Dynatrace ranks as one of Thoma Bravo’s best deals ever
Thoma Bravo earlier this year fully exited Dynatrace, a pioneer in the “observability” category of software development tools. The exit marked the end of a 10-year journey that began with the carve-out of Dynatrace from Compuware, which the tech-focused private equity firm bought for $2.4 billion in a take-private deal back in 2014 when many people in the software industry viewed it as a dying dinosaur.
The PE firm created two companies: revitalizing the Compuware mainframe business and selling it to KKR-backed BMC Software in 2020; and reimagining the Dynatrace application performance monitoring business for cloud computing and taking it public in 2019. The PE firm sold its last position in Dynatrace through a secondary transaction earlier in 2024.
Today, Dynatrace ranks as “one of the best deals” that Thoma Bravo has ever done, co-founder and managing partner Orlando Bravo told PE Hub .
“Compuware was mainly known as a mainframe company,” recalled Bravo. “Our team – Seth Boro and Chip Virnig – very astutely, saw the Dynatrace asset as a market-leading asset in basically protecting cloud infrastructure, in being able to keep its uptime as the world was going digital and as a potential number one player in that space, because there were other companies that had distributed products along with mainframe, but in this one, our team saw the potential of a big market leader.”