[frik]

Thanks for the insightful explanation!

What do PE companies do with more than one company with kind of dated offerings in the same/similar niche?

Reduce the fat, merge them and sell them to a large company?

E.g. Qlik, Riverbed and Dynatrace https://thomabravo.com/portfolio/all/current/

[postgeographic]

Yeah, that's called a buy-and-build strategy, or a bolt-hole strategy. A large number of industries or market segments that are fragmented end up consolidating this way. For example, Lumison is a data center business here in the UK, and they got bought out by Bridgepoint Development Capital. Subsequently BDC and Lumison went on to buy a few other data centers, making one larger data center with the attendant economies of scale