Kana Software, a provider of software solutions for service experience management backed by Accel-KKR, has entered into a definite agreement to acquire Lagan Technologies, a provider of government to citizen technology. Lagan is being sold by DFJ Esprit, which was the largest shareholder in the company. The transaction will complement Kana’s capabilities in the communications, financial services, healthcare, retail and technology sectors.  The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Lagan software powers 200 government agencies worldwide at the national, regional and city level, serving 60 million citizens a year. The combined entities will deliver rapid response to billions of

Thoma Bravo, a private equity investment firm, has completed the acquisition of LANDesk Software from Emerson. LANDesk specialises in systems lifecycle management, endpoint security and IT service management. Financial details were not disclosed. Steve Daly, formerly the executive vice president and general manager of LANDesk, has been named the chief executive of LANDesk and will lead the independent company along with the existing management team. “Now that LANDesk is an independent company, we can be more focused on strengthening our core business,” says Daly. “LANDesk customers, partners and employees can expect even more innovation throughout our key solutions – systems

Northern Trust has launched a portfolio reporting and monitoring solution for private equity fund of funds managers, which enables them to track their fund of funds holdings and valuations right through to portfolio company level.  “Detailed tracking of underlying investments by a private equity fund of funds manager can be a very time consuming, specialised and resource hungry middle office operation,” says Mark Schoen, head of global product and strategy for Europe, Middle East and Africa. “Through Northern Trust’s fund and investment tracking solution, we can provide our clients with a high level of granularity and reporting that effectively ‘looks

IHS has acquired Syntex Management Systems, an SMH Private Equity Group portfolio company based in Houston, Texas. SMH Private Equity Group is a division of Sanders Morris Harris Group. Syntex, a provider of enterprise risk management software, helps customers manage corporate risks such as employee safety and health programmes.  This is the second major private equity investment exit in the past 12 months for SMH, following the sale of Lombardi to IBM.

Prime Technology Ventures, a pan-European venture capital firm, has led a USD13m round of new funding in Cint, the company behind the SaaS-based marketplace for market research sample Cint Panel Exchange. Existing owners such as Nordic venture capital firm Creandum also participated in the funding. Cint is headquartered in Stockholm and provides market researchers with fully automated access to panels of four million profiled individuals across 40 countries. In 2008 Cint opened offices in US, Canada, Spain, Denmark and Russia. During 2009 and 2010 additional offices were opened in UK, Germany and the Netherlands. Funds will be used to expand

Prelert has raised USD3.75m in series A funding from Fairhaven Capital Partners and Sierra Ventures. Prelert will use the funds to expand sales of its Incident Cause Analysis software, the first product to automatically find the causal chain of events behind business affecting IT service incidents. "Prelert has proven its ability to reduce the time it takes to identify and document the cause of service disruption incidents by 90 per cent," says Rick Grinnell, managing director of Fairhaven Venture Capital. "Their product has broad applicability across a diverse set of environments, including market data systems, Web-based applications, internal network applications,

Crescent Financial Partners has purchased a minority stake in IT Trading’s proprietary quantitative trading software for USD3.2m. The software, which has been under development for nearly a decade, employs a statistical arbitrage trading model. “In the finance world, arbitrage is commonly known as the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets,” said John Indelicato and Anthony Tuozzo, creators of the software. “Essentially what our software does is automates this process through the use of advanced sophisticated algorithms.” Russell Armstrong, chief executive and managing director of Crescent Financial Partners adds: “We believe this algorithm is

Ridgemont Equity Partners, a middle market buyout and growth equity firm, has signed a definitive agreement for a majority investment in Unite Private Networks, a provider of high-bandwidth, fibre-based communications networks. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Unite Private Networks specialises in providing high-capacity data communications networks and related services to schools, government, carriers, data centres and enterprise business customers. It currently provides service in 12 states, primarily in the Midwest US. “Our partnership with Ridgemont will help ensure that UPN has continued access to capital for growth and provide broader access to strategic and financial resources.