Silver Lake is in talks to take Workday, the cloud-based HR and finance software company, private in a deal that would value it at roughly $43bn, according to a Reuters report.
If it comes off, it would rank among the largest software buyouts ever struck, and a rare vote of confidence in a corner of the industry the public market has spent the year souring on.
The talks are, for now, exactly that. Reuters, which broke the story, described the discussions as ongoing, and neither Silver Lake nor Workday has commented.
No competing bidders have surfaced, and nothing has been signed, so the $43bn figure should be read as a reported valuation rather than a done deal.
Investors, however, did not wait for the fine print. Workday shares jumped about 25% on the report before trading was halted, according to CNBC, a leap that says as much about how far the stock had already fallen as about the deal itself.
