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Avast, E2open next tech IPOs on deck

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Following positive reactions to some recent initial public offerings for tech companies, two more debuts from the sector are slated for the market this week.

The new debuts -- both software firms -- will continue to test investors' appetite for tech IPOs since the disappointing debut of Facebook(FB) in mid-May, which froze the market for new deals for more than a month, until the successful offering by ServiceNow Inc. (NOW) on June 29.

Avast Software Inc., with the ticker symbol "AVST," is expected to price late Wednesday and begin trading on Thursday morning on the Nasdaq Global Market. E2Open Inc., with the ticker symbol of "EOPN," is slated to price late Thursday and begin trading on the Nasdaq Friday morning.

Avast plans to offer 9 million shares at between $9 and $11 each. The lead underwriters for the IPO are UBS Investment Bank, Deutsche Bank Securities and Jefferies & Co. The company develops anti-virus software, specializing in a free version of its product used by consumers, then provides upgrades that can be purchased.

James Krapfel of Morningstar said Avast is going public at a time when "the company's software is installed on 20% of the worldwide consumer and small business PCs." Krapfel called Avast "a higher quality peer" to rival AVG Technologies (AVG) , with sales growing at twice AVG's annual rate. AVG went public in February.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Avast said that for its most-recent fiscal quarter, ended March 31, revenue was $27.1 million, up from $18.1 million in the same period a year ago.

A day after Avast is set to make its public debut, E2open is scheduled to put nearly 4.7 million shares up for sale, in a range of $15 to $17 a share. Certain shareholders selling 937,500 of those shares. Bank of America/Merrill Lynch is the lead underwriter on E2open's IPO.

E2open sells cloud-based collaboration software used by businesses that use it to improve the efficiency of their manufacturing and sales operations.

IPO Boutique, which tracks the performance of companies that have filed to go public, expects interest in E2open to be high, and estimates the IPO "is already well oversubscribed" among retail and institutional investors.

For its most-recent quarter, which ended May 31, E2open reported revenue of $15.5 million, up from last-year's quarterly sales of $11.2 million.

Both companies hope to ride on the success of other recent public debuts from tech firms since the Facebook IPO. Last week, network-security company Palo Alto Networks Inc. (PANW) closed its first day of trading at $53.13, up 26% from the $42 a share of the company's IPO price. Prior to its IPO, Palo Alto raised the price of its offering to between $38 and $40 a share from an earlier range of $34 to $37 a share.

Online travel information aggregator Kayak Software Corp. (KYAK) also had a strong debut last week, going public at $26 a share and rising 27% to close its first day of trading at $33.18. The company also went public above its initial price range of $22 to $25 a share.

Cloud-based business-automation software company ServiceNow went public at $18 a share, up from is earlier estimated range of $15 to $17 a share, and finished its first day of trading with a gain of more than 30%, at $23.54.