In its latest geographic consolidation move, colocation giant Equinix announced on Wednesday the acquisition of Frankfurt-based ancotel. Although previously an atypical acquirer, the ancotel buy is Equinix’s second purchase this month, following the pickup of certain assets from Hong Kong-based Asia Tone for $230m. Equinix recently said its dealmaking isn’t done yet. At the Deutsche Bank Securities Media & Telecommunications Conference in February, the company said it plans to place more emphasis on M&A.

Equinix didn’t disclose the price of the acquisition, but did say the valuation is in line with its projected 2012 adjusted EBITDA trading multiple. With a current enterprise value of $9.7bn, Equinix itself is valued at 11 times this year’s projected adjusted EBITDA. Assuming ancotel’s cost structure is similar to Equinix’s, we’d loosely estimate the deal value at $100-110m. Ancotel generated $21.4m in revenue in 2011, with a three-year CAGR north of 20%. The transaction adds a datacenter with 2,100 meters of capacity, 400 network customers, 200 new networks and 6,000 cross connects. Ancotel also has a presence in both London and Hong Kong.

In a departure from its usual practice of making just one acquisition per year, Equinix recently indicated that it intends to use more M&A to fuel growth. The company already dominates the American colocation market, so future M&A activity will likely continue to be overseas. Equinix has a lofty goal of being in 50 markets in the long term, with immediate priorities being India and China. The company has also expressed interest in growing its presence in South Korea and Australia.

Equinix’s international M&A, past five years

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase *90% stake

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Throughout its history, TriNet Group has been a slow but steady consolidator. Perhaps the best-known play by the outsourced HR provider came three years ago, when it gobbled up publicly traded rival Gevity HR for $99m. In its most recent deal, however, the private equity-backed buyer has shifted gears a bit.

Rather than simply add more accounts through an acquisition, TriNet has added a nifty offering to its portfolio. The company recently picked up three-year-old startup ExpenseCloud, which helps automate the process around creating and reimbursing employee expenses. TriNet says the expense management offering will be available on its platform later this year.

Although, candidly, employee expense management sounds like a ho-hum market, the big player in this space – publicly traded Concur Technologies – has shown it can be a wildly valued one. The company’s shares currently change hands at their highest-ever level, putting its market valuation at a whopping $3.4bn. Concur recently projected that sales for its current fiscal year, which ends in September, would be in the neighborhood of $440m, meaning investors are valuing the company at 7.6 times this year’s projected sales.

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Having already agitated for the sale of at least five tech businesses over the past few years, Elliott Associates has set its sights on a significantly bigger target: BMC. The hedge fund said on Monday that it has acquired 5% of the systems management giant and will push for a sale of the company.

For its part, BMC retained Morgan Stanley to advise it on its defense against the unwanted approach and, more importantly, adopted a poison pill that makes any unsolicited deal highly unlikely to succeed. Nonetheless, the idea that BMC could get sold goosed the company’s shares, which added 9% in mid-Monday trading.

From our view, however, it’s highly unlikely that 32-year-old BMC, which has been public since August 1988, will get snapped up. The first – and most obvious – hurdle is the poison pill, or ‘shareholder rights plan’ in the company’s description. But even beyond that, there aren’t very many companies or (probably more relevantly) buyout shops that could write the $10bn or so check that it would take to clear BMC.

For a strategic buyer, we’ve always thought Cisco Systems would be the logical home for BMC. The two companies have partnered around the datacenter, with Cisco providing the gear and BMC serving up the management layer. However, the returns on that partnership haven’t been overwhelming, and Cisco has taken to acquiring small management vendors on its own over the past year and a half. (To bolster its management portfolio, Cisco has reached for startups such as LineSider Technologies, Pari Networks and newScale.) But Cisco, which reported weak financial results last week while also forecasting a ‘cautious’ IT spending environment, is hardly in a place to do its largest-ever acquisition.

That would leave private equity firms as the most likely acquirer of BMC. Those shops have been the buyers of the other companies that Elliott has put in play, including Epicor Software, Blue Coat Systems, Novell and others. However, the collective value of all those Elliott-inspired deals would likely be only half the size of a BMC purchase, which would be a whopper for any single firm. (That goes double because of the reserved credit markets right now.)

The last point underscores one of the other large problems with a BMC takeout: even though its shares have lost nearly 20% of their value over the past year, the company isn’t particularly cheap. It garners a $7.2bn market capitalization, so throwing a 35% premium on that takes the (hypothetical) acquisition price to about $10bn. That works out to about 4.6 times 2011 revenue (10x maintenance revenue) and more than 12x the $800m in cash flow from operations that BMC generated last year. Even with the $1.4bn cash ‘rebate’ from BMC’s treasury, any potential buyer is still looking at paying a double-digit cash-flow multiple for a single-digit grower.

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Some moves just don’t pan out as planned, such as basketball legend Michael Jordan playing baseball or actor Joaquin Phoenix attempting to become a rapper. While those moves may have dented personal pride, when companies make failed moves, it hits their bottom line. Videoconferencing giant Polycom is experiencing that pain today. The company announced on Friday that it is divesting its enterprise wireless communications assets for just $110m to Sun Capital Partners, or about half the price that it paid for the business five years ago.

Polycom entered the wireless communications market in 2007 when it paid $220m for then publicly traded SpectraLink – it’s largest-ever acquisition (today’s divestiture also includes the assets of Kirk Telecom, which SpectraLink acquired for $61m in 2005). While we had doubts, Polycom argued that its rationale for the deal was sound. Polycom thought it would be able to boost revenue by leveraging the two companies’ complementary sales channels as well as by merging their server-side software products into a single platform.

Polycom, however, wasn’t able to generate the revenue that it expected from the acquired assets. The SpectraLink and Kirk Telecom assets dwindled within their newfound parent, falling from $144m in revenue in 2006 to about half that, $94m, in 2011.

Not to pick on Polycom, but its SpectraLink divestiture is just the most recent reminder of the risks involved in attempting game-changing acquisitions. Companies use M&A to enter new markets all the time, and often fail. HP shuttered its Palm Inc business just one year after paying $1.4bn for the company. And in 2010, Yahoo divested its Zimbra collaboration assets for $100m, or less than one-third of the $350m that it paid for the company in 2007. Cisco attempted to move into the consumer video segment when it paid $590m for Pure Digital Technologies, maker of the Flip video camera, but shut down that division two years later.

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When Sophos reached for Astaro exactly a year ago, the two companies lined up very well on paper: Both Europe-based security vendors go to market entirely through the channel, selling primarily to SMBs. Yet they both addressed different aspects of security, with Sophos shoring up endpoints and Astaro focusing on the network.

While the two approaches appear complementary, the infosec landscape is fraught with endpoint/network pairings that haven’t gone to plan. (That goes for M&A both on a large scale, such as IBM-Internet Security Systems, and a small scale, such as Sourcefire-ClamAV.) So what’s the verdict on Sophos’ purchase of the German unified threat management (UTM) vendor? So far, so good.

As a company, Astaro has been fully integrated into Sophos over the past year while also maintaining its historic growth rate of about 30%. (We understand that the UTM business is currently running at about $70m.) Astaro’s growth would basically match the rate of UTM kingpin Fortinet, although that company will do more than a half-billion dollars of sales in 2012.

Sophos is currently in beta with a product that combines Astaro’s UTM technology and Sophos’ core endpoint security offering. The integrated product is due this summer. That offering will hit the market just as Dell works through the integration of its purchase of UTM provider SonicWALL. That deal, which represents Dell’s largest security acquisition, closed Wednesday.

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Although Facebook’s road show may have delayed some companies’ IPO itineraries, audio processing vendor Audience is continuing with plans to begin trading on the Nasdaq on May 10. Facebook has dominated recent IPO chatter (a quick Google search for ‘Facebook IPO’ generates more than 312 million results, versus just five million for ‘Audience IPO’), but Audience’s market opportunity should help the company create some noise of its own.

Audience designs digital signal processors and associated algorithms that help separate human voice from background noise, thereby helping to improve voice quality on mobile phones. The technology also helps improve the responsiveness of speech-recognition software. Apple, for example, uses Audience’s chip in the iPhone 4S.

So far, the market has been receptive. The patient firm, which was founded in 2000 but didn’t start pushing product until 2008, has grown revenue fifteenfold over the past few years, from $6m in 2009 to $97m in 2011. That growth story should pay off in spades for its selling shareholders, notably NEA, Tallwood Venture Capital and Vulcan Capital, which collectively own 87% of the company (combined, they poured $75m into the firm).

Audience plans to raise $80m by offering 5.3 million shares in the range of $14-16 per share. Assuming it prices at the midpoint, Audience will garner a market cap of just under $300m, or three times trailing sales. That valuation is in the ballpark of where rival Maxim Integrated Products currently trades in the public markets. J.P. Morgan, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank are leading Audience’s IPO. This is likely to be the last tech IPO before Facebook’s debut.

All the breathless coverage of Facebook’s kickoff of its IPO roadshow bordered on the ridiculous, even for Wall Street. The reports flew as Facebook made its way along the well-trod path to becoming a public company, a journey that thousands of other companies have already made. But each step (even the most inconsequential) apparently merited coverage: Which door did CEO Mark Zuckerberg use to get into the meeting with potential investors? Did he wear his trademark hoodie as he met the button-down types?

Given this, it’s pretty clear that Facebook hasn’t left any room on the IPO stage for any other would-be debutant. That was underscored by the fact that – according to our understanding – another tech company was originally thinking about making the rounds to buyside institutions this week. Word was that Eloqua was loosely targeting mid-May for its roadshow, but understandably stepped back as the Facebook carnival rolled into town.

Whenever Eloqua does get a chance to tell its story to Wall Street, however, we think it’ll get a pretty good hearing from investors. The on-demand marketing automation vendor is growing about 40% annually (the rate in Q1 actually came in above that level, outstripping full-year 2011) and is likely to finish this year at roughly $100m in sales. It’s right on the cusp of profitability, too. Beyond that, Eloqua has a highly valued rival that recently made its debut: ExactTarget, which currently garners a market value of $1.6bn.

So it’s probably a prudent move by Eloqua and its underwriters not to try to compete with all the noise and flash from the once-in-a-generation offering from Facebook. After all, Wall Street isn’t known for its patience, much less a long attention span. Once Facebook does get listed, many investors will be off looking for the next shiny object.

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In its largest-ever acquisition, LinkedIn said Thursday afternoon that it will pay $119m for SlideShare in an effort to draw more people to the professional network and keep them there longer. SlideShare has some 29 million unique monthly visitors, and the combination should allow LinkedIn members to expand their professional development and identity. It also significantly increases the amount of content on LinkedIn’s network, which is crucial for the company to grow beyond a site that the 160 million registered users only access when they are looking for a job.

The purchase, which continues the company’s practice to cover its M&A bill with a mix of cash and stock, represents a significant inorganic move to bump up engagement on top of LinkedIn’s earlier in-house efforts such as forming professional groups and a dedicated news page. To date, LinkedIn has had success with its strategy.

As it announced the SlideShare acquisition, LinkedIn also reported financial results for its first quarter. Sales for the January-March period doubled to $189m, with the business running at a solid 20% ‘adjusted EBITDA’ margin. Perhaps more importantly, revenue from all three segments of its business (hiring, marketing, subscriptions) posted strong growth. It’s fairly rare that a fast-growth business (LinkedIn has at least doubled revenue for seven straight quarters now) can put up consistent results across completely different business units without a misstep.

Wall Street has certainly noticed that performance. Shares hit their highest level since last May’s IPO, changing hands at about $120 each in Friday afternoon trading. That values the company at $12.3bn, or more than 13 times the forecasted revenue of roughly $900m for 2012. In comparison, old-line job board Monster Worldwide is valued at only $950m, despite being on track to generate slightly higher revenue this year.

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After three consolidation plays in the fragmented human capital management (HCM) market, private equity-backed rollup Peoplefluent has expanded into enterprise collaboration with the acquisition of Socialtext. Although 10-year-old Socialtext was one of the pioneers of collaboration software (or ‘wikis,’ as they were known in the early days) and did attract some 6,500 users, it struggled to actually put up revenue.

According to our understanding, Socialtext was only generating about $5m in revenue. Peoplefluent – backed by Bedford Funding, whose principals served as executives at ERP rollup Geac – isn’t renowned for paying high multiples. It paid less than 2 times sales for both of its main consolidation acquisitions, 2008′s platform purchase of Authoria and 2010′s reach for Peopleclick. (Earlier this year, it also added a learning management vendor, Strategia Communications.)

Peoplefluent’s move to add collaboration to its HR platform comes almost exactly two years after HCM giant SuccessFactors paid $50m for social enterprise software provider CubeTree. Additionally, we’ve seen salesforce.com combine elements of its acquisition of collaboration software startup Manymoon with its step into the HCM market through its high-multiple purchase of Rypple. And salesforce.com just added another small part to its collaboration offering, tucking in tiny startup Stypi

The deal drought continued into April, with spending on tech transactions around the globe during the just-completed month coming in at only $12bn. That’s less than half the level of spending on tech M&A that we recorded in April during the same month last year.

Spending on deals this year has now dropped in three of the four months, compared with 2011. (The $12bn of spending in April essentially matched the monthly average of the previous three months so far this year.) Additionally, the number of acquisitions in April slumped to its lowest level this year.

The low spending and light volume goes against what most observers projected for 2012. Many buyers – flush with cash and enjoying their highest stock price in a decade or so – indicated that they would be active in the M&A market after many deals got knocked off the table due to the European debt crisis in the back half of 2011.

But now, it seems like pricing is the problem. In the recent M&A Leaders’ Survey from 451 Research / Morrison & Foerster, two-thirds of respondents said rich valuation expectations at target companies were keeping deals from getting closed. Only 10% of the survey respondents said pricing wasn’t a hindrance in closing deals. (See the full report.)

In terms of the acquisitions that did get announced last month, we couldn’t help but notice the stark contrast between the two targets of the largest (non-patent) deals in April.

On the one hand, we saw Vodafone Group’s $1.7bn purchase of Cable & Wireless Worldwide, a company that traces its roots back to the 1850s, generates nearly $3.5bn of sales and has 6,000 employees. And on the other hand, there was Instagram – a company with no revenue, only a dozen employees and a 2010 vintage that nonetheless fetched $1bn in its sale to Facebook.

2012 activity, month by month

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase

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