April 13, 2015 ONLINE & MOBILE VOLUME LED BY DEALS IN THE SAAS & CLOUD SEGMENT

Berkery Noyes’ Online and Mobile report for Q1 2015 showed that deal volume saw a four percent uptick. This was its third straight quarterly increase. Total transaction value gained 15 percent over the past three months, from $22.6 billion to $26.1 billion.

SaaS & Cloud volume increased for the fifth consecutive quarter with a 17 percent rise in Q1 2015. This was the segment’s largest quarter-to-quarter increase during the last five quarters. It also remained the most active Online and Mobile market, representing 30 percent of the industry’s aggregate volume year-to-date. E-Marketing & Search volume fell nine percent in Q1 2015, which marked a return to its Q4 2014 level.

E-Commerce deal activity remained about constant in Q1 2015. This followed a 33 percent gain in Q4 2014. Moreover, the E-Commerce segment represented four of the overall industry’s top ten largest deals in thus far in 2015. Online travel giant Expedia was responsible for two notable segment transactions, acquiring rival Orbitz Worldwide for $1.7 billion and Travelocity.com for $280 million.

This continues a trend of major search sites being acquired in the sector over the past several years, such as Priceline’s acquisition of Kayak.com for $1.5 billion and Expedia’s acquisition of Trivago for $506 million, both of which occurred in Q4 2012.

Meanwhile, the number of transactions in the consumer application subsector increased 18 percent on a quarterly basis, from 57 to 67. In terms of notable new mobile-based acquirers, technology and transportation company Uber acquired deCarta, a mapping and local search platform. With this transaction, Uber might be looking to move away from Google Maps and other external products as Google potentially seeks to launch its own driving service at some point.

Another high profile deal in this space was Ola’s acquisition of taxi rental aggregator TaxiforSure for $200 million. Ola is the largest mobile taxi application in India and one of Uber’s main rivals in the region.

Regarding the Communications segment, transaction volume rose 16 percent. This also marked a 40 percent improvement compared to its Q1 2014 level. In addition, there were several recent transactions in the segment pertaining to governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), such as Smarsh’s acquisition of Presensoft, a provider of archiving and compliance solutions.

“Relative to compliance, the instant messages, e-mails and other electronic communications and documents brought inside the four walls must adhere to appropriate records management,” said Peter Ognibene, Managing Director at Berkery Noyes. “This includes policies to meet with regulatory and/or discovery requirements.” Ognibene continued, “Many organizations are still creating comprehensive policies for this information and have not yet implemented solutions to address them. As a result, the environment for M&A activity in the GRC sector remains strong.”