Facebook, ?Titanic' Of IPOs, Could Poison Tech Company Pipeline

Faced with the disastrous fallout from the initial public offering of Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), the No. 1 social network, other technology companies that had been waiting to go next may reconsider.

Or, unlike Facebook, they may choose to be brought to market by someone other than Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) and list on NYSE Euronext's (NYSE: NYX) rather than on Nasdaq OMG (Nasdaq: NDAQ).

Among them are Palo Alto Networks, a network security specialist that filed for an IPO on May 10, which recruited CEO Mark McLaughlin from VeriSign (Nasdaq: VRSN) last August, and BlackStratus, a cloud security developer, that filed April 13.

Palo Alto Networks, of Santa Clara, Calif., another Morgan Stanley client, wants to raise $175 million. BlackStratus, of Piscataway, N.J., through Aegis Capital, is seeking $20 million.

Others are also in the pipeline such as Corsair Components, which filed last month for $78 million through Stifel Nicolaus Weisel and RBC Capital Markets and E2Open, $85 million, through Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) Merrill Lynch.

Facebook was the hottest issue in technology since Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) in 2004. Last year, problems with Facebook partner, game website Zynga (Nasdaq: ZNGA) held up its IPO for months. That company's CEO, Mark Pincus, is a Facebook director and shareholder.

As well, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission also forced Groupon (Nasdaq: GRPN) of Chicago to revise its prospectus because of questions regarding its financial reporting.

After a mediocre IPO Nov. 7, when Groupon shares were priced at $20, they've now fallen to $11.85. After announcing accounts that were materially defective last month, it was sued by many of the same lawyers now going after Facebook.

So far in 2012, there've been 69 overall IPO pricings, up 6.2 percent from a year ago, calculates Renaissance Capital of Greenwich, Ct. The issues have raised $28 billion, up 24 percent from last year.

But 70 IPOs were filed, down nearly 40 percent from 2011. Technology is the biggest by percentage, 23 percent, the bank said. The tech companies raised $18.2 billion billion, with an average first day return of 25 percent, a far cry from Facebook, which rose only 23 cents.

The second-largest cluster was financial services, with deals having collected $3.1 billion.

Several companies have either delayed their offers, such as Corsair, or pulled them for now, like Tria Beauty.

Other companies that might come along such as Workday, a human resources software company run by David Duffield, whose PeopleSoft was acquired by Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) or Infor, the software roll-up company headed by former Oracle president Charles Phillips, may just stay private longer.

There are alternatives: big players like Oracle, Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) have plenty of cash. They are constantly seeking and buying both public and private companies that have already proved their execution strategies and fill holes in the product offering.

Shares of Facebook rose $1.03 to $33.03 at Thursday's close. They were priced a week ago at $38.

--