By Ben Kolada

DISH Network's (DISH) $25.5 billion offer for Sprint Nextel (S) represents a 13% premium to SoftBank's (SFTBF.PK) October bid, but its lack of mobile experience may ultimately cause the company to lose the deal. Stock plays a major component of both transactions (32% for DISH vs. 30% for SoftBank), meaning the future value of either deal will be dependent on which company -- SoftBank or DISH -- will be able to better execute in the mobile market. Arguably, the answer is SoftBank.

Without a doubt, SoftBank understands the mobile market, and therefore would understand Sprint's business more than DISH. Mobile is an entirely new arena for DISH. SoftBank, on the

By Brenon Daly

The IPO market is getting bigger by going smaller. Investors have shown they are ready to step in and buy shares of unprofitable companies that are still only generating revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. That has drawn a number of companies onto the IPO path that might have been termed ‘sub-scale’ in the recent past.

Consider the offerings – both planned and actual – from Rally Software Development (RALY), Marketo and ChannelAdvisor. All three companies finished 2012 with less than $60m in sales. Further, all three companies continue to run in the red – deeply in the red. (For instance, Marketo lost $34m in 2012 on sales of $58m. Rally doesn’t even turn an operating profit and ChannelAdvisor still runs at a negative ‘adjusted’ EBITDA.)

Not that the diminutive size or red ink hurt Rally on its Friday debut. The agile software development shop

By Brenon Daly

As a company that has been cast off twice from its larger corporate owners, LANDesk Software might have a special affinity for its latest transaction: the acquisition of Shavlik Technologies, which is being cast off by VMware (VMW). The deal adds Shavlik's technology for managing and securing physical and virtual environments to the systems management vendor's portfolio. Inside VMware, Shavlik was known as VMware Protect; under LANDesk, the business is called Shavlik Protect.

LANDesk's purchase effectively unwinds VMware's acquisition of the security company in mid-2011. At the time, we estimated that the virtualization giant paid about 3x sales for Shavlik. We understand that today's deal

By Ben Kolada

While we're in a season of slim pickings for tech M&A, one market that's ripening is the sale of spoiled fruit. Major tech companies such as Microsoft and VMware are now selling flagging businesses at an unusually quick clip.

There are a variety of reasons why companies would sell assets during every part of the economic cycle. But right now, as growth slows across much of the established tech markets, companies are increasingly focusing on the relatively few areas that are recording sales increases. (To continue our gardening metaphor, it's similar to a person cutting off a dying bulb so that the rest of a plant can flourish.)

Microsoft (MSFT), for example, announced its second asset sale in as many months, selling its Mediaroom IPTV distribution platform to Ericsson (ERIC). (Last month, Microsoft sold its Atlas Advertiser Suite assets to Facebook (FB).) Mediaroom was part of

By Brenon Daly

Even with a few blockbuster deals we're starting off 2013 at a low level in the tech M&A market. Not only did the number of first-quarter transactions sink to its lowest quarterly total in more than three years, but the deals that did get done happened at a lower median valuation (see our full report on Q1 M&A activity).

The downtick was particularly pronounced at the top end of the market, which stands out all the more because of the record levels for the U.S. equity markets. For the 50 largest transactions announced so far in 2013, as listed in "The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase," we calculated the median price-to-trailing-sales valuation at just 1.9 times. That's a full turn lower than the full-year 2012 ratio and just half the level we saw in the pre-recession year of 2007.

A number of low-value deals have been

By Brenon Daly

Although IntraLinks (IL) is well-known for its "virtual deal rooms," the company itself hasn't spent much time in them. That changed on Thursday. After being out of the market for more than a decade, IntraLinks announced a double-barreled deal, picking up two online deal-sourcing platforms: MergerID and PE-Nexus. (And, yes, the company did use its own deal room to run the process.)

The addition of the two sourcing platforms makes sense as a way to increase the number of transactions that get executed in IntraLinks' core deal room. In fact, the company had added sourcing and networking features around the end of 2011, but had only attracted a few hundred users. MergerID and PE-Nexus dramatically increase the number of potential participants, with the two firms having attracted, collectively, some 5,000 firms -- representing about 7,200 total users.

Furthermore, the two platforms serve very different markets. MergerID --

By Brenon Daly

In one of the more financially lopsided divestitures we've seen in some time, Checkpoint Systems (CKP) says it will be pocketing just $5.4 million for its North American CheckView business, which is being picked up by buyout shop Platinum Equity. The electronic security unit generated roughly $77 million of revenue in 2012, although it did run slightly in the red.

Following a review of its businesses last year,

By Brian Satterfield

For the past two years, Yahoo (YHOO) has been mostly quiet on the M&A front. But with the appointment of CEO Marissa Mayer in July 2012, the company has headed back into the market with what appears to be a refocused strategy.

In the first three months of 2013, Yahoo has already made four acquisitions, twice as many as it inked in 2012 and equal to its entire 2011 total. (We’d note that both of its 2012 purchases came after Mayer took the CEO job.) The company’s 2013 transactions, including yesterday’s pickup of mobile recommendation application Jybe, have all been small and focused solely on the online services and mobile applications sectors.

This strategy is a distinct departure from Yahoo’s activity during its M&A heyday. Between 2005 and 2009, the company made 36 acquisitions valued at $2.4bn, representing almost 60% of all the deals it has inked

By Brian Satterfield

In a move that underscores the continuing importance of e-commerce sales to brick-and-mortar retail chains, Target Brands (TGT) has made its first foray into tech M&A by buying two online retailers.

Target announced on Thursday that it will acquire CHEFS Catalog and Cooking.com, two companies that sell kitchenware and cookware online. In its most recent earnings call, Target – which is slightly larger than Amazon (AMZN), but garners only about one-third the valuation of the Web retailer – indicated that its online revenue growth was above the industry average.

Clearly, the 110-year-old retailer bought the two Internet properties to continue that progress. (We estimate that CHEFS Catalog and Cooking.com collectively generated about $150m in sales.) However,

By Tejas Venkatesh

A year and a half after first filing its IPO papers, Silver Spring Networks (SSNI) has finally debuted on the public markets. The smart grid network company sold 4.75 million shares at $17 each, raising $81 million and creating $750 million in market value. The stock then promptly surged about 30% in its first hour of trading today.

The amount raised is only half the amount Silver Spring originally planned to raise when it filed its S-1 in the summer of 2011. It also pales in comparison to the money the company had already raised in the private markets. In its 11-year history, Silver Spring previously raised $330 million in equity and debt capital from Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and other firms.

Despite the first-day pop in trading, Silver Spring has attracted some bearish sentiment. For starters, the company, which has a high degree

By Tejas Venkatesh

Cadence Design Systems (CDNS) on Monday bought configurable silicon intellectual property vendor Tensilica for $380 million in cash. Not only is this Cadence's biggest acquisition, it is also paying the highest valuation in its M&A history. Tensilica generated $44 million in sales in 2012, valuing the company at 8x trailing sales. The purchase bulks up Cadence's IP business, pushing it over the $100 million mark. Previous IP acquisitions include Denali Software in May 2010 (for verification IP) and Cosmic Circuits just last month (for silicon IP).

Its exit did not come easy for Tensilica. The IP core vendor raised roughly $100 million in six funding rounds in its 16-year history. Investors include Foundation Capital, Altera, and Cisco, among others. Tensilica makes money through license fees for its IP and also via royalties on unit volumes its customers sell. The company's client list includes marquee tech names such

By Tejas Venkatesh

JDS Uniphase (JDSU) has acquired U.K.-based Arieso, a provider of location-based telecom network intelligence software. The transaction is meant to help carriers alleviate bandwidth constraints caused by limited spectrum capacity.

Arieso provides location intelligence software that produces maps showing network traffic down to building-level resolution. This information, based on actual measurements from consumer devices, allows mobile operators to deploy small cells strategically or even offload traffic to Wi-Fi networks.

JDSU is paying $85 million in cash for Arieso, which put up $27 million in bookings last year. Assuming actual revenue is slightly below

By Alan Pelz-Sharpe

Perceptive Software, the document and content management division of printer giant Lexmark (LXK), continued its mergers and acquisitions spree Tuesday with the acquisitions of San Francisco-based Twistage and Seattle-based AccessVia for a combined total of $31.5 million. Lexmark has now spent more than $600 million buying software companies since it started its M&A machine in May 2010 with the purchase of Perceptive Software.

Twistage provides a cloud-based video ingestion and management system, and AccessVia sells retail industry point of sale-focused printing (signage) software. Both acquisitions come as a bit of a surprise because, previously, Perceptive had focused on building out document-centric case management and pure-play document management functionality. That extends Perceptive's own heritage of providing document

By Tejas Venkatesh

VMware (VMW) is selling SlideRocket, the presentation creation and collaboration startup it acquired two years ago, to ClearSlide as it refocuses on its core business. The deal comes at a time of refocus for the virtualization giant, which in 2012 saw its growth rate decline to 22% -- a full 10 percentage points lower than the previous year. (It also recently revealed plans to lay off some 900 employees.) As VMware returns to its roots, other assets that it acquired in recent years could also end up on the chopping block.

The company's focus in the near term is on its Pivotal Initiative. This will bring together a number of "big data" and cloud assets that EMC (EMC) and VMware have acquired and developed to capitalize on the impact that cloud computing is having on emerging markets such as application

By Brenon Daly

It's been exactly a year since Vocus (VOCS) rolled the dice on its largest-ever acquisition, and in the view of Wall Street the company has come up snake eyes. The February 2012 purchase of iContact, which nearly cleaned out Vocus' treasury and caused a bit of acquisition indigestion, spooked investors. Since the deal, shares of the marketing software vendor have been nearly cut in half.

The decline has left the company a relative bargain in a market that has seen platinum valuations, both in terms of trading multiples and M&A valuations. Vocus garners a market cap of $285 million, or just 1.4x its projected revenue of about $200 million in 2013. That paltry valuation comes despite an accelerating bookings rate of roughly 20% forecast for this year, about $25 million of free cash flow generation and a re-engineered suite of offerings serving a neglected segment of

By Ben Kolada

Those merely glancing at the headlines of Informatica's (INFA) press releases would see that on Wednesday the company unveiled the latest version of its cloud-integration PaaS product, Cloud Spring 2013. However, only by reading further would an interested party see that the company has also quietly acquired cloud process automation vendor Active Endpoints. This isn't the first time Informatica has been shy with its M&A announcements, but recent financial results could give the company the confidence to be much louder with its future acquisitions.

Informatica's previous small tuck-in of Data Scout only came to light with the launch of Informatica Cloud MDM in September 2012 and the subsequent release of Informatica Cloud Winter 2013. Perhaps that deal didn't deserve significant attention, as it cost Informatica just $6 million.

In fact, with the exception of Heiler Software, Informatica's dealmaking since 2011 has involved mostly small, sub-$10 million tuck-ins.

By Brenon Daly

Tech buyers aren't actually doing much buying so far this year, but when they do close the deals, they have been big purchases. At least that's the early read on deal flow so far in 2013. To put some numbers on the activity: Through the first five weeks of this year, the number of announced transactions by tech buyers around the globe was running about 15% lower than the comparable level in either 2011 or 2012.

However, the total spending from Jan. 1 to Feb. 8 hit a whopping $55 billion, which is higher than we would typically see for an entire quarter. Indeed, the year-to-date total is 2.5 times higher than the $22 billion recorded for the same five-week period in the two previous years combined.

The surge in spending is being led by a flurry of big-ticket purchases. So far in 2013, we have

By Ben Kolada

Though previously engaged in a joint venture (JV) called Monitise Americas, mobile banking startup Monitise and Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) have been growing apart. Through a series of moves, the two companies, though still partners, seem to be getting ever closer to completely severing their relationship.

The eventual breakup appears to be spearheaded by Monitise. For just over three years, Monitise and FIS owned a JV named Monitise Americas. However, in November 2011, Monitise brought the JV completely under its own control, perhaps as a prelude to its next major M&A play.

Following the severing of that venture, FIS threw its weight behind Monitise competitor mFoundry, participating alongside MasterCard (MA) and existing investors in an $18 million round of financing for mFoundry that was disclosed in December 2011. Not only was FIS's involvement here a competitive slap in the face, but the inclusion of MasterCard in

By Brenon Daly

In the third-largest tech leveraged buyout (LBO), Dell (DELL) will end a quarter-century as a public company in a $24 billion take-private led by Silver Lake Partners. The private equity firm will be joined by Michael Dell, who is maintaining a significant minority stake in the company that he will continue to lead once it goes private. The LBO comes after Dell has struggled for much of the past half-decade to recast its business away from the rapidly diminishing PC market.

As part of that shift, Michael Dell returned as CEO to his namesake firm in early 2007 and (somewhat belatedly) began an M&A spree that eventually totaled some 20 transactions with a tab of $10 billion. The acquisitions got Dell into virtually every part of the tech landscape, including IT services (Perot Systems), security (SecureWorks, SonicWALL), networking (Force10 Networks), storage (Compellent, AppAssure), and infrastructure software

By Ben Kolada

At first glance, j2 Global’s (JCOM) acquisition of Ziff Davis Media seemed to be a stretch. However, upon further review of j2′s M&A strategy and recently released financial statements for Ziff Davis, the company actually meets many of j2′s requirements for its diversification acquisitions: Ziff Davis has a strong management team, operates in a fragmented market and, perhaps most importantly, is increasing revenue.

Technology content provider Ziff Davis Media was a powerhouse in its time, but it struggled as consumers moved from print to digital media. Total revenue at the company declined from $300m in 2001 to $76m in 2007, when more than half of its revenue was still coming from print advertising.

Ziff Davis filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and was subsequently carved up in four transactions. The Ziff Davis