CORUM M&A REPORT
Jon Scott
Thanks, Nat. Let me start by discussing Silicon Valley-based Pubmatic's recent acquisition of Boston-based Revinet, which was announced a couple of weeks back. Corum represented Revinet in the transaction. Both companies play in the digital advertising space, where there has been a lot of strategic moves and consolidation going on. The fit between these two private companies was excellent, very synergistic. Pubmatic had some nice investors behind then, including Draper Fisher. Pubmatic provides premium online publishers, typically publishers that are creating their own content, and they provide them with one holistic selling platform, with a high touch service to increase their online and mobile ad sales. Examples of their applications include real-time bidding, audience targeting, and brand protection. The whole goal for Pubmatic then is to help the publisher sell their ad inventory more efficiently and at higher revenue levels. Revinet provided some excellent tools to help publishers monetize their remnant advertising, and essentially that is the advertising left over after the direct sales force is unable to sell it. It's kind of like an airline that sells a few open seats on the airplane because once it has left the gate the empty seat, or in this case the ad space, can't be sold or monetized.
Revinet brought in some marquee customers to the deal and a staff of really experienced digital advertising experts, so this was a really interesting transaction.
Let me jump onto the next transaction, and that was PlumChoice acquiring Tific. This is interesting, PlumChoice is a Boston-based company and Tific is based in Sweden. Corum represented Tific in this deal and this was another deal with strong synergy. The acquisition brings together PlumChoice's award-winning platform for delivering remote service relationship management with Tific's self-service and self-healing IT tools. Essentially the integrated continuum of these two products is support protocols that allow companies to more efficiently provide customers with a full spectrum of support technology, starting before the first service call all the way through supporting all the customer's problems.
Tific's automated support solutions are used by some of the world's largest companies and they automatically diagnose and resolve technical problems to help technicians before the problem occurs, the customer is actually able to have their system take care of the system and support it. If they then need to deal with a call center individual, the information on the work they've done already is accessible, so it is really integrating PlumChoice's platform with Tific's, and that really came together nicely. Both are privately held and were venture funded companies.
The final transaction I'll mention is TalkSwitch, a Canadian company and a client of ours, and their acquisition by Silicon Valley-based Fortinet. This was announced a couple of weeks ago as well. TalkSwitch was a privately held company focused on development and delivery of award-winning VOIP phone systems and these were systems for companies at locations with less than 64 phones. The company had moved more than 100,000 products through their network. Fortinet is a worldwide provider of network security appliances in the unified threat management area, and their products and subscriptions provide integrated high performance protection against security threats while really simplifying the IT security infrastructure. Their customers include some very large companies and government entities. For Fortinet these talks were designed to expand their portfolio and reach into the multi-service business gateway market. This is an interesting acquisition, taking these two technologies and putting them together.
Corum also has another client that closed in the customer engagement space, and that has not been announced yet, but we'll talk about that next time.
Nat, back to you.
Nat Burgess
Thanks, Jon, we appreciate that update, its definitely an exciting time with a lot of transactions closing a lot more in LOI.