SonicWALL’s big-ticket buyout

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

The recently closed leveraged buyout (LBO) of SonicWALL represents the largest straight take-private of a technology company so far this year. Thoma Bravo announced the deal, which has an equity value of $717m, back in early June and shareholders gave the LBO their blessing on Friday. The bid of $11.50 for each share stood as the highest price for SonicWALL shares since 2002. The close came only after an unidentified bidder – which some observers suspect may have been the ever-aggressive Barracuda Networks – stepped out of the process.

While other private equity (PE) shops have handed over bigger checks so far this year than the one Thoma Bravo is writing for SonicWALL, the buyout of the unified threat management vendor is the most money that a single firm has spent to take a public company off the market in 2010. Other large deals have involved either carve-outs (IDC, for instance, was majority owned by Pearson), secondary transactions (Hellman & Friedman’s flip of Vertafore to TPG Capital) or club deals (the consortium buyout of SkillSoft, as well as IDC).

The big-ticket buyouts of SonicWALL and other companies have helped push PE activity so far this year to essentially where it was in 2008. PE spending in the first two quarters of 2010 hit $14bn, just a shade under the $16bn we tallied in 2008 but a dramatic rebound over the paltry $2bn we saw in the first half of last year. The seven-fold increase in spending by buyout shops so far in 2010 has vastly outpaced the broad M&A market, which is basically running at twice the spending of the same time in recession-wracked 2009. See our full report on first-half tech M&A activity.

Tech M&A strikes back

Contact: Jarrett Streebin

As we pointed out in a recent webinar, 2010 is shaping up to be a great year for tech M&A. With year-to-date acquisition activity already surpassing last year’s total value and number of deals, it appears as though most companies were just sitting out the storm until it was time to start buying again.

The same trend in M&A can be seen in our annual AlwaysOn study. Each year before the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford, we do a breakdown on companies that have been selected to the AO Global 250. This year’s uptick was even more pronounced for firms selected by AlwaysOn. The median revenue multiple for AO companies was 5.2, compared with only 1.5 for tech M&A as a whole. This was based on the incredibly high volume of AO companies bought. From August 2009 to early July, there were 37 exits by AO companies, more than in any other 12-month period before. There was also the second-most total spending, with more than $5.6bn spent.

Some of the more notable exits were AdMob by Google, Greenplum by EMC and Cast Iron Systems by IBM. Google, EMC and IBM were some of the most acquisitive players this year, with each buying three AO companies. They cast their votes in the most meaningful way – by reaching for their wallets.

What’s up with the Bay Area?

Ben Kolada

Contact: Ben Kolada

Bay Area buyers have roared back to life in 2010. Compared to the same period a year ago, Bay Area buyers’ deal volume has increased 46%, while at the national level M&A has risen only 21%. Year-to-date, Bay Area-based acquirers announced 230 transactions, 19% of all technology deals undertaken by US-based companies. Further, these companies represent 19% of the total declared deal amount, including four of the 18 billion dollar-plus transactions made by US-based buyers. In the same period last year, Bay Area acquirers did only 162 deals.

So, what’s up with the Bay Area? Our data suggests that 15 big serial acquirers accounted for most of the increase. In fact, the number of Bay Area buyers acquiring three or more companies increased five-fold in 2010, compared to a 50% increase at the national level. After waiting on the sidelines in 2009, these companies have resumed M&A activity in full force. As a group, they bought 52 more companies in year-to-date 2010 than they bought in 2009. (An interesting note, Internet content providers were the preferred targets across the board, representing 22% of acquired companies at both the Bay Area and national levels.)

M&A activity by Bay Area buyers

Acquirer 2010 deal volume, year-to-date 2009 year-ago period
Google 15 0
Oracle 7 5
Playdom 6 0
Apple 4 0
Facebook 4 0
Symantec 4 1
Synopsys 4 1
Trimble Navigation 4 5
Cisco Systems 3 3
Hewlett-Packard 3 2
TIBCO Software 3 0
Twitter 3 0
VMware [EMC] 3 0
Yahoo 3 0
Zynga 3 0
Totals 69 17

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase, 451 Group research

Google is the poster child for Bay Area M&A. Year-to-date, the company has been involved in 15 transactions – the most since it inked the same amount of deals in full-year 2007. However, the search giant is noticeably absent from the 2009 ranking. Even though Mountain View, California-based Google had $8.6bn in cash at the end of 2008, the vendor took nearly a year-long break from M&A activity. Google’s M&A drought began after it acquired TNC in September 2008 and ended 11 months later, when it announced its first purchase of a public company – On2 Technologies – in August 2009.

Preview: Will FCoE-driven networking convergence lead to M&A?

Contact: Henry Baltazar

In an upcoming 451 TDM report, we argue that momentum behind SAN and IP networking convergence could fuel M&A in the fiber channel over Ethernet (FCoE) space. It all started in August 2002, when Cisco Systems paid $750m for Andiamo Systems. Reinforcing that acquisition, the vendor acted again four years later, buying Nuova Systems – the company that was largely responsible for developing the FCoE protocol – for $50m. Not to be outdone, primary players in the FCoE market responded. Brocade shelled out $2.6bn for Foundry Networks in July 2008, and Emulex picked up ServerEngines for $159m last month.

Brocade is currently the FCoE market share leader, holding an estimated 70.1% of the market at the start of 2010, compared to 66.8% at the beginning of 2009. However, the tide appears to be turning in the SAN switch space. According to Cisco’s latest third-quarter fiscal year 2010 earnings report (for the period ending May 1, 2010), its SAN business (switches and directors) grew 100% to $140m from $70m a year ago. The vendor’s Nexus product line has seen particularly stellar growth. Cisco’s top-of-rack Nexus 5000 has seen its sales grow 425% year-over-year and is at a current run rate of $250m per year. Further, Cisco’s Nexus 7000 core switch, which typically aggregates network traffic from rack-mounted switches, has also exhibited rapid growth to the tune of 281%.

The emergence of pre-integrated stacks of consolidated server, networking and storage hardware could spur other major players to make moves as well. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and Dell can now infuse new technologies and management tools into their offerings. As such, firms such as Akorri, Virtual Instruments and Aptare that can locate storage bottlenecks within SAN environments could become potential targets for these larger companies. There have already been a handful of storage management transactions over the last few years, including NetApp’s purchase of Onaro in January 2008, EMC’s takeout of WysDM Software in April 2008 and SolarWinds’ pickup of Tek-Tools in January.

Apple maps collision course with Google

Contact: Jarrett Streebin

Marking its second purchase of a mapping company in just nine months, Apple reportedly reached for startup Poly9 Group last week. Not much is known about Quebec City-based Poly9, which makes interactive 3-D software. (And not much can be gleaned from the company’s website, which no longer loads.)

Apple’s latest acquisition comes on the heels of its pickup of Placebase last October. The Los Angeles-based startup, which had been bootstrapped, specialized in maps similar to Google Maps but with more customization. With Poly9, Apple adds 3-D mapping capabilities that are comparable to Google Earth. Currently, Apple phones use Google Maps for mapping – but we can only assume that’s going to change once Apple rolls out these features.

Of course, this is just another area where the two once-friendly tech giants are finding themselves in competition with one another. And it’s not the first time that M&A has figured into the fight. Back in January, after losing the bidding war with Google for mobile advertising startup AdMob, Apple turned around and bought Quattro Wireless. Since then, Apple has rolled out its own mobile advertising platform, iAd. Apple’s expansion into mapping will definitely help its advertising efforts as mobile ads become increasingly targeted to a user’s exact location. With Apple and Google, which each hold some $30bn in cash, both targeting some of the same markets, we suspect they’ll be bumping into each other in future deals as well.

Nokia hiring by acquiring

Ben Kolada

In an unusual bit of dealmaking, Nokia bought geo-tagging vendor MetaCarta in April and then turned around and sold it three months later. The recent divestiture might appear to be a botched acquisition. However, as we look closer at the deal, it turns out that Nokia actually got what it wanted out of the purchase. It is retaining MetaCarta’s engineering team while shedding its enterprise accounts to Qbase. (Nokia didn’t really have any use for the startup’s enterprise business, which was largely oil and gas industry as well as government installations.)

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based MetaCarta employed approximately 20 development engineers, plus 15 enterprise sales and support staff. Although terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, we understand that Nokia paid about $30m for MetaCarta. If we look at the price in terms of what assets Nokia actually wanted to obtain, we pencil it out at about $1.5m per engineer. This is obviously an expensive way to recruit personnel, and underscores the increasing pressure that Nokia is seeing in the mobile-mapping space.

Nokia ‘hired’ MetaCarta’s engineers to reinforce the search feature in Ovi Maps, Nokia’s most popular application. MetaCarta is a specialist in geo-tagging unstructured text such as websites and emails. While mapping competitor Google does the same, MetaCarta’s information will be layered on NAVTEQ’s mapping data, which is arguably more detailed than Google’s maps.

The transaction is another in the long line of acquisitions that Nokia has made in its move toward mobile advertising. However, Nokia’s rivals have also been active in the mobile M&A space. Research In Motion reached for GPS vendor Dash Navigation in June 2009. In November 2009, Google outbid Apple and bought AdMob for $750m. In response, two months later, Apple picked up Quattro Wireless for an estimated $275m. Nokia hasn’t made a purchase of this magnitude, but we still believe it could be on the hunt for additional mobile providers. The company could build on its MetaCarta acquisition by buying location-based advertising vendor 1020 Placecast. The San Francisco-based firm is a major strategic partner of Nokia’s NAVTEQ, and would supplement MetaCarta’s geo-tagging capabilities.

A post-IPO shopping list for QlikTech

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly, Krishna Roy

Bucking the trend of trimmed prices and broken issues for tech IPOs, QlikTech debuted on the market Friday with a strong offering. The analytics vendor sold 11.2 million shares at $10 each, above the $8.50-9.50 range the company had set. In their Nasdaq debut, shares of QlikTech continued higher, changing hands at around $12.50 in early-afternoon trading. With 75 million shares outstanding, that gives the company an initial market capitalization of some $940m. (That’s basically spot-on to where we expected the company to begin its life on Wall Street when the paperwork first came in.)

As the proceeds from the IPO make their way to QlikTech, we’ve put together a handy-dandy shopping list for the company. Not that we necessarily expect QlikTech to immediately step into the M&A market. After all, it’s got a pretty solid business running right now. In recession-wracked 2009, QlikTech managed an impressive 33% increase in revenue. Even more impressive, the company doubled that rate in the first quarter of this year. Perhaps mindful of not messing with a good thing, QlikTech hasn’t done any deals up to now.

Nonetheless, my colleague Krishna Roy recently noted that QlikTech is essentially a one-product company that competes against the enterprise software giants that sell analytics as part of a larger product suite. (IBM, Oracle and SAP combined to snap up all three primary BI vendors in a string of deals that, collectively, set them back $15bn.) Further, one of QlikTech’s key technological advantages that the company helped pioneer (in-memory analytics) has become much more commonplace. Both of those facts turn up the competition on QlikTech, which might benefit from looking out-of-house for some additional technology.

If so, one area where we could imagine QlikTech going shopping is in the predictive analytics market. The company already offers some predictive analytics with the inclusion of advanced aggregation features in the latest QlikView 9. But additional technology could make for an easy knock-on sale to existing customers. (That’s a key for QlikTech, which gets roughly 60% of its revenue from existing customers.) Two small startups that might fit the bill for QlikTech are Revolution Analytics and Rapid-I.

NTT makes $3.2bn IT services play

Brenon Daly

Contact: John Abbott

Japanese telecommunications giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) has made a surprise offer for one of its existing partners, Dimension Data Holdings, an LSE- and Johannesburg Securities Exchange-listed IT services firm with roots in South Africa. This is an unusually large acquisition for a Japanese company, worth 120 pence per share, approximately £2.12bn ($3.2bn) in cash. That’s just over a 15 times EV/EBITDA multiple and 18x the closing share price before the announcement. (NTT has plenty of cash, with about $10bn on hand).

The Dimension Data board has recommended the offer and NTT has assurances from the directors and major shareholders Venfin DD Holdings and Allan Gray covering 52% of Dimension Data’s issued shares. The deal is expected to close by the end of October.

NTT cited the cloud computing opportunity as the main motivation behind the transaction. It brings to NTT specialist managed IT infrastructure and services capabilities that can now be rolled out on a global scale. NTT has its own managed network services, datacenters, system integration and mobile services, but Dimension Data adds to the development, operations and maintenance side of IT infrastructure, including network devices and servers running in customer sites. Geographically, NTT’s main strengths are in Asia, followed by Europe and the US; Dimension Data is strongest in Africa, the Middle East and Australia. NTT rival China Mobile has been making noises recently about investments in South Africa.

Dimension Data was founded in 1983 and listed on the JSE four years later. A series of acquisitions, including that of Plessey South Africa in 1998 and the European networking business of Comparex Holdings in 1999, helped it grow to over $2bn in revenue by 2003. (The deals have continued, with eight listed in The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase since 2004). At the end of fiscal 2009, revenue hit nearly $4bn and net profit was $135m. The company has 11,500 employees and more than 6,000 clients. JPMorgan Cazenove advised on the transaction for Dimension Data and Morgan Stanley for NTT.

Hardly a firecracker start to July M&A

Brenon Daly

Contact:  Brenon Daly

Just looking at the high-profile names that have been buyers so far this month, an observer could be forgiven for just assuming that we’re automatically going to top the record level of spending that we tallied for the second quarter. ADP, Facebook, EMC, IBM and Dell (among others) have all announced acquisitions in July, the first month of the third quarter. So M&A is back, right?

Maybe not. Although it’s still early (very early) in the third quarter, we don’t necessarily expect spending in the current quarter to eclipse the second-quarter level. In the April-June period, the value of transactions hit $62bn, more than 10% higher than any quarterly total we’ve seen since the Credit Crisis erupted two years ago. For the third quarter, we wouldn’t at all be surprised to see M&A spending slip back somewhere in the band of $30-50bn in quarterly deal flow that we’ve seen over the past two years.

Nearly halfway through July, we’re tracking to the lowest spending level in the past four months. In fact, July is shaping up to be 30-40% lower than the monthly totals from March to June. Granted, the start to July – with the long Independence Day weekend, not to mention the distraction of the World Cup – may not be representative for the full month. But it’s certainly an early indicator worth following. We’ll be looking at the current M&A market and what the rest of 2010 might hold for dealmakers in a special midyear webinar. Click here to register.

2010 activity, monthly

Month Deal volume Deal value
January 296 $5bn
February 278 $8.3bn
March 273 $17bn
April 252 $21.1bn
May 271 $20.3bn
June 260 $22.5bn

nextstop gets Facebooked

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Contact: Jarrett Streebin

After years of building up its platform organically, Facebook has been acquiring like mad this year. The Palo Alto, California-based startup has just purchased its fourth company since January, up from only one in 2009. The latest acquisition is nextstop, a user-generated travel recommendation site. Like earlier buys this year, this one is about adding features to the Facebook platform.

Location features are something Facebook has been promising for some time but has yet to deliver. The sheer growth of sites like Foursquare, Gowalla and SCVNGR has demonstrated widespread demand for location-based services and networks. Twitteradded location features through its Mixer Labs acquisition and Google already has a service called Latitude, in addition to having invested in SCVNGR, a network similar to Foursquare. Facebook has also recognized the attraction of such offerings. It’s rumored that it recently had talks with Foursquare about an acquisition.

However, what check-in-based sites like Foursquare and Gowalla lack is user-generated content. People can interact but there is no way for users to write reviews about locations they visit. It’s likely that with nextstop, Facebook will incorporate user reviews into its forthcoming location offering. Not only will users be able to see where their friends are, they will be able to read what they wrote about places. With these features, Facebook’s location offering will represent the next wave in location. That’s if it ever arrives. We’ll be looking at moves by Facebook and other key technology buyers as well as our outlook for dealmaking in the second half of the year in our midyear webinar on Thursday. Click here to register.