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?
David Cummings on Startups 