“It is easy to be brave when far away from danger” – Aesop.

The above quote is an apt description of Corporate Development and CFO behavior over the past few years due to many companies choosing to accumulate cash on their balance sheets rather than deploy it for acquisitions. However, this is not to diminish the importance of taking a cautious approach in turbulent times as the aforementioned storyteller also sagely noted “It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow”.

Today marks our first time as a public company that we’re releasing full year financial results. Investors, analysts, customers and employees are either eager or simply curious to see how we’ve performed both in Q4 and for the full year 2010. In many ways, it feels like just another year has gone. However, this year is clearly different as we’re now a public company and have the opportunity to tell the world about our financial performance in 2010.

 2010 was an exceptional year for IntraLinks, our employees, our customers and our investors. Highlights from our full year financial results include:

• Strong growth in our Enterprise and M&A principal markets drove record revenue of $184.3 million in 2010, up 31% over 2009.
• Non-GAAP operating income was $45.6 million, up 36% over 2009 and yielding an operating margin of 25%.
• Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA was $62.6 million, up 39% over 2009, and yielding a best in class 34% EBITDA margin compared to other SaaS companies.

If you have been following our recent blogs on the M&A market, then the recent flurry of deal activity in global M&A will be of little surprise. The writing was on the (virtual) wall: quarterly Deal Flow Indicator results for Q2 and Q3 (read the results here) showed the beginning of an improvement in M&A deal volumes as early as July. Indeed, these optimistic indicators were echoed by the panelists in our recent UK Corporate Development webinar (watch the replay here).