Two Major SaaS Exits Announced

After last week’s Lack of SaaS Consolidation post, we just had two major SaaS exits announced in the last 24 hours:

• Vista Equity Partners to Acquire Marketo for $1.8 Billion
• Salesforce Buys Demandware for $2.8 Billion

With relatively few SaaS exits recently, these two are huge. What to make of it? Here are a few thoughts:

• SaaS has much more growth ahead than public markets even priced in
• Market leaders get a serious premium
• Consolidation will eventually happen for the category leaders
• Plan on 10+ years for the largest of SaaS exits
• Look for more of these huge exits over the next five years (Zendesk, Shopify, HubSpot, etc.)

It’s a great time to be in SaaS and we have many years of growth ahead of us.

What else? What are some more thoughts on these recent SaaS acquisition announcements?