Riverbed bolts onto Steelhead

Posted by on October 29, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Riverbed Technology just keeps flowing higher. Shares in the company, which hit the Nasdaq four years ago, notched their highest-ever close Wednesday. The market values the WAN traffic optimization (WTO) vendor at a staggering $4.2bn. That works out to some 7.7 times projected 2010 sales of $545m and some 6.2 times next [...]

Oracle parlays new interest in chips into small stake in Mellanox

Posted by on October 29, 2010

Contact: John Abbott When Oracle started hinting recently about its growing interest in chip vendors, Mellanox Technologies was at the top of our list of potential acquisition candidates. It turns out that Oracle is indeed interested in Mellanox, but only in a chunk of it. Oracle said earlier this week that it bought 10% of [...]

Symantec still struggling with storage

Posted by on October 27, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Symantec gives its latest quarterly update on business after the closing bell Wednesday, with Wall Street wondering if the company will ever emerge from its ‘Veritas hangover.’ The storage business, which Symantec picked up in its $13.5bn purchase of Veritas in late 2004, has long weighed on Big Yellow’s overall performance. The [...]

Small purchases add up big for IBM

Posted by on October 26, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Shortly after IBM bagged Netezza, we noted that Big Blue had been doing some big-game hunting in recent deals. It turns out that’s also true when it takes aim at private companies. In fact, we estimate IBM has spent more on startups than it has on the public companies it has taken [...]

EA flies into mobile

Posted by on October 25, 2010

Contact: Jarrett Streebin Electronic Arts (EA) recently shelled out a reported $20m for mobile game publisher Chillingo. The UK-based startup published the popular iPhone game Angry Birds. Although the acquisition didn’t include the game or its developers, it will help EA market and distribute its mobile games. This small deal is the latest in a hot [...]

No celebration for this anniversary

Posted by on October 22, 2010

Contact: Ben Kolada One year ago, Equinix announced that it was acquiring Switch and Data in its largest-ever transaction. The deal gave Equinix an immediate presence in several new markets, and alleviated capacity constraints in existing ones. However, the acquired properties haven’t lived up to their expectations, and Equinix was forced to trim its revenue [...]

The thin air around Isilon

Posted by on October 21, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Regardless of the fact that Isilon Systems hasn’t traded on anything remotely connected to its underlying financial performance for a long time, the NAS vendor nonetheless reported third-quarter results earlier today. As these things go, it was a strong report: sales up 77% and a solid profit, reversing a year-ago loss. The [...]

To scale or not to scale

Posted by on October 20, 2010

Contact: Ben Kolada, Brenon Daly For businesses that both had ‘scale’ in their name, neither MaxiScale nor ParaScale got very big. Nor did they get very big exits in their recent sales. In the crowded cloud storage market – dominated by multibillion-dollar incumbents IBM, EMC and HP – startups have only a short time to [...]

Software AG does a bit of MDM shopping of its own

Posted by on October 19, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly, Dennis Callaghan, Krishna Roy A little more than a year after scrapping its OEM agreement with master data management (MDM) vendor Orchestra Networks, Software AG has picked up its own MDM and data-governance technology. The German company recently reached across the Atlantic for Data Foundations, which we gather was a small purchase [...]

Ulticom’s shareholders cash out

Posted by on October 15, 2010

Contact: Brenon Daly Cash is king. We got a reminder of that tried-and-true business adage when we were skimming the terms of Ulticom’s sale to buyout shop Platinum Equity earlier this week. While the pending take-private is hardly a regal outcome for shareholders of the telecom software provider, the structure of the deal helps them [...]

keep looking »