LogMeIn enters into definitive agreement to be acquired by affiliates of Francisco Partners, Evergreen Coast Capital for $4.3 billion

LogMeIn Inc., vendor of cloud-based connectivity, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired in a transaction led by affiliates of Francisco Partners, a technology-focused global private equity firm, and including Evergreen Coast Capital, the private equity affiliate of Elliott Management, for US$86.05 per share in cash. The all-cash transaction values LogMeIn at an aggregate equity valuation of approximately $4.3 billion.

Under the terms of the agreement, LogMeIn shareholders will receive $86.05 in cash for each share of LogMeIn’s common stock they hold. This consideration represents a premium of approximately 25 percent to LogMeIn’s unaffected closing stock price on Sept. 18, 2019, the last trading day before a media report was published speculating about a potential sale process. The Board of Directors of LogMeIn approved the agreement and recommended that shareholders vote in favor of the transaction.

LogMeIn will have the right to terminate the definitive agreement to accept a superior proposal subject to the terms and conditions of the definitive agreement. There can be no assurance that this process will result in a superior proposal, and LogMeIn does not intend to disclose developments with respect to the solicitation process unless and until its Board of Directors makes a determination requiring further disclosure.

Qatalyst Partners and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC are acting as financial advisors to LogMeIn, and Latham & Watkins LLP is serving as the company’s legal advisor.

Mizuho Bank Ltd. is acting as lead financial advisor and Barclays, Deutsche Bank Securities, Jefferies LLC, and RBC Capital Markets are acting as co-financial advisors to Francisco Partners and Evergreen with Paul Hastings LLP, Kirkland & Ellis LLP, and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP serving as legal advisors. Barclays, RBC Capital Markets, Deutsche Bank Securities, Jefferies Finance LLC, and Mizuho Bank, have provided committed debt financing for the transaction.

“This transaction acknowledges the significant value of LogMeIn and provides our stockholders with a meaningful and certain cash offer at a compelling premium,” said Bill Wagner, president and chief executive officer of LogMeIn. “Together, Francisco Partners and Evergreen are committed to addressing the unique needs of both our core and growth assets. We believe our partnership with Francisco Partners and Evergreen will help put us in a position to deliver the operational benefits needed to achieve sustained growth over the long term.”

“LogMeIn has a compelling product portfolio and leadership in the Unified Communications and Collaboration, Identity, and Digital Engagement markets,” said Andrew Kowal, senior partner at Francisco Partners. “We look forward to working with Bill and the leadership team at LogMeIn to accelerate growth and product investment organically and inorganically.”

“This investment builds on the strength of our infrastructure and security software franchise and we are thrilled to partner with the company to achieve its long-term strategic vision,” added Dipanjan “DJ” Deb, co-founder and CEO of Francisco Partners.

“We have deep appreciation for the LogMeIn franchise and leadership team from our long-term involvement in the business,” said Elliott Partner Jesse Cohn and Portfolio Manager Jason Genrich. “We look forward to partnering with Bill and the entire executive leadership team alongside Francisco Partners on the next phase of growth and value creation for LogMeIn as a private company.”

Christine Wang, principal at Francisco Partners also commented, "We are excited to invest in LogMeIn and support its mission to deliver best-in-class software solutions to the modern workforce.”

The transaction is expected to close in mid-2020, subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of stockholder and regulatory approvals.

Pivot3 improves resilience for large-scale HCI deployments with AI and automation capabilities

Pivot3 announced addition of  artificial intelligence (AI) and automation features to its Acuity software to address the data protection challenges often faced in large-scale hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) deployments. These capabilities provide resilience for large multi-petabyte environments, allowing customers who experience catastrophic hardware failures to recover, while ensuring high-availability with auto-healing, quick node rebuild and intelligent monitoring and analytics.

At the core of Pivot3's Acuity software platform is the Pivot3 Intelligence Engine. The Intelligence Engine comprises many advanced data- and performance-management capabilities, including its market leading Business Policy Management feature. This enables customers to map business objectives to resource management through simple policies. 

Pivot3 uses AI and machine learning to understand application performance, protection and security requirements and to make real-time system changes so SLAs are met. The Intelligence Engine also monitors system health and performs predictive maintenance to ensure maximum system availability. This automates time consuming systems administration and maintenance tasks to reduce operating expenses and to allow organizations to scale without adding additional IT resources.

Pivot3’s Intelligence Engine now includes a suite of new auto-healing capabilities. Designed to automate human decisions and tasks, the new features replace manual recovery processes by automatically adding a node back to a cluster once it has recovered from a failure. Pivot3 has also introduced a quick node rebuild feature to reduce repair times up to 90 percent and to eliminate the need for a time-consuming full node rebuild, lowering the risk of a second failure.

Other enhancements to the Intelligence Engine include intelligent automation, AI and analytics for proactive system health, configuration optimization and support. These additional system analytics and diagnostics provide customers with improved system health and performance and the ability to automatically share information to Pivot3’s Support Cloud. 

Proactive system monitoring flags events in real-time with on-alarm dispatch to Pivot3 Support and provides daily status reports. New AI and machine learning techniques analyze phone-home data and alert the customer to options if a system is not in compliance with best practices.

“Customers are increasingly required to manage massive amounts of data generated by video surveillance, both for long term retention and for analysis with video analytics,” said Ben Bolles, vice president of product management, Pivot3. “The sheer scale of the infrastructure needed to support these use cases presents new resilience challenges, and organizations are increasingly concerned about capturing, protecting and capitalizing on this mission-critical data. Pivot3 is meeting this growing challenge with new automation and intelligence capabilities to provide customers with peace of mind, knowing their system is resilient, secure and always available.”

“With the real-time system monitoring, Pivot3 Support now alerts my team to unforeseen failures and provides remediation,” said Jeremiah Francis, director of information technology at Financial Advocates. “Additionally, receiving daily system health and configuration status reports allows us to ensure our system is running at peak performance; we can now more easily resolve potential points of failure and optimize for success.”

API Fortress releases unlimited API monitoring for internal APIs

API Fortress announced Monday unlimited internal API Monitoring license, which allows companies to run any number of functional API monitors without paying additional metered usage fees. 

Metered usage pricing has contributed to a significant increase in QA costs for enterprises as their testing centers of excellence have encountered rapidly growing numbers of APIs. Modern apps and platforms need many more APIs, which involve an increasingly complex array of API calls to work properly.

Just because an API monitor returns a 200 does not mean that the API is working. Some APIs even use a 200 to indicate that there is an issue. In this eBook of API Horror Stories from actual API Fortress customers, one of the world's largest retailers believed that their retail app was functioning properly. Then they were mystified by a dip in revenues from certain product lines. 

When they ran API Fortress functional uptime monitors, they became aware of an API bug that their uptime monitors could never have detected - the cache function of their API management platform was causing the wrong data to populate certain product listings.

“Continuous delivery with CI/CD was the start of an important trend for test automation. That trend has continued to evolve, and now companies are asking why can't their functional API tests constantly test and monitor business-critical APIs? With API Fortress, they can,” said Patrick Poulin, CEO and co-founder of API Fortress. "With our unlimited monitoring, companies can detect API flaws early and diagnose API flaws quickly. You can schedule API monitoring on our platform without a CI (continuous integration) platform. We also let our customers deploy monitors on-premises, keeping all test and monitor data behind the firewall."