Tibco sells out to private equity in $4.3bn deal with Vista Equity Partners

Tibco becomes latest major software company to sell to private equity after Compuware and BMC Software

Tibco has become the latest major software company to agree to a buy-out by private equity, following on from the "privatisations" of BMC Software and Compuware.

Vista Equity Partners is taking the middleware software vendor private in a deal valuing the company at $4.3bn - subject to the approval of shareholders - or $24 per share. The deal places a 26 per cent premium on the company's closing stock price on Friday, so it is unlikely that shareholders will object, unless a counter-offer is flushed out.

Vista reportedly pipped Thoma Bravo, which last month struck a deal to buy Compuware, to the deal. The deal follows an announcement by Tibco earlier this month that it was "exploring strategic alternatives" and had hired investment bank Goldman Sachs to help work out its options. Carlyle Group was also in the running to purchase the company.

Tibco was founded in 1997 by its current chairman and CEO Vivek Ranadivé. It was a pioneer of message-oriented middleware, particularly for the financial sector, which enables information to be pushed to multiple recipients at precisely the same time.

However, Tibco's expensive high-end proprietary software is under attack from open source in the form of the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), which promises not just lower-cost message queuing software, but also inter-operability between different vendors' implementations of the open-source standard.