DETROIT — Compuware Corp. shareholders Monday approved a merger agreement with the Chicago private equity firm Thoma Bravo LLC that will see the 41-year-old firm, formerly Michigan’s largest technology company, go private in a $2.4 billion buyout.
The company said more than 99 percent of the shares voting at the special meeting voted in favor of the adoption of the merger agreement.
Compuware shareholders will get $10.75 a share when the merger is completed, which includes a net cash payment of $10.389188 per share of common stock as well as the per-share value of the shares of former Compuare subsidiary Covisint Corp., distributed to Compuware shareholders as of Oct. 20.
The companies said they expect the deal to be completed by the end of the year.
Compuware offers mainframe debugging software and application performance management software, which finds and fixes problems in web and smartphone applications. It peaked in size during the Y2K bug period, when it briefly offered IT consulting and had 15,000 employees and was around $2 billion in revenue. As of Sept. 30 it had 2,975 employees and had an annual revenue rate of about $600 million.
Compuware moved its headquarters from Farmington Hills to downtown Detroit, breaking ground in 2000 and moving in in 2003, leading the charge of what has become a torrent of technology companies based in downtown Detroit. The headquarters was bought last month by Bedrock Real Estate Services, the real estate arm of mortgage mogul Dan Gilbert, and Meridian Health, a Detroit-based managed care company.
Compuware CEO Bob Paul told Technology Century in September that he expected few layoffs after the buyout except for staffers directly concerned with managing Compuware as a publicly traded company — for instance, financial and regulatory reporting, investor relations and public relations.
Thoma Bravo manages private equity funds totaling more than $7.5 billion. More at www.thomabravo.com.