Google deflates Dodgeball.com

Posted by on January 29, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly Like nearly all tech companies, Google has had a rough go of it lately. The search giant has cut jobs for the first time and scrapped a number of projects that it had planned during its more freewheeling days. The programs on the chopping block are both organic (print ad initiative) and [...]

Is Open Text open for a deal?

Posted by on January 27, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly, Kathleen Reidy If Autonomy Corp’s $775m purchase last week of Interwoven came out of left field, we suspect the next major enterprise content management (ECM) deal will bring together a buyer and seller much more familiar with each other. As it stands now, Open Text is kingpin of the stand-alone ECM vendors. [...]

A SaaS-y deal

Posted by on January 26, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly Given the rich premium that Wall Street awards to on-demand software companies, it’s no wonder that vendors still hawking software licenses are looking to get into the business of selling software as a service (Saas). Of course, there are many obstacles in making that transition, ranging from internal (how to compensate sales [...]

Small-time means good time for M&A

Posted by on January 23, 2009

As we dissected the data from our annual survey of corporate development officers, we discovered an interesting fact: Smaller shoppers are more inclined to browse and are generally more positive than their larger counterparts.

Mr. Fixit sells again

Posted by on January 22, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly Known as a turnaround guy for most of his career, Joe Cowan didn’t actually have too much fixing up to do at his latest posting as chief executive of content management vendor Interwoven. After he took over Interwoven’s top post in early April 2007, the business hummed along with sales growth in [...]

Interplay between M&A and IPO

Posted by on January 21, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly With the IPO calendar essentially blank right now – and likely to stay that way as long as the Nasdaq keeps lurching downward – companies that are both of size and mind to go public are using the pause to do a little shopping of their own. These transactions tend to be [...]

Barracuda bites again

Posted by on January 21, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly A ravenous eater, Barracuda Networks has now gobbled up four companies in the past 14 months. (And that doesn’t even count the privately held security company’s unsolicited bid in May for publicly traded Sourcefire, the Snort vendor.) Barracuda’s latest bite is backup and recovery company Yosemite Technologies. The company will be lumped [...]

Salesforce.com’s service play

Posted by on January 16, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly Heading into Thursday‘s luncheon hosted by Salesforce.com, there was a fair amount of speculation that the software-as-a-service (SaaS) stalwart would be using the event to announce a new acquisition. The company employed the same setup to disclose its purchase of tiny content management startup Koral in April 2007. The rumors turned out [...]

Quest shops again, virtually

Posted by on January 15, 2009

Contact: Simon Robinson, Brenon Daly A year after closing a deal with Vizioncore that got Quest Software into the storage virtualization market, the company went shopping again this week. The systems management company picked up some of the assets of venture-backed MonoSphere, most notably its Storage Horizon product. This is a storage analysis and reporting [...]

Xing the Atlantic

Posted by on January 14, 2009

Xing has been stirring up the M&A landscape since it went public two years ago. And with valuations on the decline, we believe it will finally make its long-awaited move into the US this year.

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