Dear Clients and Friends,
Welcome to our February 2013 Market Update. As you will see, it provides our sense of M&A values, activity and trends for the dozen plus technology, information and healthcare sectors that we follow.
After a very busy December, we expected a fall-off in M&A activity; we were wrong. Last month, we saw a continuation of high levels of M&A activity across nearly all sectors. Strategics and financial sponsors both were active acquirers, as exemplified by:
• Fiserv (NASDAQ:FISV) acquired Open Solutions for $1Bn;
• TPG Capital acquired Eze Castle and RealTick from Convergex;
• Ingenico (ENXTPA:ING) agreed to acquire Ongone for $485M;
• ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ:ACIW) agreed to acquire Online Resources Corp. (NASDAQ:ORCC) for $266M;
• athenahealth (NASDAQ:ATHN) agreed to acquire Epocrates (NASDAQ:EPOC) for $215M;
• FIS (NYSE:FIS) agreed to acquire mFoundry for $120M;
• CoreLogic (NYSE:CLGX) acquired CDS Business Mapping for $78M;
• Lexmark (NYSE: LXK) acquired Acuo Technologies for $45M;
• Heartland Payment Systems (NYSE:HPY) acquired Ovation Payroll for $44M;
• IBM (NYSE:IBM) agreed to acquire Star Analytics;
• ION Group acquired Financial Software Systems;
• TransUnion agreed to acquire ZipCode;
• Vista Equity Partners acquired Lanyon; and
• Welsh Carson acquired GetWellNetwork.
The acquisition of Epocrates by athenahealth, a leading Revenue Cycle Management company, is a strong indication that the administrative and clinical applications are starting to co-mingle; a principle we predicted in our White Paper (link). We saw a few larger deals close, as ConvergEx’s sale of their Eze Castle and RealTick businesses to TPG Capital for a rumored nearly $1Bn and Fiserv’s acquisition of Open Solutions for a similar amount; however, once again, the vast majority of transactions were well under $200M.
Marlin & Associates is one of the most active investment banking and strategic advisory firms providing strategic and financial advice to worldwide buyers and sellers of middle-market technology firms. Our firm is headquartered in New York, NY and has additional offices in San Francisco, CA; Washington, DC; Toronto, Canada; and Hong Kong, China serving companies that provide information and technology to a wide range of communities including those that serve the banking, capital markets, insurance, marketing and healthcare arenas.
We trust that you will find this month’s newsletter useful. If you would like more information on these transactions or on our sense of the market, please feel free to call or write.