On Friday morning Austin software maker SolarWinds Inc. quietly completed its $4.5 billion sale to two investment firms.
Jason Ream, Solarwinds’ chief financial officer, said the day was business as usual for the 17-year-old company, with only an internal email announcement sent out notifiying employees the deal had closed.
In October, Silver Lake Partners and Thoma Bravo announced plans to take SolarWinds private. The offer was to pay shareholders $60.10 for each share of SolarWinds’ stock — a nearly 20 percent premium from where the stock was trading prior to the deal being announced. SolarWinds shareholders voted in January to approve the sale.
With the closing of the sale, SolarWinds becomes privately held, and its stock ceased trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday morning.
Ream said the company’s business model “generates a lot of value by being patient.” He said the company doesn’t just go after a few customers, but instead tries to serve companies of all size all over the world. “Sometimes that’s not a perfect fit with the public stock market,” he said. “They think about things day to day or at the very least quarter-to-quarter.”
Ream said the company will make no changes to its executive team, though nearly its entire board of directors was replaced with people from the two investment firms. Though Ream said no job cuts were part of the deal, the company did confirm that in early January it conducted some layoffs.
In a written statement, the company said it made the “difficult decision to party ways with a small number of colleagues and friends after carefully assessing ways to refine our organizational structure.” This layoff, the company said, was about improved alignment with SolarWinds’ business strategy and “evolving priorities.”
Based on workforce totals provided to the American-Statesman in 2014 versus on Friday, it appears that the company shed at least 80 jobs, with 20 in Austin. Now the company employs 1,770 worldwide and 510 in Austin. Ream said they are currently hiring.
The company’s software is used by information technology professionals to configure, monitor and report on the health and performance of their network, systems and applications. Ream said the company’s goal is to help IT professionals “manage anything they’ve got and do it in a way that is pleasing to them,” comparing it to the way Apple products easily work together.
This purchase comes at a time of heavy mergers and acquisitions activity for Austin-based tech companies. Expedia bought HomeAway for $3.9 billion, a deal that closed in December. That same month Netherlands-based NXP Semiconductors purchased Freescale Semiconductors for $11.8 billion. And Dell Inc., which went private in 2013, is in the midst of trying to buy data storage company EMC Corp. for $67 billion.
Silver Lake Partners, founded in 1999 and based in Menlo Park, Calif., focuses on investing in mature technology companies, such as Dell Inc. Thoma Bravo, with headquarters in Chicago and San Francisco, specializes in investing in middle-market companies in fragmented industries.
SolarWinds was founded in Tulsa, Okla., in 1999 and moved to Austin in 2006. The company went public in 2009. The company had been achieving double-digit revenue growth in recent years. For 2015 the company reported profit of $95.3 million, a 22 percent increase from 2014. Its revenue was $504.1 million, which is a 17.6 percent increase from the year before.
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