Increasing cloudiness

Posted by on August 31, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly Just three weeks after VMware inked its company-defining acquisition of SpringSource, the virtualization kingpin is throwing the doors open on its annual VMworld conference today. (We can only hope that those attending the get-together found it smoother than those trying to access the conference through the website. For much of Monday morning, [...]

Will Taleo exercise its M&A option?

Posted by on August 28, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly Having crossed the anniversary of its acquisition of Vurv Technology earlier this summer, Taleo recently indicated that it is looking to return to the M&A market. (Shares of the human capital management vendor trade essentially where they did when the company closed its $128m consolidation play with Vurv, while the Nasdaq is [...]

ConSentry: more VC dollars for the NAC bonfire

Posted by on August 27, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly, Paul Roberts It’s difficult – if not impossible – to point to any area of technology this year with a more consistently god-awful ROI than network access control (NAC). At this point, the return for VCs on their bets in the NAC market is literally pennies on the dollar. The latest addition [...]

Bleak outlook for social networking M&A

Posted by on August 27, 2009

This month saw the sector’s largest deal of the year. But don’t get too excited – it was a fire sale worth just a fraction of last year’s largest transaction, and says more about the dire conditions of the space than anything else.

Red Hat rumors: a reheat or something more?

Posted by on August 26, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly When VMware reached for SpringSource earlier this month, the $420m pairing represented the largest open source transaction in a year and a half. Now, the market is buzzing with rumors about another blockbuster open source deal, one that would be more than 10 times the size of VMware-SpringSource. Several sources have indicated [...]

Where’s the hurry in Oracle’s reach for Sun?

Posted by on August 25, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly Having gotten the all clear on this side of the Atlantic, Oracle is now waiting for the EU to sign off on its pending purchase of Sun Microsystems. And the company will have to wait a bit longer. The European Commission has a deadline of September 3 to determine if the deal [...]

Sourcefire: No sale turns into a great deal

Posted by on August 14, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly With Barracuda Networks looking to gobble up Austrian IT security vendor phion, we thought we’d look back on the other time the rapacious privately held firm eyed a public company. Last summer, Barracuda launched an unsolicited bid for Sourcefire, initially offering $7.50 per share but later raising that to $8.25. The bumped-up [...]

VMware: a ‘table-clearing’ bid for the clouds

Posted by on August 13, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly About a year and a half after Paul Maritz got picked up by EMC, the former Microsoft honcho has struck his signature deal for his new employers. When EMC reached for Pi Corp, which had yet to release a product, we figured the move was basically ‘HR by M&A.’ And that has [...]

Will Fortinet go shopping after going public?

Posted by on August 12, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly, Paul Roberts Not that Fortinet actually needs more cash to go shopping, but the company will likely substantially fatten its treasury by the end of the year. Officially, the security vendor, which has been generating cash for the past three years, said in its IPO prospectus this week that it plans to [...]

EMC and advisors: All or nothing

Posted by on August 11, 2009

Contact: Brenon Daly After EMC doled out no fewer than nine credits to different banks for working on its acquisition of Data Domain, we were curious how the deal credits would flow around the largest-ever purchase by EMC subsidiary VMware. (The unusually long list of advisers for EMC on Data Domain made us think – [...]

keep looking »