SaaS Deals Get Top Valuations, Del Mar DataTrac Sold, Qualcomm Introducing a Pet Tracker, & More San Diego BizTech News

The climate for software deal-making improved during the second quarter, especially for cloud-based companies offering Software-as-a-Service. We’ve got the rundown on that, as well as a new software deal to be counted in the next quarter.

—San Diego’s Software Equity Group counted 397 buyouts and mergers in the software sector with a cumulative value of more than $21.3 billion during the second quarter that ended June 30. The investment banking and advisory firm says global spending on information and communications technologies is fueling higher valuations for public software companies, although much of that growth has been driven by big deals for Software as a Service.

—Pleasanton, CA-based mortgage software developer Ellie Mae (NYSE Amex: [[ticker:ELLI]]), which only went public in April, said it has agreed to acquire San Diego’s Del Mar DataTrac for $25.2 million over the next three years.

—After investing in Assistly, bitly, Klout and TweetDeck, hedge fund manager Howard Lindzon decided to start StockTwits in San Diego. The company’s TweetDeck-like platform enables investors to share their investing ideas, stock tips, comments, charts, and other information in 140-character tweets. Lindzon told me in an interview, “If I’m running an institutional trade desk, and following real-time streaming of news, then Twitter is going to rule the world.”

—First a consortium that includes Apple (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AAPL]]) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MFST]] spent $4.5 billion to buy Nortel Networks and its wireless patents. Then Google (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GOOG]]) bid $12.5 billion to acquire Motorola Mobility (NYSE: [[ticker:MMI]] and its wireless patents. Now here are rumors that San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) has been considering a buyout of InterDigital, a Pennsylvania wireless technologies specialist that recently opened a R&D outpost in San Diego. The problem with this rumor, though, is that Qualcomm already has a substantial number of wireless patent holdings.

—It’s kind of a LoJack for missing pets. Snaptracs, a year-old Qualcomm subsidiary, is introducing a consumer product next month—a lightweight tracking device called Tagg that attaches to a pet’s collar and helps pet owners track down their lost pets. The $200 system includes a GPS location device, and alerts pet owners when their dog or cat strays beyond its “Tagg Zone,” a geo-boundary that pet owners set up.

—San Diego CEOs on the move: Desmond Wheatley, Envision Solar’s president and chief operating officer, has succeeded founder (and Xconomist) Robert Noble as CEO, and Noble is now executive chairman. San Diego-based Decision Sciences named Stanton D. Sloan as its new CEO. Sloane is the former CEO of SRA International, the Fairfax, VA-based IT company acquired by Providence Equity Partners earlier this year for nearly $1.9 bil

—San Diego-based Astute Networks signed a distribution agreement with Tech Data (NASDAQ: [[ticker:TECD]]) to help extend the adoption of ViSX G3, technology that Astute developed to accelerate server and desktop virtualization.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.