Acquisitive Thoma Bravo Buys Talend

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Consolidation in the data analytics sector continues apace with the acquisition of data integration specialist Talend by the aggressive private equity investor Thoma Bravo.

The deal announced Wednesday (March 10) is the latest big data transaction for Thoma Bravo, which previously acquired business intelligence software specialist Qlik Technologies and analytics software vendor Infogix, among many others.

Talend valued the cash and stock deal at approximately $2.4 billion. That represents a premium of about 29 percent based on the company’s (NASDAQ: TLND) closing price on March 9.

A memorandum of understanding unanimously approved by Talend’s board calls for Thoma Bravo to tender an offer of $66 a share to acquire all outstanding Talend shares.

Talend, Redwood City, Calif., went public in July 2016, part of the initial wave of big data IPOs that continues to accelerate as company valuations soar.

The tender offer is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021, with the final transaction completed by the end of this year. Upon completion, Talend would again become a private company, at which point it would continue its cloud data transition initiated over the past year. The company’s operations in France would be transferred to a new wholly-owned French subsidiary.

Chip Virig, a Thoma Bravo partner, cited Talend’s cloud-native orchestration platform as among the keys to the acquisition, the latest in a series of technology deals for the Chicago-based private equity firm. Along with Infogix and Qlik, Thoma Bravo acquired AIOps specialist Dynatrace in 2019.

The firm also cited Talend’s data fabric used to integrate data and applications while knocking down technology siloes as enterprise customers migrate to the cloud.

The deal for Talend also underscores growing enterprise demand for governance and security frameworks as more data migrates to the cloud.

“Today’s distributed enterprise architectures combined with agile development processes are making it increasingly difficult to ensure data integrity, security and compliance,” said Idan Ninyo, CEO and founder of Bionic, the two-year-old application management startup focused on data governance. “The increasing volume and distribution of data and applications means these challenges will only get more acute.”

Added Ninyo: “Being able to track how data is flowing across the organization considering the rapid pace of change makes it all even harder.

“These are big problems that companies are spending billions to figure out.”

So, too, are private equity firms stocking up on big data acquisitions.

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