- BMC has been owned by Bain Capital and Golden Gate Capital since 2013, when the buyout firms took the company private in a deal valued at about $6.9 billion.
- CA, led by Chief Executive Officer Michael Gregoire, develops applications for cloud and mobile computing, with most of its revenue coming from maintenance contracts and subscriptions. Founded in 1976 as Computer Associates International, the company went public in 1981.
BMC Software Inc. and CA Inc. are considering a potential deal that would see the software companies combine as part of a transaction to take CA private.
If a deal goes ahead, it would be the biggest leveraged buyout of a technology company since a group led by Michael Dell and Silver Lake Management agreed to buy Dell Inc. in 2013 in a transaction valued at almost $25 billion. CA shares closed at $31.58 on Tuesday, valuing the New York-based company at about $13.2 billion.
Leveraged buyouts -- in which financial sponsors raise a large amount of debt to finance an acquisition -- have become rarer since the 2008 financial crisis led to tighter rules on lending at banks. Private equity firms led 19 purchases worth more than $10 billion from 2005 to 2007
Since the start of 2008, just one such deal other than Dell has been led by a private equity firm: Apollo Global Management LLC’s $12.3 billion acquisition of ADT Corp. in 2016.
