Software industry mergers and acquisitions rose dramatically this past year, with Facebook’s moves accounting for 20% of the growth.
In its Software Industry M&A Report for 2014, investment bank Berkery Noyes revealed a 14% increase in the number of deals to a total of 1,840 transactions, with deal value rising 36% from US$88.32 billion to $120.18 billion.
Facebook’s blockbuster acquisitions of mobile messaging application WhatsApp for $19.65 billion and its controversial (for developers, at least) $2 billion deal for virtual reality startup Oculus VR accounted for a fifth of the year’s aggregate deal value, according to the report.
The largest increase in deal volume (a 20% gain) came from the business software sector of the industry. Broken down by deal value, four of the Top 10 highest-value deals of the year were SAP’s $7.6 billion acquisition of travel and expense management company Concur Technologies; Vista Equity Partners’ $4.11 billion acquisition of business integration and process-management company TIBCO Software; Thoma Bravo’s $2.05 billion acquisition of enterprise software and IT services company Compuware; and VMware’s $1.56 billion acquisition of mobile device management company AirWatch.
Elsewhere in the software market, Oracle’s $5.3 billion acquisition of point-of-sale and integrated solution provider MICROS Systems led the niche software sector. EMC dominated M&A in the infrastructure software sector with six mergers and acquisitions, while Google bolstered its mobile and cloud infrastructure portfolio with acquisitions of cloud-hosted back-end service Firebase, mobile app testing platform Appurify, and cloud monitoring service Stackdriver.
The full 2014 Berkery Noyes Software Industry M&A Report for 2014 is available here.
