Buoyant debt markets have encouraged private equity to consider larger deals, which in turn call for larger equity checks and make buyout firms more open to teaming up.
Houston, Texas-based BMC Software shares ended trading at $45.42 on Friday. It competes with Oracle, SAP, CA, and Compuware, and has been under pressure from Paul Singer's activist hedge fund Elliott Associates to sell itself since last year.
BMC currently trades in line with its peers at around 11.5 times projected earnings, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Elliott, a seasoned investor in the software sector, has a 9.7-percent stake in the company and has argued that BMC's management was neglecting a huge opportunity to expand into Internet-based business software, a market dominated by the likes of Salesforce.com.
The world's largest providers of software for enterprises, including Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, have already begun investing heavily in that market. Since Elliott first announced an activist stake in BMC last May, the software company's shares have jumped over eight percent from $42 a share.
Elliott is a shareholder in business software company Attachmate, alongside Golden Gate, Thoma Bravo, and Francisco Partners.
BMC is due to announce first-quarter earnings on May 7. The company said on April 8 that it would reduce its workforce following a company-wide operational review. Those job cuts will result in pretax charges of approximately $33 million to $38 million for severance and related termination costs, it added.
