Thursday, March 02, 2006

fuego bea - $85m 6-8x multiple

venture market summary
By VentureWire Staff Reporters

BEA Systems is paying $87.5 million to acquire Fuego, a business process management software developer, in a move aimed at cementing its position in the blistering market for service-oriented architecture software.

Plano, Texas-based Fuego, founded in 1999, is a provider of software designed to help its corporate customers run a variety of business processes across their businesses. The company employed some 100 workers.

Analyst John Rizzuto at Lazard Capital Markets, who estimated that Fuego had revenue of $11 million to $14 million last year, praised BEA's purchase. "We believe that the Fuego acquisition provides a much-needed technology to deepen its technology stack, and it is likely to become more competitive as a result," Rizzuto told clients.

Alfred Chuang, chairman and chief executive of San Jose-based BEA, said: "We are systematically targeting the fastest-growing segments of the red-hot SOA software market." BEA said that the market for business-process management software is one of the fastest-growing segments of infrastructure software, estimated to be worth over $1 billion by 2008.

SOA is a type of architecture used to define the use of independent services across a network that gives software users access to independent services in a standardized way. Earlier this year Mercury Interactive agreed to acquire service-oriented architecture company Systinet Corp. for $105 million in cash, bolstering its SOA offerings.

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