January 19, 2016 SOFTWARE VALUE MAKES SIGNIFICANT STRIDES AS VALUATIONS REMAIN STRONG

Berkery Noyes’ Software report for full year 2015 showed that deal volume experienced a nine percent year-to-year increase, with a total of 2,028 transactions in 2015. Overall value gained 72 percent, from $123.74 billion to $213.20 billion. This rise was attributable in major part to Dell’s announced acquisition of EMC Corporation for $67.48 billion, which was the highest value deal ever recorded in the industry.

The EMC acquisition accounted for almost one-third of the industry’s aggregate value in 2015. If excluded, total value gained 18 percent on a yearly basis. With this transaction, Dell is looking to combine its server businesses with EMC’s storage and virtualization assets, enabling it to better compete beyond the PC market with a wider range of products. Also of note, Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners took Dell private in 2013 for $24 billion.

In terms of valuations, the median revenue multiple declined from 2.7x to 2.4x, while the median EBITDA multiple improved from 12.0x to 13.8x. Deals in the $10-$20 million range over the past three years received a median enterprise value multiple of 2.3x revenue, whereas those above $160 million had a median enterprise value multiple of 3.6x revenue.

Financial sponsors were responsible for five of the industry’s top ten largest deals in 2015. Three of these five transactions occurred in the Infrastructure segment. This consisted of The Carlyle Group’s announced acquisition of Veritas Technologies Corporation, a storage and server management software solutions business, for $8 billion; Permira and CPP Investment Board’s acquisition of Informatica, a provider of enterprise data integration software and services, for $4.77 billion; and Thoma Bravo and Silver Lake Partners’ announced acquisition of SolarWinds, an IT management software and monitoring company, for $4.38 billion.

Meanwhile, the number of deals in the Business Software segment, which consists of software designed for general business practices and not specific industry markets, increased 12 percent. The most active acquirer in the Business segment in 2015 was Microsoft with seven transactions.

“With the increased adoption of cloud and SaaS environments even software companies are recognizing the innate ability to integrate rather than develop everything,” said James Berkery, Chief Information Officer at Berkery Noyes. “It stands to reason as more software solutions appear on the web that the proliferation of the API has begun to create an integration market unto itself. A sort of API marketplace with brokered solutions, tech enabled services and niche applications is poised to capitalize.”