BMC binned by Bain and buds, bought by investment company

Software house BMC has been bought and sold again and now might do some buying and selling of its own.

The company last changed hands in 2013 when a group of private equiteers headed by Bain Capital splashed US$6.9bn to take it out of public hands and promised “to accelerate BMC's growth and strengthen its position as the best-in-class provider of IT management software for heterogeneous environments.”

BMC’s buyers have declared themselves pleased with the company’s performance under their care, but offloaded it anyway to investment firm KKR.

Just why isn’t clear, but there’s a hint in the canned statement from John Park, the head of the KKR’s Technology, Media & Telecom industry team, who said “We are thrilled to partner with the talented BMC team to accelerate growth—including via M&A—building on BMC's deep technology expertise and long-standing customer relationships."

BMC’s not made notable acquisitions for years, but reportedly considered a consensual acqui-merger with CA in 2017.

That didn’t happen, suggesting BMC’s owners didn’t like the idea.

KKR clearly has other ideas. If it pursues a CA transaction, it would create a substantial enterprise software outfit, albeit one with a strong odour of legacy systems about it. Or perhaps KKR thinks BMC’s ambition to get SaaS-y and multi-cloudy could be more easily achieved with some acquisitions.

Neither KKR nor BMC’s soon-to-be-former owners have mentioned how much money will change hands. ®