Cisco’s $28 billion offer for enterprise cloud protection company Splunk is the biggest enterprise software deal so far in 2023, while last year’s biggest, Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware, is creeping closer to securing regulatory approval.
There was a sharp decline in software merger and acquisition activity in the second quarter of 2023, after limited signs of a recovery in the first quarter. Deal values for Q2 were down 85% year-on-year, compared to a 52% drop in Q1. Deal numbers also declined in Q2, after a small rise in Q1, according to risk and financial advisor Kroll.
One reason deals are getting smaller is that buyers are less willing to bet on future growth, and so ratios of enterprise value to revenue are getting smaller. Kroll noted that the ratio for ERP and supply chain management software vendors dropped from 11.0 in December 2021 to a low of 7.1 in December 2022, recovering slightly to 7.4 in June 2023. Over the same period the EV-to-revenue ratio for HCM software vendors dropped from 11.3 to 6.5 and for financial and accounting software vendors from 12.0 to 6.3. Vertical software vendors, already valued less highly, saw their EV-to-revenue ratio decline from 4.4 to 2.7 over the same period.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors have also seen their valuations crash. After a euphoric period early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when the median EV-to-revenue ratio for SaaS companies topped 15, it had dropped below 10 by December 2021 and was as low as 5.9 in June 2023.
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Despite the broader slump in valuations, there have still been a handful of billion-dollar-plus enterprise technology M&A deals thus far in 2023, including the acquisitions of Splunk, Qualtrics, Apptio, MosaicML, and Software AG.
For CIOs, these deals can disrupt strategic rollouts, spell a need to pivot to a new solution, signal sunsetting of essential technology, provide new opportunities to leverage newly synergized systems, and be a bellwether of further shifts to come in the IT landscape. Keeping on top of activity in this area can help your company make the most of emerging opportunities and steer clear of issues that often arise when vendors combine.
Here CIO.com rounds up of some of the most significant tech M&As of 2023 to date that could impact IT.
October 2023
Atlassian pays almost $1B for Loom
Atlassian, the developer of work management tools such as Jira, Confluence, and Trello, has agreed to acquire video messaging platform Loom for $975 million in stock and cash. It’s betting big that workers will prefer to send one another asynchronous video messages rather than text.
AMD plans to acquire AI software company Nod.ai
Chipmaker AMD is taking a leaf out of rival Nvidia’s playbook with a plan to buy AI software developer Nod.ai for an undisclosed sum. Nvidia has turned itself into a trillion-dollar company by building a full stack of generative AI models, tools to create them, and hardware to run them. In contrast to Nvidia’s proprietary software approach, AMD is pinning its hopes on an open-source strategy to drive demand for its hardware.
September 2023
Cisco to pay $28B for Splunk
Enterprise and cloud protection company Splunk could be part of Cisco a year from now, following a $28 billion bid from the networking equipment vendor. CEO Chuck Robbins sees the acquisition as a way for Cisco to expand its existing security products into a full-stack observability platform. He expects to close the deal by October 2024.
SAP adds LeanIX to its software portfolio
SAP is adding enterprise architecture management specialist LeanIX to its software stable. SAP is hoping that LeanIX’s AI-powered tool can help customers move off its legacy ERP system and onto S/4HANA in the cloud. Recent research by LeanIX showed that only 12% of SAP customers have completed their move to the cloud, eight years after S/4HANA was released and just four years before SAP ends mainstream support for its predecessor, ECC6.
Akeneo buys Unifai to clean up product catalogs
Product information management (PIM) specialist Akeneo has acquired Unifai, which uses AI for data collection, cleansing, and categorization. Akeneo plans to roll Unifai’s tools into its Product Cloud offering, where it will help with supplier data onboarding and pricing integration.
Rocket Software integrates tcVision developer BOS
Rocket Software, the company that lost out in July’s bidding war for Software AG, has landed on another acquisition target. On Sept. 7, it bought BOS, a German developer of data integration tools, including tcVision, which has been renamed Rocket Data Replicate and Sync. The deal will help Rocket round out its portfolio of mainframe modernization tools.
August 2023
IFS buys Falkonry to boost its ERP asset management services
IFS has agreed to acquire Falkonry, developer of an AI-based time-series data analytics tool. IFS plans to incorporate it into its ERP platform to boost its enterprise asset management (EAM) services capabilities.
Broadcom closes in on VMware acquisition
Broadcom secured approval for its $61 billion acquisition of VMware from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority on Aug. 21, five weeks after gaining similar approval from the European Commission, the EU’s antitrust regulator. However, the company still needs the go-ahead from Chinese regulators for the bid, which it launched way back in May 2022. Broadcom representatives are still confident the deal will close by the end of the company’s fiscal year on Oct. 30, 2023.
Adobe-Figma deal runs into regulatory trouble
Adobe’s plan to buy one of the largest rivals to its online design tool Creative Cloud is having less luck with competition regulators. On Aug. 7 the European Commission called in Adobe’s September 2022 agreement to buy Figma for $20 billion for a full investigation, while the UK Competition and Markets Authority said in late June that it would oppose the deal unless Adobe made undertakings to avoid the deal resulting in a substantial lessening of competition. The US Department of Justice is also said to be considering an antitrust lawsuit to block the deal. Figma is more often seen in the art department than the IT department, but with Adobe also a big player in customer data platforms, CIOs will be wary of the company getting an even bigger hold on their cloud software spend.
ServiceNow partners in Scandinavia and Germany merge
The Cloud People (TCP), a ServiceNow partner based in Norway, has acquired its German counterpart Nuvolax. The deal nets TCP a delivery center in Brazil, giving it 24-hour service coverage and opening up access to the US market, where it has growth ambitions.
July 2023
Teradata acquires Stemma to enhance analytics
Teradata has bought Stemma, the three-year-old developer of an AI-based data exploration tool, to accelerate its Vantage self-service analytics platform.
ServiceNow agrees to buy retail data platform G2K
ServiceNow is getting ready to sprinkle some more AI magic on its automation of workflows in the retail industry. It has agreed to buy G2K, the developer of the Parsifal data platform, which the company says can analyze the movement of customers and products around stores.
Silver Lake buys majority stake in Software AG
Software AG, the German maker of tools for managing IoT data, APIs, and legacy mainframe apps, looks set to become part of Silver Lake, which also owns stakes in Airtable, Celonis, Qualtrics and Splunk. The investment fund secured a 63% stake in the company, valuing it at $2.4 billion, after a bidding war that pitted it against mainframe modernization firm Rocket Software. Prior to the deal, Software AG’s largest shareholder was a foundation, SAGST, created by one of its founders: SAGST’s 30% holding had for years protected the company from takeovers, but in April the foundation agreed to sell most of its stake to Silver Lake. Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO of Software AG since August 2018, said the company will benefit from the stability and certainty provided by a single major shareholder.
June 2023
IBM offers $4.6 billion for Apptio
IBM has agreed to buy cloud cost control specialist Apptio from private equity firm Vista, which has owned it since 2018. IBM plans to roll Apptio’s offering into its IT automation portfolio — AIOps, Instana and Turbonomics, — to help enterprises optimize both application cost and application performance from a single control center. The acquisition will also give IBM access to anonymized data on $450 billion of IT spending that it can use to train AI tools for further optimization.
FTC case against Microsoft’s $68.7 billion bid for Activision Blizzard reaches court
The US Federal Trade Commission has aired its concerns about Microsoft’s plans to acquire games developer Activision Blizzard in a US federal court, six months after it sought an injunction to stop the deal and 18 months after the companies announced it. Microsoft’s bid, a whopping $68.7 billion, dwarfs even the $19.7 billion it paid for Nuance Communications in 2021 or the $26.2 billion it paid for LinkedIn in 2018.
Activision Blizzard’s apps are not typically authorized on enterprise networks, but when the deal was first announced, it seemed there was a chance its technology for creating and animating virtual worlds could make it into the workplace. Back then, Microsoft said the acquisition would give it the building blocks for the metaverse. However, since then Microsoft has laid off 100 staff in its industrial metaverse unit, essentially closing it down.
While regulators in the European Union and South Africa have now approved the deal, the FTC and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority are still against it.
Databricks buys MosaicML for $1.3 billion
Generative AI is a hot commodity these days, and Databricks for one can’t get enough of it. In addition to developing its own large language model (LLM) based on open data, Dolly, it has now acquired MosaicML, the creator of two open source models, MPT-7B and MPT-30B. With the acquisition, Databricks hopes to make it easier for enterprises to build large language models based on their own data.
Silver Lake buys Qualtrics for $12.5 billion
Qualtrics has changed hands again. SAP acquired it for $8 billion in 2018, but the graft didn’t take, and SAP soon sold a minority stake. Now Silver Lake and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board have snapped up the whole company. The deal closed June 28. SAP will remain a go-to-market partner of Qualtrics and service their joint customers.
Data center operator buys its way to a greener carbon footprint
Data center operator nLighten has bought Euclyde, owner of six data centers in neighboring France. One of nLighten’s goals with the acquisition is to reduce its carbon footprint: in France 70% of electricity comes from nuclear power stations, while in nLighten’s home country, Germany, around one-third of it comes from coal, which has the highest carbon intensity of all electricity sources.
HCM vendor UKG buys payroll provider Immedis
UKG’s cloud-based HCM software already delivers a wide range of functions to some enterprise HR departments. Now it is now adding to those capabilities with the acquisition of Immedis, which helps enterprises and mid-size companies operating in more than one country to manage payroll across borders. UKG plans to integrate the new functionality into its software suite as UKG One View later this year.
IBM buys French cloud services firm Agyla
Looking to improve its offering for French clients, IBM has agreed to buy Agyla, a provider cloud platform engineering services. It plans to incorporate Agyla into its IBM Consulting division.
May 2023
Survey company Momentive says yes to STG deal
Symphony Technology Group has closed its acquisition of Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey) for $1.5 billion. STG’s portfolio also includes ERP vendor CAI Software and a stake in cybersecurity firm RSA.
Snowflake adds Neeva’s generative AI to its data warehouse platform
Snowflake has acquired Neeva, a small startup that used generative AI to improve the search experience. The deal came just days after Neeva closed its subscription-based, ad-free search engine. Building a search experience people were willing to pay for, while hard, turned out to be the easy part, according to a farewell blog post from Neeva’s founders: “Convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place.” Now it’s up to Snowflake to convince its customers to change.
IBM to automate cloud data protection with Polar Security acquisition
Data security posture management specialist Polar Security will soon be part of IBM, which plans to integrate the Israeli company into its Guardium range of data security products. There, it will help IBM customers pinpoint security risks and compliance violations. IBM didn’t say how much it had paid for the company, but Israeli news site Tech12 put the price at $60 million.
Databricks buys Okera to keep tabs on LLMs
Databricks has been encouraging enterprises to experiment with large language models, offering one of its own, Dolly, as open source. Now it’s offering its customers a way to keep such models under control with the acquisition of LLM governance specialist Okera.
April 2023
Ciphr adds diversity with Marshall acquisition
Marshall E-learning, a provider of diversity and inclusion training, is now part of Ciphr, a UK-based HR SaaS platform. Ciphr expects the deal will enable it to expand its existing online learning offering.
March 2023
Vista buys Equity Partners buys insurance software firm Duck CreekQuantive buys OKR consulting firm
Following its acquisition of consulting firm AuxinOKR, strategy execution platform Quantive is rolling out a new consulting division to support enterprises adopting its tools for measuring business results.
Quantexa is loving the Aylien
Quantexa has acquired Aylien, a Dublin-based natural language processing firm specializing in risk management and market insight. It will use Aylien’s NLP skills to enhance its AI-based decision intelligence tools for the finance industry.
Capita lays off employment screening business
Matrix SCM, a British IT staffing agency, has acquired Security Watchdog, a provider of employment screening services, from Capita, the giant IT services business. It’s part of a broader sell-off for Capita, which also let go of three other human resources companies in March: Capita Resourcing, HR Solutions, and ThirtyThree. Capita is selling non-core businesses to reduce its debts and refocusing on public sector and customer experience work.
Key secures Rocket
Mainframe software developer Rocket Software has bought mainframe security specialist Key Resources. The deal will enable Rocket to offer additional security-related services to the mainframe users it works with.
February 2023
Thomas Bravo manages $8B spend on Coupa Software
Coupa Software, a provider of business spend management tools, has been acquired by investment firm Thomas Bravo in an $8 billion deal. Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has taken a minority stake. Thomas Bravo also owns business payments company BottomLine, open finance platform Solifi, data management tool Talend and a raft of security and identity management software companies.
Arm sells software arm
Processor designer Arm has sold Forge, its suite of software development tools for high-performance computing, to Linaro, which develops and supports a range of other Arm-specific software for enterprises. Arm originally acquired Forge in 2016 to support its entry into the HPC market.
Accenture buys Morphus, adds new South-American cybersecurity center
With its acquisition of Brazilian cybersecurity and threat intelligence provider Morphus, Accenture has added a new site from which to supervise its offering of managed security services and advanced analytics. The cyber fusion center in Fortaleza, Brazil, was previously Morphus Labs.
January 2023
OpenText buys Micro Focus for $5.8 billion
OpenText has closed its acquisition of Micro Focus, a vendor of mainframe modernization and application portfolio management tools. OpenText’s first move on completing the deal was to begin laying off staff. It announced an 8% reduction in workforce to realize $400 million in annual cost savings to help finance the $5.8 million purchase, which it first announced in August 2022.
Dell buys Cloudify
After selling off its stake in VMware, Dell is moving back into the cloud software business with the acquisition of Cloudify. The Israeli startup has developed a cloud orchestration platform to help devops teams automate provisioning.
McKinsey buys machine MLops platform Iguazio
McKinsey is adding to its stable of machine learning experts with the acquisition of software developer Iguazio. In time, it plans to integrate it into QuantumBlack, a McKinsey business unit that has specialized in AI for the last decade. Iguazio is the developer of a commercial MLops platform and two open-source tools: MLRun, for ML pipeline orchestration, and Nuclio, which offers real-time serverless functions for automating application deployment.
HPE buys Pachyderm to automate ML development
Pachyderm, a developer of data pipeline automation tools used in training machine learning models, is now part of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. The company’s software will become part of the HPE Machine Learning Development Environment.
Quantum fusion: IonQ ties up with Entangled Networks
With each of the handful of companies developing quantum computers betting on a different architecture, a cross-platform quantum computing operating system is still a way off. That’s why quantum hardware companies like IonQ are developing their own software tools too. To speed up the process, IonQ has acquired Entangled Networks, a developer of software optimization tools for quantum computers, and is building a new Canadian subsidiary around the software team.
Two ServiceNow partners tie the knot
ServiceNow solutions provider Thirdera has acquired another ServiceNow partner, SilverStorm Solutions, to expand its reach in Europe. Thirdera also operates in South America. Combined, the two ServiceNow Elite-level partners have over 900 employees.
December 2022
IBM buys Octo Consulting Group
Appropriately enough for its eighth deal of 2022, IBM’s latest acquisition is called Octo Consulting Group. Not to be confused with Octo Technology, a French consulting company bought by Accenture in 2017, IBM’s Octo is a US company specializing in government IT modernization projects that was until recently owned by Arlington Capital Partners. Its 1,500 staff will join IBM Consulting.
Intercontinental Exchange’s bid for Black Knight in doubt
Another of the biggest software deals of 2022 is also in doubt. In May, Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange and a host of mortgage technology companies, bid $13.1 billion for Black Knight, a mortgage software company.
In late December, though, the Financial Services Committee of the US House of Representatives wrote to the US Federal Trade Commission to express its concern that the deal could result in too much concentration in the mortgage origination market.
Big though the deal is, it’ll have few consequences for CIOs outside the mortgage services industry.
Cognizant buys AustinCSI and assets of OneSource Virtual
IT services giant Cognizant has added 175 digital transformation consultants in Texas with the acquisition of AustinCSI, a company specializing in the design of cloud and automation systems. It has also acquired 400 specialists from another Texas company, Workday partner OneSource Virtual, and bought Houston-based SAP services company Utegration, bringing it close to 350,000 employees worldwide.
LumApps buys chatbot maker Vizir to improve employee experience
French employee experience platform LumApps has snapped up Vizir, developer of a no code chatbot creation platform, to help enterprises deliver more interactive services to employees. Companies building their own tools for natural language understanding like this will face strong headwinds from the likes of ChatGPT, an interactive version of the giant AI language model GPT that can be trained for use in multiple domains.
November 2022
After Broadcom made its offer in May, it’s a step closer to closing the $61 billion deal to buy VMware, after that company’s shareholders voted to accept the offer. VMware is looking to expand its virtualization technologies into the 5G edge computing market, where Broadcom’s radio and networking chip business could give it a foothold.
RegScale, GovReady join forces to implement OSCAL governance formats
RegScale, a developer of governance, risk, and compliance software, has acquired compliance-as-code platform GovReady. The two companies are early adopters of NIST’s Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL), used for representing control catalogs and system security plans in machine-readable format.
SAP service providers join forces
Codestone Group is still expanding. After its May acquisition of Clarivos, the company has added data analytics and BI specialist DSCallards to its collection. The purchase will allow it to expand its services capabilities around SAP and Microsoft ERP tools.
Anonos buys Statice to boost data protection
Anonos, a developer of software for pseudonymizing personal data in use, has acquired Statice, creator of a tool for generating synthetic data. With European regulators cranking up fines for breaches of GDPR, tools that allow enterprises to move data between jurisdictions while maintaining protection will only grow in importance.
For last year’s mergers and buyouts, see The biggest enterprise technology M&A deals of 2022.
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