During one 24-hour period on June 11th and 12th in New York City, 14 cloud services companies (with enterprise values ranging between $15 to $70M) met with more than 50 strategic buyers and private equity firms in 90+ face-to-face private meetings. What happened?
Potential partners were sized up. Visions, strategies, and expectations were communicated. Phone numbers and email addresses were exchanged.
Think of this as an organized and efficient marketplace for companies seeking mergers and acquisitions -- and for buyers looking for ways to compress what can often be a time consuming M&A discovery phrase.
The marketplace was the Global IT M&A Forum on Cloud Services, co-sponsored by martinwolf, leading industry media company UBM, and global accounting firm Grant Thornton.
The Forum is unique in the M&A industry in that its purpose is to accelerate transactions by introducing pre-qualified buyers and sellers from around the world in a controlled and completely confidential environment during one 24-hour period. In many cases, investors, buyers and sellers participated in as many as nine one-to-one private meetings -- each lasting 50 minutes.
martinwolf President and Founder Marty Wolf opened the marketplace with remarks to participants entitled, "All Software is SaaS." Marty offered insights into valuations in the SaaS/cloud industries and advice to both sellers and buyers about how to get the most of their time at the Forum.
Forum CEO and martinwolf Principal Tim Mueller said that cloud services was chosen as the focus of this Forum because valuations and M&A activity in the sector are growing rapidly. "SaaS-related transactions are now 12% of all global tech deals," said Tim. "For sellers, the M&A window is open for the foreseeable future. Buyers have the opportunity to be richly rewarded with smart acquisitions."
The inaugural Global M&A Forum was held in May 1998 in San Francisco. Since then Forums have been hosted in Scottsdale, Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., San Diego and San Jose, CA. To date, the Forums have resulted in transactions valued at more than $350 million.
Sponsors are currently planning the next Forum for the Fall of 2013, which will focus on IT and Managed Services.
For more information, see: www.itmandaforum.com
