What’s new at Novell?

Posted by Brenon Daly on May 27, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Even though its shareholders aren’t overwhelmingly concerned with Novell’s financial numbers right now, the company will nonetheless be releasing results for its fiscal second quarter later Thursday afternoon. For what it’s worth, Wall Street expects earnings of about $0.07 per share on sales of $205m, representing year-over-year declines on both the top [...]

CDC Software’s rollup is rolling along

Posted by Brenon Daly on May 26, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Since being spun off from its parent company less than a year ago, CDC Software has been rolling along with its planned rollup. It has done a half-dozen acquisitions of small, on-demand software companies to help expand its portfolio of ERP, CRM and supply chain management offerings. (It got bigger eyes earlier [...]

One last sale at VeriSign?

Posted by Brenon Daly on May 25, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly With VeriSign having somewhat unexpectedly shed its identity and authentication business to Symantec last week, we started to think about what other transactions might be coming from the former serial acquirer. What about this for a final deal? A sale of itself to a private equity shop. After all, the value of [...]

Big Blue dials up a deal with Ma Bell

Posted by Brenon Daly on May 24, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Sterling Commerce has had one of the more colorful and varied ownership histories in the software industry. Founded inside parent company Sterling Software, the business-to-business software vendor was then spun off through an IPO in the mid-1990s before being acquired by SBC Communications (now AT&T) in a Bubble-era deal that valued Sterling [...]

VeriSign saves best for last

Posted by Brenon Daly on May 20, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly When we look back at VeriSign’s two-year period of jettisoning unwanted businesses, we can only marvel at how it saved the best for last. The divestiture of its identity and authentication division to Symantec for $1.28bn caps a massive process of unwinding the previously misguided acquisitions of former CEO Stratton Sclavos. The [...]

Social CRM: haves and have-nots

Posted by Brenon Daly on May 19, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly, China Martens Even though social CRM is still an emerging market, the deals have been flowing. And it isn’t just one-off, conventional activity, but just about every conceivable type of transaction: public-to-private deals, private-to-private deals, a private equity-backed rollup and even (apparently) a wind-down. Among the more notable deals in this broadly [...]

HP: relentlessly reaching for Palm

Posted by Brenon Daly on May 18, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly As Hewlett-Packard prepares to report fiscal second-quarter results after the close of the market today, there’s already been an SEC filing related to the tech giant that has attracted a fair amount of interest. That document is the proxy statement for HP’s pending acquisition of mobile OS maker Palm Inc. The background [...]

Thoma Bravo doubles down on Double-Take

Posted by Brenon Daly on May 17, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Just a week after we noted that the bidding for Double-Take Software had hit the final stretch, with a trio of buyout shops still in the running, one of the private equity firms announced plans Monday to pick up the file-replication software vendor. Thoma Bravo, through its Vision Solutions portfolio company, will [...]

IPO woes

Posted by Brenon Daly on May 14, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly For the second straight time, a tech company hoping to come to market has scaled back the money it planned to raise. TeleNav, which started trading Thursday, originally planned to sell shares at $11-13. The mobile navigation service vendor then cut the range to $9-10 before ultimately pricing its seven-million-share offering at [...]

The German giant’s gamble