M&A Update: Zoom-Five9, TD Synnex, Upstack, MSP Group, More
A big VAR merger, multiple agent acquisitions and an MSP investment group are catching the attention of partners.
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One of the biggest acquisitions in the history of technology recently closed.
Synnex and Tech Data officially merged to become TD Synnex. That occurred almost a half-year after Synnex announced plans to buy Tech Data for $7.2 billion. Tech Data CEO Rich Hume now services as the combined company’s chief executive.
Christine Horton wrote about the completed transaction.
Zoom and Five9 called off their $14.7 billion merger.
First news buzzed about the U.S. government reviewing the deal for national security concerns. Then both companies announced that they mutually agreed to nix their deal. Zoom’s CEO cited “financial discipline.” We learned that Five9’s shareholders rejected the deal at a special meeting.
Read about the news, as well as analysis of what went wrong.
F5 Networks is paying $68 million to bolster its cloud security and workload protection.
Privately held Threat Stack will officially join F5 by the end of the year. Threat Stack’s ability to detect and mitigate threats in real-time will aid F5 in providing “adaptive applications.”
“Threat Stack brings technology and talent that will strengthen F5’s security capabilities and further our adaptive applications vision with broader cloud observability and actionable security insights for customers,” an F5 executive said.
Read more about F5‘s plans.
Dialpad‘s acquisition of Kare Knowledgeware should improve customer experience for its contact center offering.
Kare provides a customer experience platform that among many things provides automated engagement for callers. That fits well with Dialpad, which is looking to add elf-service functionality and conversational AI.
Get details about the acquisition.
The networking giant acquired Battlelabs to improve its speech tech.
The completed deal puts Battlelabs in the Cisco Collaboration Group. Cisco will use Battlelabs’ noise removal technology to differentiate human noise from incidental background noise during calls.
Edward Gately has the scoop. You can read about similar speech tech acquisitions in his Enterprise Connect roundup.
Content delivery network services provider Akamai Technologies went zero-trust with its latest acquisition.
Akamai is buying Guardicore, which provides microsegmentation that will help Akamai stop threat actors. The bill totaled $600 million.
Read about Akamai’s inorganic growth strategy.
Carousel Industries has officially integrated with NWN.
The finalization of the deal creates what executives are calling a $1 billion cloud communications and infrastructure services provider. Carousel brings about 5,000 customers to the combined company. They first announced the deal in the spring.
Read more about NWN Carousel and its new offerings.
Rumors swirled about a potential Citrix sale.
Bloomberg reported that the vendor was considering putting itself back on the market. The company kept mum when pressed by Channel Futures about the report.
“We continue to make the right moves, both from a leadership standpoint, from an engagement standpoint, to make sure that we make our business the best line of business for our partners in the marketplace,” Citrix’ chief customer officer said.
Jeffrey Schwartz wrote about the rumors.
Can’t stop, won’t stop.
That seems to be Upstack’s mindset when it comes to consolidation in the broker channel. The New York-based firm announced a handful of acquisitions in September, including MOC4 Consulting, idea Communications Group and Legacy Solutions.
These partners will stay in the business as opposed to retiring.
Learn about Upstack’s recent purchases as well as our interview with its head of channel.
An MSP-focused private equity group continues to pad its war chest.
MSP Corp Investments is working with $35 million that it will use to buy Canadian MSPs. The group’s leaders are looking for MSPs with “well-rounded culture.” Owners of the purchased companies will retire or move on to other opportunities.
Allison Francis wrote about MSP Corp.
Dallas MSP The Synetek Group purchased one of its peers.
SabinoCompTech, another Texas-based IT services provider, has joined the Synetek family. The deal allows both companies to scale their business and take advantage of new teammates’ expertise.
Read about why Sabino agreed to the purchase.
FireEye has officially rebranded as Mandiant following its sale.
The Symphony Technology Group consortum announced plans to purchase FireEye’s products business earlier this year. The $1.2 billion deal created a new publicly traded company, separate from private FireEye.
Check out Allison Francis’ story.
Cybersecurity vendor LogPoint bolstered its automation capabilities with an acquisition.
LogPoint bought SecBI for an undisclosed amount. SecBI provides a security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) and extended detection and response (XDR) platform. Those will pair with LogPoint’s security information and event management (SIEM) offerings.
Read about the acquisition.
Virginia-based Thirdera acquired a fellow ServiceNow channel partner.
Appoxio focuses on ServiceNow UX/UI design and holds premier partner status with ServiceNow. Thirdera will take on Appoxio’s Canadian headquarters and 40 employees and create a new business unit.
Read about the acquisition in Kelly Teal’s cloud computing roundup.
Virginia-based Thirdera acquired a fellow ServiceNow channel partner.
Appoxio focuses on ServiceNow UX/UI design and holds premier partner status with ServiceNow. Thirdera will take on Appoxio’s Canadian headquarters and 40 employees and create a new business unit.
Read about the acquisition in Kelly Teal’s cloud computing roundup.
The MSP and agent channels continue to see M&A interest from private equity.
Partner acquisitions comprise a large portion of the latest deals. Upstack’s broker acquisitions have become an every-week occurrence, and private equity continues to target MSPs. If you want to hone in on MSP acquisitions, you can check out Allison Francis’ Q3 recap.
The usual vendor suspects are here as well. Cisco improved its audio game with an acquisition, Zoom’s behemoth Five9 purchase fell through, and the world’s largest tech distributor finalized its record-setting merger.
Scroll through the images above to see the latest deals in the channel.
Check out our August M&A wrap if you missed it.
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