Brenon Daly oversees the financial analysis of 451 Research's Market Insight and KnowledgeBase products, having covered more than a quarter-trillion dollars' worth of deal flow for both national publications and research firms.
Brenon began his career in 1991 as one of the initial reporters at Prognosis, the first English-language newspaper in the former Eastern Bloc. While there, he covered the Czech Republic's transition to a market economy, as well as larger financial stories across the region. Brenon moved to Vienna in 1995 to run the local bureau for United Press International. In addition to reporting extensively on Austrian politics and economics, he also coordinated and edited EuroBusiness stories from correspondents in Slovakia and Hungary. After UPI, Brenon moved to an analyst position with the Economist Group, where he researched and wrote reports for The Economist Intelligence Unit and the regional publication of The Economist.
Returning to the US in 1997, Brenon helped establish the editorial voice in the early days of financial news site CBS MarketWatch. During his time there, he helped launch OptionsWatch, covering options trading, and MarketPulse, a minute-by-minute report on stock activity licensed primarily to brokerages. Since 2000, Brenon has focused his reporting on M&A as a reporter for The Deal. During that time, he also sharpened his analytical skills, writing reports for TechDealmaker (since acquired by 451 Research) and the boutique research firm Intellectual Capital Associates.
Getting to the cloud isn't easy. That's true for clients as well as technology providers that want to take them there. To understand how that comes through in business, consider the current standing of Pivotal Software, a company that has traveled a long and winding road before arriving on the NYSE.
The hundreds of information security vendors that swirl around the RSA Conference have all bundled up their wares and headed home. The four-day conference was crammed with too many companies, an often-jostling reminder of how the overfunding in infosec has overpopulated the industry. So how did it get that way? By appealing to some of the base motivations for human behavior: get rich but don't get hacked.
Even as equity markets convulsed and economic concerns mounted throughout the opening months of 2018, tech dealmakers kept doing deals. M&A spending on tech and telecom acquisitions across the globe in the January-March period hit $119bn, according to 451 Research's M&A KnowledgeBase. The just-closed quarter stands as the highest spending level for Q1 of any year since the end of the recent recession.
The IPO parade rolls on, with DocuSign the latest tech company to unveil its prospectus. The e-signature provider, which is already a unicorn in the private market, didn't reveal terms for its upcoming offering. Whatever amount it raises on Wall Street would come on top of an already substantial haul of funding for DocuSign, which has drawn in more than $400m in backing from some 20 different venture investors.
Smartsheet has turned its focus on small deals into a pretty big business. Now, the SaaS vendor is set to see how its model will play on Wall Street. As the latest enterprise-focused software provider to head public, however, Smartsheet doesn't share a lot of financial characteristics with the rest of Wall Street's 'Class of 2018.'
With Dell Technologies still carting around $50bn in debt, the privately held company is looking at ways to raise cash. Its latest move is to sell off a stake in its Pivotal unit through an IPO. Dell, which will maintain control of the cloud platform software provider, clearly hopes this offering of a slice of one of its businesses proves more lucrative than its previous public market spinoff. We think there's every reason it will.
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