2015 Key Highlights

  • The largest transaction in 2015 was Dell, Inc.’s announced acquisition of EMC Corporation, a provider of cloud computing, data storage and other infrastructure technologies, for $67.48 billion. This was the highest value deal ever recorded in the industry.
  • Five of the top ten largest transactions in 2015 were completed by financial sponsors. The highest value private equity backed deal during the year was The Carlyle Group’s announced acquisition of Veritas Technologies Corporation, a storage and server management software solutions company, for $8 billion.
  • The most active acquirer in the Infrastructure Software segment in 2015 was IBM with six transactions: Gravitant, CleverSafe, StrongLoop, Appcore, Blue Box Group, and AlchemyAPI, Inc.
  • There were 327 financially sponsored transactions with an aggregate value of $57.83 billion, representing 16 percent of the total volume and 26 percent of the total value, respectively.

2015 Key Trends

  • Total transaction volume in 2015 increased by nine percent over 2014, from 1,860 to 2,028.
  • Total transaction value in 2015 rose by 72 percent over 2014, from $123.74 billion to $213.20 billion. Excluding the EMC Corporation deal, aggregate value gained 18 percent.
  • The median revenue multiple declined from 2.7x in 2014 to 2.4x in 2015. The median EBITDA multiple improved from 12.0x in 2014 to 13.8x in 2015.

M&A Market Overview

Berkery Noyes tracked 5,509 Software transactions between 2013 and 2015, of which 1,314 disclosed financial terms, and calculated the aggregate value to be $337.89 billion. Based on known transaction values, we project values of 4,195 undisclosed transactions to be $85.23 billion, totaling $423.12 billion worth of transactions tracked over the past three years.

Disclosed median enterprise value multiples for all segments combined in this report during the last 36 months were 2.5x revenue and 12.7x EBITDA.