Two separate reports were released this morning, both bringing upbeat news of increased exit activity (M&A;, IPOs) for venture-backed companies in the first quarter of 2010.

We take a look at the most important findings for both the Exit Poll report by Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association, and Dow Jones VentureSource’s assessment of IPO and M&A; activity in the U.S. during the first three months of this year.

Dow Jones VentureSource

Title: U.S. Venture-Backed Company IPOs in First Quarter Match 2009 Total; M&A; Deal Activity Flat as Median Paid Picks Up

Subtitle: M&As; and IPOs of VC-Backed Companies Net $4.7B in Q1; Time to Reach M&A; Still Low as Investors Sell Companies Earlier

Q1 2010 according to Dow Jones VentureSource:

- Eight U.S. venture-backed companies raised $711 million by going public on U.S. stock exchanges, matching the number of IPOs that occurred throughout 2009.
– It took companies that went public during the first quarter a median of 10.4 years and $156 million in venture capital to achieve liquidity.
– This is more than the median 7.9 years and $32 million in capital it took for companies to reach an IPO in 2009.

- Corporations bought 77 companies for $4 billion through mergers and acquisitions (M&As;), on par with the 77 deals that raised $3.4 billion during the same period last year and a far cry from the 109 deals completed during the first quarter of 2008.
– The $27 million median amount paid for a venture-backed company in the most recent quarter is a 17% increase from the $23 million median paid during the same period in 2009.
– It took a median of 5.4 years for a venture-backed company to reach liquidity via a merger or acquisition, 15% more than the 4.7-year median in the first quarter of 2009, but still less than the medians seen during the same period in 2007 and 2008, 6.1 and 6.6 years respectively.
– Companies that exited during the first quarter raised a median of $19 million in venture capital before exiting through a merger or acquisition, a 19% increase from the $16 million median during the same period last year.

Thomson Reuters / NVCA

Title: Venture-Backed Exit Activity Shows Improved Signs of Life in Q1 2010

Subtitle: All-time Record for Venture-backed M&A; Exits; Nearly All Venture-backed IPOs Trading Above Offer Price

Q1 2010 according to Thomson Reuters / NVCA:

- The quarter ended with nine venture-backed IPOs and 111 M&A; transactions.

- There were nine venture-backed IPOs valued at $936.2 million in the first quarter of 2010 quarter of 2009, more than double the amount raised during the fourth quarter of 2009.
– Of the nine IPOs in the first quarter, eight were trading at or above their offering prices as of 3/31/2010.
– Three of the eight IPO exits for the quarter were in the Biotechnology sector, accounting for a total of $310.5 million.
– Forty-three venture-backed companies are currently filed for an initial public offering with the SEC.

- 111 venture-backed M&A; deals were reported for the first quarter, 31 of which had an aggregate deal value of $5.6 billion.
– The average disclosed deal value was $180.2 million.
– This marks the biggest quarter for overall number of venture-backed M&A; exits since records began in 1975.
– The information technology sector led the venture-backed M&A; landscape, with 81 deals and a disclosed total dollar value of $2.3 billion.
– Within this sector, computer software and services and internet specific companies accounted for the bulk of the targets, with 35 and 26 transactions, respectively, across these sector subsets.
– Deals bringing in the top returns, those with disclosed values greater than four times the venture investment, accounted for 45 percent of the total in the first quarter of 2010.
– Venture-backed M&A; deals returned less than the amount invested accounted for 31 percent of the quarter’s total, on par with total in the previous quarter.

And here’s a bonus report: JEGI’s Q1 2010 M&A; Results – Deal Activity and Transaction Value Up (PDF)

Google just announced a small but useful update to the chat feature in iGoogle and Orkut, Google’s social network. You can now use the chat feature to send photos, documents and other files directly to your contacts. More importantly, though, Google also announced that it plans to finally bring this file transfer functionality to Gmail’s built-in chat feature. Right now, if you want to transfer a file to your Google contacts, you either have to email them the file or use the Google Talk desktop app or a compatible instant messaging client.

To use this feature, simply go to your chat widget in iGoogle or Orkut, start a chat and click on “Send a file…” in the “Actions” menu. The recipient will be able to either accept the incoming file or politely decline the transfer.

Chat in Gmail already features video and voice chat, but the file transfer feature is currently still missing. It always seemed rather strange to us that some of Google’s instant messaging services like the Google Talk desktop client already had this capability. Now, there isn’t even feature parity among the web-based version of Google Talk anymore. Hopefully Google will soon fulfill its promise and bring this feature to Gmail as well.

Enterprise content management (ECM) is big business these days. There are scads of companies turning a tidy profit promising to do a competent job of managing every conceivable type of content, from records bound by regulation to Web content and freewheeling collaborative work. What there isn’t as much of is sound advice from experienced professionals on how to save money when it comes to ECM.

At a time when IT budgets are tight and few can afford to spend anything they don’t have to, Gartner’s research vice president Tony Bell is offering some interesting thoughts on best practices for reducing costs. Here’s our assessment of his tactics for increasing efficiency when it comes to ECM.

Clean House

Before you’re ready to make a new ECM implementation of any kind, take the time to assess what content you have and what you can do without. Either as a team or through designated point people, find and eliminate old and duplicate content that bogs down your current solution.

Keeping content around that is doing you no good is a waste of time and resources. If content migration and integration of systems is so important, more enterprises should be paying attention to how they can alleviate the burden that unnecessary content creates.

Develop Automated Policies

As Gartner puts it, “a policy about documents takes the form of rules and metadata that allow some automatic categorization and expiration of content.” In other words, creating document policies for your ECM implementation is going to help preclude the need for spending a lot of time on the need to prune old content to increase efficiency.

Automated processes are a big deal in many enterprise systems these days, but not everyone is applying their understanding to documents. That’s a shame, since it’s a powerful method for keeping junk out of your document repositories and file servers.

Consider Open Source Alternatives & Accompanying Services

Gartner’s specific recommendation is about “content service providers” and open source. The first half of that equation refers to ECM vendors who can also provide services to augment or replace certain needs when in the enterprise. In our view this is the area that needs the most careful consideration.

While Gartner is correct that services can be a boon to your ECM strategy and help you make good choices that will reduce spending, it’s not always the case that services perform as advertised. It’s important to note that what we’re talking about is companies that integrate services with their core business, not those who rely on a partner ecosystem to make up for all necessary consulting.

The latter half of Gartner’s suggestion here is about open source. Yes open source is the kind of thing that tends to scare the enterprise. But running blindly away from a market that has become a stable alternative, complete with SLAs and adequate support, is foolish during a period when enterprises know they need to cut costs.

Leverage the Web

By which we mean stop trying to rely on in house data and content channels for everything, especially in areas where you’re ferrying data from one consumer-facing location to another. It may make IT feel more secure, but not taking advantage of a faster, cheaper network that already exists for content delivery isn’t going to save you any money.

Go Green

Going green isn’t just about acting ethically as a business, it can save you money too. As anyone who works in the B2G space knows, dealing with a heavy paper document workload is a serious drain on company resources. Unless you’ve a special case, there’s no excuse for not pushing hard on becoming as close to a paperless organization as humanely possible.

Get Out of the Email Business

The headline for this one was just too good not to change. Countless enterprise vendors large and small are declaring how hip they are when it comes to fighting email overload and increasing efficiency. But fewer enterprises are tackling the root of the problem by killing their on-premise Exchange servers altogether.

Even if you’re not the least bit interested in “Going Google” there are now robust hosted Outlook options available. Cutting out the enormous IT overhead that email and calendaring creates is a great way to save money when it comes to enterprise content management.

The full release is available here, and you can hear Tony Bell speak on this at Gartner’s Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in September.

Photo by AMagill