LogMeIn Acquired By Private-Equity Firms (techcrunch.com) 29
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: LogMeIn announced this morning that it has agreed to be sold for $4.3 billion to affiliates of Francisco Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation, the private equity affiliate of Elliott Management Corporation. The purchase price comes out to $86.05 per share in an all-cash deal. The company had a 52-week high of $96.87 per share and a low of $62.02. The purchase price represents a 25% premium on the closing share price on September 18th, which the company reports was the day media reports began to leak that the company was up for sale.
Bill Wagner, president and CEO at LogMeIn said in a statement that the price reflects the high value of the company and will give stockholders a meaningful return. As you would expect, he was also was optimistic that the partnership with Francisco and Evergreen will help the company going forward. As for the private equity firms, they are getting a broad portfolio of products including unified communications and collaboration (UCC). LogMeIn bought Jive Communications for $357 million in 2018 to give it deeper penetration in the unified communications market. It's most well known product is probably GoToMeeting, which has had to compete with the likes of Zoom, WebEx, BlueJean, Google Hangouts and others in a crowded video conferencing space. The company bought GoToMeeting from Citrix in 2016 for $1.8 billion Unless it can find a buyer who will offer a higher price, the deal is expected to close in mid 2020 after standard regulatory scrutiny.
Bill Wagner, president and CEO at LogMeIn said in a statement that the price reflects the high value of the company and will give stockholders a meaningful return. As you would expect, he was also was optimistic that the partnership with Francisco and Evergreen will help the company going forward. As for the private equity firms, they are getting a broad portfolio of products including unified communications and collaboration (UCC). LogMeIn bought Jive Communications for $357 million in 2018 to give it deeper penetration in the unified communications market. It's most well known product is probably GoToMeeting, which has had to compete with the likes of Zoom, WebEx, BlueJean, Google Hangouts and others in a crowded video conferencing space. The company bought GoToMeeting from Citrix in 2016 for $1.8 billion Unless it can find a buyer who will offer a higher price, the deal is expected to close in mid 2020 after standard regulatory scrutiny.
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Block it wherever you find it.
Or centrally manage it. Whichever works best for your environment.
Just don't let individual users install it themselves
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Yup. Its primary use seems to be Indian tech support scams, so blocking logmein and gotomypc should be a top priority for anyone concerned about these things.
I can also see why it'd be worth $4.3B, online scams are a huge, and growing, market.
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Scams? I use it legitimately as part of my job most of the day.
RIP LogMeIn. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that I ever thought storing your passwords online, even if locally encrypted, was not completely retarded (or "making sense" in an already completely insane context), but . . .
"Private Equity" is the busines version of a vampire pimp. Whoring you out, wearing you down, bleeding you dry, and throwing your business corpse away to get the next one. Friends don't let friends fall for what should be a completely criminal form of "business"... But as I already said: "making sense" in an already completely insane world.
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Things some of us never do.
Well Crap....there goes the remote login planet. (Score:2)
Yo Grark
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Why did the end of Spaceballs come to mind when I heard this announcement?
Yo Grark
You can bypass all this store your passwords online nonsense by only using the secret combination to President Skroobs luggage for every account you have. Nothing to remember.
I have about 300 personal unique logins I manage for myself...
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You can bypass all this store your passwords online nonsense
No I can't, because I work for a company that was also bought out by a private equity firm a few years ago, and they insist on us storing everything on lastpass.
Don't worry, it's not the stupidest thing the new management has had us do. Not by a long shot.
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Oracle bought the company I used to work for. My group was immediately spun out and sold to another company. Those who ended up at Oracle did little better as the new owner striped away all the patents and customers and did the usual Oracle push to migrate those customers to existing Oracle products. The retained employees were fired as soon as the product they supported was deemed to have no future. The rest ended up as mindless drones doing whatever Oracle wanted.
The customers, meanwhile, mosty fled,
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Private equity in comparison (at least in my experience) don't, and often don't understand the businesses they buy.
In my case, they saw a company that was profitable, and either the second or third biggest player in the market. They then cut all the costs out of the business, and provide a much worse experience for the customers and watch the business get smaller and sm
It's most well known product is probably.... (Score:5, Informative)
Umm, LastPass? LogMeIn owns LastPass.
It's astonishing that this wasn't mentioned in the Slashdot summary.
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How many times has lasspass changed hands???? If the deal goes through, it may be time to change to another password manager. Private equity firms are only in it for the money. If lastpass is not making them money, they will shut it down or sell it yet again.
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How many times has lasspass changed hands???? .
Apparently just once.
Lastpass was originally privately held until Logmein bought it.
And now Logmein is being acquired.
KeePassXC is open source and free. (Score:2)
If a password manager is not open source, I would worry that something hidden was being done. That is much less likely with open source software.
2 of the Keepass features:
"Cross-platform, runs on Linux, Windows and macOS without modifications"
"File format compatibility with KeePass2, KeePassX, MacPass, KeeWeb and many others (KDBX 3.1 and 4.0)"
I wish programmers would give more attention to social issues. Keep-Ass is not a good name. KeepPass, would be better
I'm scared Toto. (Score:3)
To the moon! (Score:2)
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Where are you getting your numbers? LOGM has a projected P/E of 21.01 for 2019 [nasdaq.com]. Apple's was 23.58 for 2019 [nasdaq.com].
Not necessarily (Score:3)
The company I work for was taken private by Thoma Bravo. It's continued to grow at a pretty rapid pace.
I don't know what Elliott Management Corporation's business model is; it could be "suck it dry and discard the desiccated husk" for all I know. I've never heard of them.
But that's not the universal business model of private equity firms. (Thoma Bravo tends to take companies back private in a few years, after they've grown substantially.)
It Webex... (Score:2)
Its Webex, not WebEx. Going on almost 2 years now and no one has noticed the change?
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Nobody cares.
Stopped using it YEARS ago (Score:3)