Philly Enterprise Tech Daily Roundup 11/ 8: Arris, Stitch, & C&D deals
Tom Paine
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Hickory NC-based Commscope reached a deal to acquire Suwanee, GA-based Arris International for $5.7 billion, excluding debt. Reuters first disclosed that the two businesses were in discussions last week.
Arris, one of Comcast's most important suppliers, makes set-top boxes & modems, and has made a move into wireless networking with its recent acquisition of Ruckus Wireless. The set-top business is declining primarily due to migration to the cloud. CommScope sells connectivity products to the wireless industry and cable operators. The two company's products are more complementary than competitive, but the changing industry landscape is pushing their strategic road maps closer together.
Ironically, Commscope started life as a subsidiary of Horsham's General Instruments, while Arris bought what was left of GI, then Google-owned Motorola Home, in 2013.
Commscope turned to its old owner prior to going public, Carlyle Group LP, which will make a $1 billion minority equity investment in CommScope to help finance the transaction.
Talend, which saw its share dive slightly after it reported earnings yesterday (down 31% today), also announced it was acquiring Philly-based Stitch for about $60 million in cash.
Stitch, one of those by-product businesse that ends up creating considerable value - perhaps more than the original business - specializes in ETL (Extract Transform & Load), a utility that enables rapid self-service transfer of data from one database to another. When RJMetrics sold its analytical business to Magento, it spun off Stitch as a new, separate business under RJMetrics co-founder and Penn alumnus Jake Stein"s leadership, and it prospered.
Talend, founded in 2005 and based in California, competes in the iPaaS market against SnapLogic and others. It sees Stitch as a means of completing its main database creation work for customers quicker. Stein will be EVP for Stitch, reporting to Talend CEO Mike Tuchen.
C&D Technologies, the Blue Bell-based specialty battery maker, is acquiring California-based Trojan Battery Company . The combined company will have annual revenue of over $1 billion. C&D offers industrial lead acid batteries and battery systems that are used for the storage and transmission of electrical power, mainly for standby applications. Trojan provides deep-cycle batteries for motive and stationary applications.
KPS Capital Partners LP owns C&D, while Trojan is being sold by Charlesbank Capital Partners LLC and other shareholders.
Last year KPS Capital Partners acquired C&D Technologies from Angelo, Gordon & Co., which had backed the battery maker since 2012. It had previously been publicly traded.
