Formed in 1999, Silver Lake Partners, a Menlo Park, California-headquartered firm, has earned a named for itself as the leading private equity resource for the technology business. The firm is continuously seeking out more mature technology companies that are able to rule over their sectors, mostly those investing between $100 and $500 million. In addition to this, the firm has operating offices in London, New York and San Francisco.
Silver Lake’s holdings involve various big-time firms in the technology industry, mostly coming from its December 2000 connection with the equity recapitalization of web-based brokerage Datek. Investing for Datek eventually resulted to a stake in Ameritrade, which merged with Datek in September of 2002 and further merged with TD Warehouse USA. As a result of this, the company became TD Ameritrade.
Silver Lake Partners’ participation in NASDAQ (also known as the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is likewise a result of its Datek investment. This came about when Datek’s Island ECN was put up as an independent business. By September 2002, Island was fused together with the Instinet Group’s trading network called Instinet. The network was retained when NASDAQ bought the Instinet’s sister network INET. Later, in a deal that closed in February of 2007, Nomura Holdings purchased Instinet.
A number of the many investments of Silver Lake Partners include these business leaders:
• Serena,
• Network General,
• Business Objects,
• SunGard,
• Flextronics,
• Avago,
• Seagate,
• Thomson,
• UGS (presently known as software company Siemens PLM Software),
• Gartner,
• NXP and IPC.
Through TPG Capital from Texas Pacific Group, Silver Lake just added Sabre Holdings and Avaya to its portfolio companies.
The firm employed former Compaq and MCI chief executive officer Michael Capellas in October of 2007 as one of its senior advisors.
