Need a virtual data room...Best Value?

I was chosen to head up a small cap deal, and we are in the beginning of the execution phase. I've done some research but it takes a lot of time to call all these different sites to get quotes, and I've got ridiculous amounts of work to do. Some are superior to others, but those are usually very pricey. I'd like to find a very professional site, but also good value.

Any of you monkeys know of sites that aren't crazy expensive but still offer quality service? Had any personal experience to vouch? Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks guise

Full Disclosure: Searched several pages of past threads before starting this thread

 
Best Response

Data room sales reps are on another level, they'll bug you quite a bit if they know you're looking. Proceed with caution, lol. Maybe even get a burner phone and a throwaway e-mail.

Intralinks and Merrill are awful suggestions. Very expensive. Some providers of comparable quality, but cheaper price include: Firmex, Deal Interactive, Ansarada (they'll deal), and Sharevault. Bowne/RR Donnelly would be slightly more expensive than those providers, but cheaper than Intra & Merrill. Depending on your needs, OneHub is a great solution. Much cheaper than anything I mentioned above. It's basically WatchDox with additional features commonly needed in deals (customizable disclaimer pages, etc.).

Whatever you do, pit the offers against each other. You'll be amazed how much they can move down in price from the initial offer, haha.

 
ThaVanBurenBoyz:
Data room sales reps are on another level, they'll bug you quite a bit if they know you're looking. Proceed with caution, lol. Maybe even get a burner phone and a throwaway e-mail.

Intralinks and Merrill are awful suggestions. Very expensive. Some providers of comparable quality, but cheaper price include: Firmex, Deal Interactive, Ansarada (they'll deal), and Sharevault. Bowne/RR Donnelly would be slightly more expensive than those providers, but cheaper than Intra & Merrill. Depending on your needs, OneHub is a great solution. Much cheaper than anything I mentioned above. It's basically WatchDox with additional features commonly needed in deals (customizable disclaimer pages, etc.).

Whatever you do, pit the offers against each other. You'll be amazed how much they can move down in price from the initial offer, haha.

Appreciate the advice. I've already fallen victim to their schemes. The last place I was at used intralinks and the invoices were ridiculous. No way I'm using them. I'll check out the others tomorrow.

 
Genetic:
ThaVanBurenBoyz:
Data room sales reps are on another level, they'll bug you quite a bit if they know you're looking. Proceed with caution, lol. Maybe even get a burner phone and a throwaway e-mail.

Intralinks and Merrill are awful suggestions. Very expensive. Some providers of comparable quality, but cheaper price include: Firmex, Deal Interactive, Ansarada (they'll deal), and Sharevault. Bowne/RR Donnelly would be slightly more expensive than those providers, but cheaper than Intra & Merrill. Depending on your needs, OneHub is a great solution. Much cheaper than anything I mentioned above. It's basically WatchDox with additional features commonly needed in deals (customizable disclaimer pages, etc.).

Whatever you do, pit the offers against each other. You'll be amazed how much they can move down in price from the initial offer, haha.

Appreciate the advice. I've already fallen victim to their schemes. The last place I was at used intralinks and the invoices were ridiculous. No way I'm using them. I'll check out the others tomorrow.

The sales boys at those places have a pretty big budget to spent, you should make them take you out, have a good time, then use DebtDomain.

"After you work on Wall Street it’s a choice, would you rather work at McDonalds or on the sell-side? I would choose McDonalds over the sell-side.” - David Tepper
 
Genetic:
ThaVanBurenBoyz:
Data room sales reps are on another level, they'll bug you quite a bit if they know you're looking. Proceed with caution, lol. Maybe even get a burner phone and a throwaway e-mail.

Intralinks and Merrill are awful suggestions. Very expensive. Some providers of comparable quality, but cheaper price include: Firmex, Deal Interactive, Ansarada (they'll deal), and Sharevault. Bowne/RR Donnelly would be slightly more expensive than those providers, but cheaper than Intra & Merrill. Depending on your needs, OneHub is a great solution. Much cheaper than anything I mentioned above. It's basically WatchDox with additional features commonly needed in deals (customizable disclaimer pages, etc.).

Whatever you do, pit the offers against each other. You'll be amazed how much they can move down in price from the initial offer, haha.

Appreciate the advice. I've already fallen victim to their schemes. The last place I was at used intralinks and the invoices were ridiculous. No way I'm using them. I'll check out the others tomorrow.

Your complaint about invoices is spot on. It’s an unfortunate fact that many vendors rely on complex invoices, to keep the signing prices low by hiding costs. Watch for contracts that detail complex calculations to count pages uploaded, calculate documents according to size and charge extra for storage fees, etc. etc.

In the interest of full disclosure, I work for Firmex, so I’m admittedly bias but I do hear a lot about what goes on in the market. My advice – take a minute and look at the contract fine print. If the sales rep is straight forward and the terms are simple, you’ll avoid the schemers.

 

+1 for Merrill. Only one I've used but can attest that they're good. TBH I feel like all the VDRs are probly the same... One of the associates told me that a couple years back they even hosted cool events for analysts so they can get picked over the other,

 

Hello - If you are interested in learning more about the value Ansarada can add, please let me know and I am happy to discuss. We aren't just a standard VDR anymore, but much more of a platform for the entire Event process (Pre and post).

 

My company used to use the standard ones until we recently switched to HighQ's VDR. Frickin brilliant. It even lets you download all the questions in an excel spreadsheet, fill it up and then upload the answers. Aside from being fast, secure and simple, it also looked really good. We ended dup winning some business because our clients liked the dataroom. Bizarre.

 
Hugo92:

My company used to use the standard ones until we recently switched to HighQ's VDR. Frickin brilliant. It even lets you download all the questions in an excel spreadsheet, fill it up and then upload the answers. Aside from being fast, secure and simple, it also looked really good. We ended dup winning some business because our clients liked the dataroom. Bizarre.

You joined WSO just to post this? Ya, that doesn't seem suspicious or anything...

 
Texas2016:

Merrill customer service is great, and the reps take you out for dinner / drinks. what more do I need

Agreed. Merrill > Intralinks when it comes to this, even if its platform is not quite as good. I've had a couple of situations when I was an associate and I was in a time crunch, just forwarded a folder structure and 100MBs worth of files and the Project Mgmt team put it up for me.

Intralinks has taken me out too, but Merrill is more frequent.

 

Merrill and Intralinks are the two major providers. I've used a lot of dataroom providers and few are as effective as these two. You can also look into Bowne if you want more options.

CompBanker’s Career Guidance Services: https://www.rossettiadvisors.com/
 

To be perfectly honest, I look for data room providers that throw open bars. Ideally, the infrastructure of the data room should be user friendly and security shouldn't really be a selling point because if your security is shit, you won't have a business. There are nuance differences between sites like Merrill, Intralinks, and others, but basically the easier and more straightforward the interface the better.

Realistically though, I don't give a shit about that. If you are regularly throwing some open bars our way, I will keep coming back to that provider over another one...

 

I have a question for you - what do you believe is the long term competitive advantage for data room providers? They are very expensive, and is the somewhat better interface and access rights functionality really that valuable versus using dropbox or something similar? Really a data room is just a cloud storage solution.

On a related note, have data room prices come down over the years?

 

Sorry for the lack of response-- was out of the office on Friday. Personally, I think that the advantage for data room providers is that we can provide a much more secure platform than something like Dropbox or Google Docs can provide. Specifically, being able to have different levels of access for different bidders, cut people out of transactions quickly and set expiration dates on documents are three of the advantages I can think of that would put my company in front of a "cheaper" or "easier" solution.

As far as pricing goes, I'm not the best person for that discussion, although I do know that our pricing is incredibly flexible based on the size and scope of the deal.

 

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