Dolphin Equity Partners has agreed to sell its portfolio company Gomez, a provider of Web application experience management, to Compuware, an application performance management software company.
The USD295m cash acquisition is expected to close in November 2009.
Dolphin is Gomez’s largest shareholder and first invested in the company in 2000, when it saw an opportunity to build on Gomez’s nascent Web performance monitoring assets, and has since played a pivotal role in defining the company’s direction.
Dolphin president Richard Brekka has been Gomez’s chairman of the board after a stint as interim chief executive in 2005, when he led the search to bring in current chief executive Jamie Ellertson.
“Dolphin Equity Partners has been instrumental in the success of Gomez,” says Ellertson. “Richard Brekka and the rest of the Dolphin team have been strong advocates of our strategic direction and a valued business partner in helping Gomez achieve its expansion plans. In Richard, we benefited from the hands-on insights of an industry veteran as a close advisor as we built the company and supported our goals to build a world-class management team with a global organisation to take advantage of the market opportunity.”
“We recognised that Gomez had a lot of potential and the opportunity to build a transformative and disruptive business as applications moved to the Web,” says Brekka. “We have worked closely with the Gomez senior management team to develop the latest technologies to position the company to dominate the Web application management space.”
Headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, Gomez employs 272 people around the world. Substantially all of these employees, including the leadership team, are expected to remain with Compuware after the close of the transaction.
