Posted by Dave Phillips on March 30th, 2012 |
No Comments » CHILDS sponsored this year’s conference, which had record attendances of over 600 participants! SIA reported that hiring trends continue to demonstrate growth across all sectors, despite some deceleration from 2011 levels. SIA is projecting that IT staffing growth will be in the 14% range in 2012, with healthcare, legal and F&A all growing in the high single digit range.
Healthcare reform was a hot topic as well as the continuing adoption of VWS and the impact it is having on margins. Also of particular interest were IT trends currently impacting the staffing community; specifically, this included advancements in ATS systems and social media’s influence on recruiting strategy.
Direct hires – perm placements are accelerating with most companies experiencing a significant growth in year of year placements, indicating that the current cycle might be beginning to mature.
There was a great deal of interest in what was happening in the M&A arena; and I can assure you there is and will be a lot of activity in 2012 driven partly by the threat of legislation effecting capital gains and the interest of Private Equity, Foreign and strategic buyers looking to expand.
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Posted by Don Holbrook on March 22nd, 2012 |
No Comments » On March 15th, 2012 San Mateo based Appirio raised a series D round of $60m. The round was led by General Atlantic with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital. The capital will be used for additional acquisitions as well as investment into its technology platforms.
We continue to see significant interest from both financial and strategic buyers looking to hedge their bets in the Cloud/Saas consulting sector.
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Posted by Don Holbrook on February 10th, 2012 |
No Comments » Today Oracle announced the $1.9 billion acquisition of Taleo, a cloud based HCM software firm. This announcement comes only 2 months after Oracle’s biggest rival, SAP, announced its acquisition of Successfactors for $3.4 billion. Successfactors is a cloud based employee performance management software located in the Bay Area. In addition to this activity, it is expected that Workday, a Saas based HCM software maker will file for an IPO some in the first half of 2012. Workday was founded Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri who were also the founders of Peoplesoft which was acquired by Oracle for $10.3 billion in January of 2005.
This activity validates the interest levels we saw in 2011 for Saas and Cloud based consulting firms. Large consulting firms have been proactively seeking to acquire firms that have Saas or Cloud computing skills to bolster their current offerings or add new practice areas to stay ahead of the demand curve for such skills. As with the multiples being paid for firms such as Successfactors and Taleo, we are seeing buyers willing to pay a hefty premium for Saas and Cloud computing skills.
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