UC4 Sold to Private Equity Firm for $270 Million

August 14, 2012 Alex Woodie

UC4 Software has been acquired by a European private equity group for $270 million, it was announced yesterday. The deal gives a big return for The Carlyle Group, a global asset management giant with $159 billion under management, which sold the business automation software specialists to EQT Partners, a Swedish private equity group with €18 billion in assets.

UC4 makes enterprise job scheduling software that’s used to manage applications running across a wide range of operating systems, including IBM i, z/OS, Unix, Windows, Linux, MPE, BS2000, OpenVMS, and many other “legacy” platforms, not to mention the cloud and software as a service (SaaS) apps. The company wasn’t a major player in the IBM i job scheduling business, but it did have several dozen customers (out of thousands) managing IBM i workloads with its software.

In recent years, UC4 has been a major proponent in developing and delivering the next generation of workload automation solutions. The complexity involved with provisioning, integrating, monitoring, and managing workloads running in both on-premise and cloud environments will overcome traditional job scheduling tools, and require a different approach, the vendor said. The company positioned its solution, the UC4 Automation Engine, as the answer to that problem.

The folks at EQT like what they see with UC4. “We consider UC4 a highly attractive growth company and are impressed by its customer base and strong automation offering,” Per Franzén, a partner at EQT Partners in Germany and an investment advisor to the EQT VI fund, stated in a press release. The new owners “[look] forward to support UC4’s management team in driving further expansion into the rapidly growing cloud automation market.”

EQT is one of the largest private equity groups in Northern Europe. The Stockholm-based company has invested in more than 100 companies since its inception in 1994, primarily concentrating on other Northern European concerns, although it does have a few investments in the U.S., Eastern Europe, and the Far East.

UC4 also unveiled some financial results. The Bellevue, Washington, company says revenues for its second-quarter ended June 30 increased by 24 percent over the same quarter last year. The company says it had $76 million in revenues for all of fiscal 2011, which was a 21 percent increase over the previous year.