Thoma Bravo completes $3.5bn acquisition of Riverbed Technologies

Riverbed joins lengthening list of private equity acquisitions

Thoma Bravo, the private equity company that acquired Compuware last year, has completed its acquisition of application performance management software company Riverbed Technology in a $3.5bn deal.

The private equity company, which focuses on technology investments, acquired Riverbed in alliance with Teachers' Private Capital, the private investor department of Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. Riverbed has ceased trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange in consequence.

Riverbed joins Attachmate, Compuware, Dynatrace, Embarcadero, Hyland Software, SailPoint, Sirius Computer Solutions and Tripwire among Thoma Bravo's portfolio of companies.

Jerry Kennelly, chairman and CEO of Riverbed, described the private equity takeover as an opportunity to pursue "strategic initiatives" that will enable the company to move on "to the next stage of growth" free from the demands of quarterly reporting that being public company entails.

He continued: "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."

"Riverbed is a clear industry leader and significant addition to our portfolio of software companies," said Seth Boro, a managing partner at Thoma Bravo. "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."

Thoma Bravo partner Robert Sayle added that the private equity company foresaw application performance management software as a particular area of potential growth in the next few years. "The application performance sector is poised to see even greater advances in the coming years, and we look forward to helping Riverbed realize its tremendous growth potential."

Riverbed reported revenues of more than $1bn in its last financial year. It focuses on application performance infrastructure, which enables organisations "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".

It claims more than 26,000 customers, including 97 per cent of the Fortune 100.