The Corum Group’s research team keeps track of every tech M&A transaction so we can keep ahead of the trends and keep an eye on what comes next. Here are some important deals we noted, and some facts that caught our eye.
- Deal value from megadeals was almost double this year what it was last July. This is driven by buys from IT Services players, and, of course, healthy SaaS valuations are a big part of this.
- Yahoo went on a tear this summer, with six transactions in July and several more in August. Most importantly, one of these purchases was the first China acquisition in more than ten years for Yahoo. This is in keeping with the heightened activity we’ve come to expect from Asia.
- We saw a substantial swing in activity in the restaurant/food service SaaS sector, including OpenTable’s purchase of Rezbook from UrbanSpoon, consolidating reservation services, and Yelp’s purchase of SeatMe, so that Yelp now has two reservation suppliers, as they also continue to have a relationship with OpenTable.
- We’ve also been watching a trend in the infrastructure market with key acquisitions of virtualization and network security firms. The largest example of this from last month was Cisco’s purchase of Sourcefire for more than $2.5B. This builds up Cisco’s security coverage, in addition to two previous acquisitions, Virtuata and Cognitive Security.