CORUM SOFTWARE THIRD QUARTER UPDATE REVIEW
November 16, 2006
Operator
Good morning ladies and gentleman, I would now like to turn
the floor over to Mark Reed. Please go ahead.
Mark Reed
Thank you. Good morning and welcome to Corums
software mergers and acquisitions update. Im Mark Reed, executive
VP based here in Seattle, Ill be moderating todays
presentation. We also have Corum personnel jointing us from
Portland, Bellevue, Philadelphia, Phoenix, London, Munich and Zurich as well. This
presentation is a special event focusing on M&A in the software industry
this year. Normally we hold this update twice a year in January and
July to keep you posted on what is happening in M&A in the software and IT world, but there has been so much
activity this year that we thought it would be timely to have a third quarter
update. Since Corum operates worldwide, we will be speaking from a
global perspective. As I understand it, today we have people from
about 30 countries, maybe, around the world, joining us.
In January of this year, we held our M&A update to
recap the events of 2005 and look at what we expected for
2006. Certainly 2005 was an exciting year and we expected that 2006
would be just as active. In fact, 2006 has exceeded our expectations
in many ways, which is why we are holding this webinar. Software
CEOs and entrepreneurs need to know what is happening in this active and
exciting market, because you drive the strategy for your companies and because
timing is so important in a successful M&A transaction. Today we
will pass on some thoughts for software executives to keep in mind as you think
about building shareholder value and when to realize that value. I
will be handing the presentation over to our speakers shortly, but first there
are some logistics to cover.
We reserved time at the end of todays session for
Q&A. Because we have so many people attending the conference
today we will only use the chat tool to take questions. All
telephone lines will remain muted by the operator. So, as you have
questions during the presentation, please use the chat facility available
through your browser. In the upper left corner of the presentation
window, you should see a chat balloon on the menu bar. Please use
this to send me your questions during your presentation and during the Q&A
session. We will record questions as they come in and address as many as
possible after the presentation. Also, if you have any problems during this
conference call or web presentation that you cannot solve, you can press star 0
on this conference call to get an operator to help you.
So, lets get to the presentation. Today our
speakers are Ward Carter, who is the president of Corum Group, Miro Parizek,
who is the managing director of Corum Group International, and Ryan Blakely,
who is our senior director of research. Ward and Ryan are speaking
with us today from Corums head office in Seattle, and Miro joins us from
Corums international headquarters in Zurich. We also have the other
Corum professionals that I mentioned who will be available to field
questions. With that, Ward, its all yours.
Ward Carter
Great. Thanks Mark. I want to welcome
everyone to our conference today. Youre in good company. You
are joined by hundreds of other software executives from around the world on
this teleconference this morning. We also have the backing of
numerous software associations worldwide, and as Mark mentioned, we had up to
30 countries respond, which I think really demonstrates what a multinational
business this is. The agenda today, Im going to be providing some opening
remarks about Corum and who we are, and then well dive in to our market
overview, talk about various trends in the market, what some of the forces
driving that, look at the public market, the IPO market, the influence of
venture capital, and then well look at some of the latest data from our 3rd quarter
M&A briefing, which, by the way, is available on our website, and we will
be providing instructions later on how you can download that.
Briefly, on the Corum Group, many of you know us, we are
M&A specialists in the software space. We have been totally
focused on software and IT M&A
going back to 1985, so more than 20 years. All of our people are
experts in software and IT. Our dealmakers are mostly comprised of
former CEOs and senior software executives from the software industry, and all
of our staff, our resources, our relationships, our exceptionally strong
database, are all totally focused on doing software M&A and meeting the
needs of sellers such as yourself. We have completed over 200
M&A transactions during our history, created over $6 billion in wealth for
our clients. You will see a strong bias towards cross-border
transactions. That is basically the result of the fact that we are
very much an international firm with offices worldwide, throughout North
America and Europe currently, and we are in the process of expanding into South
America and Asia during the next few months. We are recognized as
leaders in this space, many of you know us from our Selling Up, Selling Out
M&A conference, which we conduct 25 times or so a year around the
world. Also, as an attendee of the conference today, you will be
given a complimentary pass to an upcoming Selling Up, Selling Out conference,
that you can access more information on through our webpage. There
is also a brief video on the webpage, which describes that
conference. We also sponsor the World Financial Symposium, which is
three times-yearly conference at major financial centers around the world,
currently they are in London, New York, and San Francisco, where we deeper into
growth and exit strategies for software
and IT executives, and we explore options that include IPOs and venture
funding, as well as M&A, so that
also could be of interest to you as a way to broaden your education and you can
go to Worldfinancialsymposium.com for more information there.
Today we are going to highlight our industry leading
M&A research, which I know many of you already receive. This has
now grown to about a 90 page document, and the recently released report will be
what we are drawing on today for most of the data.
Brought to you by Corums M&A advisors