Symantec ‘discovers’ Kazeon?

Brenon Daly

We hear Symantec, which has already inked five deals so far this year, may be getting close to another acquisition. Several sources have indicated that Big Yellow is planning to bolster its e-discovery offering through a purchase of startup Kazeon Systems. The two companies have been partners for a year, with Kazeon able to integrate with Symantec’s Enterprise Vault and Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator. Mountain View, California-based Kazeon has raised some $51m in venture backing from a handful of firms, including Redpoint Ventures, Clearstone Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures, which led the startup’s second round.

Several large technology vendors have already made e-discovery acquisitions, running up a tab of about a half-billion dollars in the past year alone. Most recently, Interwoven snagged on-demand e-discovery startup Discovery Mining. In the past, we have speculated that NetApp, which at one point accounted for more than half of Kazeon’s revenue through an OEM arrangement, would be a logical buyer of Kazeon. (We would note, however, that NetApp’s share of total sales at Kazeon has declined in recent months.)

While the e-discovery marketplace is relatively crowded, there are also several key challenges for companies looking to sell in this space. For starters, e-discovery products don’t immediately appeal to departments that must budget to buy software, such as IT or finance. The end user of the e-discovery software, which in many cases is a company’s general counsel, may not have the authority to write a check for an offering that can run $100,000 and up. We recently spoke with a venture capitalist who pulled the plug on an e-discovery startup in his portfolio. He pointed out that e-discovery projects are still largely taken on by service providers and companies have been slow to move that work in-house with purchased software. Recognizing this last fact, Kazeon has inked a number of service partners for its e-discovery products.

Selected e-discovery deals over the past year

Date Acquirer Target Deal value
July 2008 Interwoven Discovery Mining $36m
March 2008 Hewlett-Packard Tower Software $100m
February 2008 Dell MessageOne $155m
December 2007 Seagate Metalincs $74m
October 2007 Iron Mountain Stratify $158m

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase