Riverbed Technology goes private in $US3.5 billion acquisition
The acquisition is valued at about $US3.5 billion, with Riverbed stockholders receiving $US21 per share in cash.
With the transaction's close, Riverbed stock has ceased trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol RVBD. Thoma Bravo managing partner, Seth Boro, said Riverbed was a clear industry leader and a significant addition to the firm's portfolio of software companies.
"Our team is looking forward to building upon Riverbed's world class customer support and delivering its market-leading product portfolio to even more enterprise customers." Riverbed chief executive and chairman, Jerry M. Kennelly, said, with the acquisition complete, the team could not begin to move forward with the strategic initiatives to take the company to the next stage of growth.
"As a private company, Riverbed is better positioned to pursue our long term goals, and has greater flexibility to develop best-of breed technologies that deliver superior application performance for our customers.
"This flexibility, alongside Thoma Bravo's deep experience growing companies in the application performance space, makes us very excited about the future." Thoma Bravo partner, Robert Sayle, said the application performance sector was poised to see even greater advances in the coming years.
"We look forward to helping Riverbed realise its tremendous growth potential," he said. Thoma Bravo invests with a particular focus on application and infrastructure software and technology enabled services.
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The firm currently manages a series of private equity funds representing more than $8.5 billion of equity commitments. Riverbed, at more than $US1 billion in annual revenue, provides application performance infrastructure and delivers a platform for the hybrid enterprise to ensure applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues can be proactively detected and resolved before impacting business performance.