Dear Clients and Friends,
The report found here gives our sense of the current m&a trends, values and deals in the four segments of the Enterprise Data and Analytics sector that we follow and sometimes lead.
Please click here for our January Enterprise Data and Analytics Market Update.
There can be no doubt that this market is large and growing. Harvard Business Review recently said that 85% of those surveyed in the Fortune 1000 have started, or plan to start, Big Data usage. According to IDC, global revenues for Big Data and business analytics are estimated to grow 12% annually to $203 billion by the year 2020, from $130 billion in 2016. And those figures focus mostly on the big American firms – such as HP Enterprise, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Splunk, Tableau, Teradata, and others. We’ve gotten used to the U.S. dominating much of this industry. But increasingly Enterprise Data and Analytics has become a global market – attracting global players. Read more in our January Enterprise Data and Analytics Market Update here.
In case you missed it, in 2015, China announced the “Made in China 2015” in an effort to “comprehensibly upgrade Chinese industry”. That plan followed Germany’s 2011 “Industry 4.0” plan to “apply the tools of information technology to production”. The British, French, Irish, Italians, and Japanese all have their own initiatives. One of the things these plans have in common (as opposed to “MAGA”) is detail – including a focus on use of “Big Data” analytics.
China is in the lead (after the U.S.). According to one report, China now has 29 Big Data “unicorn” firms and another 54 Big Data “future unicorns”. Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent are all in. As are others you may not know such as Megvii, more commonly known as Face++, which uses Big Data for facial recognition, and IZP Technologies Group, which is using Big Data to build a Visa-like cross-border payment system. They don’t yet compete with Hadoop. But change is fast approaching.
China also has a “One Belt Road Strategy”. It’s known mostly as a plan to build a physical paved road from China to Europe. And it includes plans to improve sea lanes to Venice. But “One Belt” also includes a detailed plan to increase seamless electronic movement of goods (E-commerce). And that means Big Data; Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent are all in.
Enterprise Data and Analytics is a global phenomenon, with a global market and smart, global players working very hard. Americans should not be complacent. Some of the more interesting deals this past month include:
• Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) agreed to acquire Aconex for $1.2bn valuing the company at an implied 10x LTM revenue,
• Intuit (NASDAQ:INTU) agreed to acquire TSheets from Summit Partners for $340mm,
• ACL (Vancouver, Canada) raised $50mm in an equity funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners,
• Instana (Redwood City, CA) raised $20mm in a Series B funding round led by Accel Partners,
• Livehire (ASX:LVH) raised $15mm in a private placement led by Telstra Super.
For the fifth year in a row, Institutional Investor has named me as one of the most influential people in fintech finance. It’s always fun to be on these lists. You can read more about the company I keep, here. Most of them deserve the distinction much more than I.
Also, our team will be in Paris next week for the Paris Fintech Forum. Please send an email to Ajmal Hachim at ahachim@marlinllc.com to arrange a meeting.
Please see our January 2018 Enterprise Data and Analytics Update here.
