Our corner of the world — "infrastructure" — has been beaten up over the past couple of years by financial types wondering how new companies in this space can ever make significant returns for venture investors. In the past few years acquisition has been the preferred exit strategy, often at a distressed price. "Home runs" have been few and far between. But 2009 looks like the beginning of a new chapter in that book. Four public infrastructure companies that we watch — ArcSight, Acme Packet, Riverbed and Sourcefire — went public between late 2006 and early 2008. For the most part they hovered around their offering price, in some cases spending many months below it. But that's changed. Despite the recession, 2009 has been a wonderful year for this group as the table below shows — with ArcSight leading the pack at 5x its share price at the beginning of the year. It's probably too soon to pontificate about these.
Infrastructure Recent IPO's Growth in 2009
