2015 Key Highlights

  • Three of the industry’s top five largest transactions in 2015 occurred in the Infrastructure Software 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.

2015 Key Trends

  • Total transaction volume in 2015 increased by 12 percent over 2014, from 552 to 619.
  • Total transaction value in 2015 gained by 23 percent over 2014, from $52.79 billion to $64.90 billion.
  • The median revenue multiple improved from 1.9x in 2014 to 2.3x in 2015. The median EBITDA multiple rose from 12.4x in 2014 to 15.2x in 2015.
  • In terms of secondary buyouts, or transactions completed between private equity firms, deal volume in 2015 remained about constant compared to 2014. However, this represented an improvement of 40 percent relative to 2013.

M&A Market Overview

Berkery Noyes tracked 1,623 private equity transactions in the Information Industry between 2013 and 2015, of which 305 disclosed financial terms, and calculated the aggregate value to be $120.60 billion. Based on known transaction values, we project values of 1,318 undisclosed transactions to be $37.04 billion, totaling $157.64 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 2.1x revenue and 12.9x EBITDA.