May 30, 2008
Index Ventures Backed B-hive Bought By VMWare
VMware (NYSE: VMW) is buying Israeli's B-hive Networks for what has been put at several tens of millions of dollars.
B-hive monitors an application from the network, measuring the response time between a user action and an application response. Such monitoring watches the application from an end-user point of view instead of a systems management point of view, with emphasis on responsiveness.
Index partner and Venrock co-led the $7 million series A investment in B-hive.
Index gets in touch to say that the deal is significant for the following reasons:
+ Along with the recent acquisition of FilesX by IBM, the deal signals that the M&A market remains strong for advanced technologies with a capacity to alter the economics of the data center.
+ B-hive's technology builds a bridge between virtualization (which enables more compact, greener data centers) and automation (which leads to significant cost reduction and service level improvement).
Index continues to travel to Israel for portfolio investments that include Zend, Evolven and Worklight.
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March 27, 2006
Skyrock and Skyblog Acquired by Private Equity Investors
Axa Private Equity has acquired an 80% stake in Orbus, the company behind French radio station Skyrock and Skyblog, a popular blogging platform, according to news coming out of France today.
Le Figaro first reported news of the transaction this morning. It said that founder Pierre Bellanger retains the other 20%. The amount was not disclosed but the French paper put a €100M valuation on the company. Orbus had sales of €31M last year and a proft of €7.5M, according to the French paper (not clear if that is EBITDA).
The reason Skyrock was on our radar is that it was one of the first media companies in Europe to offer a blog publishing platform to its audience of 12 to 24 year olds.
And while it is very common now that newspapers, TV and Radio stations in Europe offer blogs to their audience, when Skyrock started Skyblogs, it was not. Today it has over 4M blogs regsitered, according to the Skyblog front page. To put that in perspective, France has a population of 60M. As of posting this article, some 2800 blogs had been created today.
According to a one year old article in BusinessWeek, some 20 percent of the parent company's sales are generated via online ads and affiliate marketing schemes related to the popular blogging platform.
The deal was a secondary buyout with Axa acquiring the stakes held by Morgan Grenfell and Goldman Sachs.
The a:c euro expects updates to emerge from other sources, especially if this was a good exit for the earlier investors. So check back if this news of interest.
Read - Let them eat cake and blog about it (BusinessWeek)
Read - AXA Rachat Skyrock (Le Figaro)
