10 Companies Recently Acquired By A Private Equity Firm

Private Purchases

Many solution providers, large and small have caught the eye of private equity firm over the course of the last two years. With many advancements and adjustments in trends catching on in the tech world, private equity firms are investing big money in companies and their valued assets and expertise.

From names the size of Dell to CSC to CompuCom and others, investments of this scale don’t come cheap, and equity firms that ink these types of acquisitions envision big payoffs.

DLT Solutions

On Friday, DLT Solutions announced it has been acquired by private equity firm Millstein & Co. from TZP Capital Group for an undisclosed amount. The Virginia-based company is listed at No. 39 on CRN’s 2014 Solution Provider 500 list and told CRN last week it made more than $900 million in 2014.

Millstein & Co. is a financial services, merchant banking and private equity firm that focuses on companies in the finance, technology, industrial, consumer and technology business services sectors and does not own any other solution providers.

Presidio

Presidio announced in December that the company was acquired by Apollo Global Management. The private equity firm purchased the company from American Security for an undisclosed amount.

Presidio, No. 22 on CRN’s 2014 SP500 list, was estimated to be worth about $1.5 billion back in May, and was first acquired by American Securities in April of 2011, when the company was worth north of $1.3 billion.

As of Sept. 2014, Apollo Global’s investments totals $164 billion across private equity, credit and real estate. It primarily focuses on investments in the spaces of chemical, commodities, consumer and retail, distribution and transportation, financial and business services, manufacturing and industrial, media, and packaging and materials industries, as well as in satellite and wireless businesses.

CompuCom

CompuCom was acquired by Thomas H. Lee Partners in April of 2013 with the intention of facilitation more growth to the Dallas-based solution provider.

CompuCom is a $2.2 billion systems integrator and was listed at No. 23 on the 2014 CRN SP500. The company was owned by Court Square Capital Partners prior to the deal.

The Dallas-based company is a provider of end-user enablement, cloud technology and service management.

Riverbed

Riverbed announced in December that Thoma Bravo and Teacher’s Private Capital would acquire the company for $3.6 billion.

The deal, which will be the largest acquisition ever for enterprise-tech-focused Thoma Bravo, will allow Riverbed to break away from a slowdown in growth of the WAN acceleration market to reach the company's "next level of growth," said Jerry Kennelly, chairman and CEO of Riverbed, in a statement at the time of the announcement.

Thoma Bravo has been investing in the security industry in recent years. Riverbed, which traditionally has focused on application performance, has a growing Web application firewall product designed to protect Web applications from threats.

The deal is expected to close in the first half of this year.

Accuvant

In March, Accuvant sold a majority stake of its business to private equity firm, Blackstone Group.

The Denver-based occupant brought in $577 million in revenue in 2013 and grew at an average rate of 32 percent year-over-year for five years, ranking at No. 60 on the CRN Solution Provider 500 list.

Blackstone acquire the Denver-based company’s security software and hardware and its services arm that provides implementation, consulting and 24x7 monitoring.

At the time, Blackstone said it made the investment in order to build out its technology portfolio and had been making small minority investments in emerging security companies.

ConvergeOne

ConvergeOne was acquired by Clearlake Capital Group for an undisclosed amount in May. The solution provider specialized in managed services and unified communications and is one of the top Avaya Partners in the world. Clearlake bought the company from another private equity firm, Genstar Capital.

The Minnesota-based ConvergeOne has more than 4,000 customers, many of which are Fortune 500.

Autotask

Autotask, the hosted IT management platform provider, was acquired by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners in June for an undisclosed amount.

Vista Equity Partners had approximately $11.5 billion invested in software, data and technology services companies prior to the acquisition. Despite the deal, Autotask, who has more than 5,500 customers, has remained a private company.

Dell

Dell went private through a deal with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners and other financing companies in a leveraged buyout for $16 billion.

The deal allowed the company to step away from the Wall Street quarterly earnings conference calls and focus more on technology and building innovative hardware.

Lately, the company has made big strides in the mobile space, launching the thinnest tablet in the world in the Dell Venue 8 7000 at CES last month.

Compuware

Software developer Compuware was sold to private equity firm Thoma Bravo in September for $2.5 billion. The Detroit-based company said at the time it has 500 worldwide channel partners, including resellers, managed service providers, systems integrators, consultants, distributors and OEMs, with about 200 partners located in North America.

Compuware reported revenue of $944 million for its 2014 fiscal year, and sells software that monitors and helps optimize the performance of mission-critical business systems.

Juniper Networks

Juniper Networks agreed to sell its Junos Pulse portfolio, the networking company's mobile security suite, to Siris Capital for $250 million, Juniper announced in July.

The Junos Pulse software was built on Juniper's existing SSL VPN product and capabilities include remote backup and data restoration, lost device location, network access control (NAC) and collaboration capabilities.

Siris Capital is a New York City-based private equity firm focuses on data, telecom and technology investments.

Bonus: CSC

According to a report from Bloomberg in September, Computer Science Corporation has been exploring its options for a leveraged buyout with multiple private equity firms, including Bain Capital and Blackstone Group. The company was still in the early stages of the process at the time of the report and no deal was close to being agreed upon.

CSC is No. 4 on CRN’s SP500 list, with over $13 billion in annual revenue. A buyout of CSC would be the large leveraged acquisition since Dell went private for $16 billion last year.