Layer 7 Technologies Acquired For Estimated $180 Million

Layer 7 Technologies | BCBusiness
The deal is rumoured to be the biggest of its kind in Vancouver of the past decade

The CA Technologies acquisition of Layer 7 may be the biggest B.C. software deal in the last decade

CA Technologies Inc. announced an agreement to acquire Layer 7 at CA World, a cloud and mobile conference in Las Vegas, on April 22. While the terms of the transaction were not disclosed, The Vancouver Sun has pegged CA Technologies’ purchase at $180 million.

Layer 7 builds and manages accessible programming interfaces, which allow its corporate clientele to integrate partners, internal and external developers with their services and data.

Organizations that have data are facing the problem of making that data accessible to apps available on mobile phones or tablets and to internal and external partners, explains Layer 7 chief strategy and marketing officer Dimitri Sirota.

“We’ve been providing technology to let them do that securely and in a repeatable way,” says Sirota.

Launched in 2002 by founders Toufic Boubez, Jamie Glennon, Lonny McLean and Dimitri Sirota, Layer 7 raised $21 million in venture capital from BDC, Vancouver’s GrowthWorks and local angel investors.

Sirota estimated in The Vancouver Sun that local investors will get around $50 million each.

“It leaves funds for the [venture capital firms]. We had backing from some Bay Area funds, but we received primarily local money, and in terms of executives founders, those kinds of people they now have the capital to reinvest in Vancouver’s tech scene,” Sirota told BCBusiness.

Layer 7 saw $30 million in revenue last year, a figure that Sirota expects to see double in 2013.

The emergence of smartphones, tablets and cloud computing, and their importance to large enterprises, helped a Vancouver company that banked on the long-term importance of API security and management, turn into one of the biggest players in its escort.

“You’re always forecasting, you assume a particular vision of the future and sometime that vision takes a little bit longer to occur,” says Sirota. “In our case, while the original vision was sound, what really made a difference in the last three to four years in terms of our company performance and in terms of the interest we’ve had from companies like CA Technologies was the emergence of cloud computing and mobility.”

Layer 7 Technologies has 180 employees in Vancouver and offices in the U.S. and Europe. As one of 10 B.C. companies named to the Deloitte Fast 500 in 2012, the company reported a total of $30 million in revenue in 2012.

Its API security and management products are used by Cisco, Adobe, General Motors and U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Defense.

CA Technologies Inc. is an management software company headquartered in New York and employs 14,000. It reported revenues for the 2012 fiscal year at $1.15 billion.