Two more Wellington portfolio acquisitions….

As you’ve read from time to time, there’s been plenty of strategic M&A interest in our Fund III portfolio over the course of 2012 (see prior post “Tech M&A market getting hotter” Aug 8-12). Two more acquisitions were announced this morning, pushing the running total for 2012 to five:

Stratus Technologies of Maynard, MA acquired Marathon Technologies of Littleton, MA.

and
Clearlake Capital Group of Santa Monica, CA acquired Mformation Technologies of Edison, New Jersey.

VC-backed Marathon was the company to build the world’s first software-based, fault tolerant solution to support multi-core/multi-processor Microsoft applications. And a huge partner to Citrix (CTXS:Q), the $14.5 billion market cap. provider of datacentre enterprise cloud solutions.

Mformation (also VC-backed) counts many global telecom providers as clients, and is best known for its mobile device management solutions — particularly those that are alleged to have been infringed upon by Waterloo’s Research In Motion (RIM:TSX). A high profile lawsuit ended in a draw earlier this summer when a jury awarded Mformation a US$147 million judgment, only to have the now-retired Judge overturn the verdict over some questionable construct issues.

Earlier this month, Clearlake announced that it had acquired NetMotion, a provider of mobile VPN and network performance management software solutions; there is an obvious PE plan underway. In both cases, terms were not disclosed. Clearlake is a very-well financed PE fund with pros at the wheel; Mformation (with its 28 patents) and its customers are in excellent hands. RIM may well regret letting the firm, and its intellectual property, slip away if and when the infringement case goes back to Court.

Congrats to everyone involved on all sides.

MRM
(disclosure – I own RIM)