The new year’s first billion-dollar private equity deal isn’t a take-private buyout o?r the acquisition of a once-flashy startup. Instead, it’s an add-on.
Clearlake Capital Group has agreed to acquire LANDesk, a provider of IT and security software, from Thoma Bravo in a deal The Wall Street Journal reports to be worth more than $1.1 billion. Clearlake will combine LANDesk with current portfolio company HEAT Software, which makes software related to cloud service management and unified endpoint management for various sorts of organizations.
Fewer than a dozen add-ons in the US topped the $1 billion mark during all of 2016, according to the PitchBook Platform.
HEAT is itself the product of a different Clearlake add-on; in 2015, the firm acquired FrontRange Solutions and merged it with Lumension to create the business. At the time, Clearlake had backed Lumension for a little less than a year.
For Thoma Bravo, meanwhile, the deal marks the exit of an investment from 2010, when the firm acquired LANDesk from Emerson (NYSE: EMR).
The combined company created by the deal—which will adopt a new name in the near future—reflects that acquisitive past, claiming some 1,600 employees across 23 countries working with more than 22,000 customers. The business will have about $180 million in EBITDA, according to the WSJ. The sale is expected to close later this month.
Article by Kevin Dowd, PitchBook
