Lawson: silence, suitors and synergy

Posted by on March 31, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly If Lawson Software had held its scheduled call later this afternoon to discuss its third-quarter earnings report, we suspect that attendance would have been a bit higher than usual. Instead, the old-line ERP vendor scrapped it, citing the two-week-old unsolicited offer from industry consolidator Infor Global Solutions. (Those sorts of things tend [...]

The ever-increasing appetite of salesforce.com

Posted by on March 30, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Salesforce.com just keeps taking bigger bites. The company announced Wednesday that it will hand over $326m ($276m in cash and $50m in stock) for social-media monitoring company Radian6. Not only is it salesforce.com’s highest-priced acquisition, it also likely brings more revenue than any other deal the company has done, at least based [...]

Mentor Graphics’ ‘marginalized’ size

Posted by on March 29, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly In knocking down Carl Icahn’s unsolicited bid, Mentor Graphics cited the regulatory difficulties that would likely accompany a combination with either of the two other large vendors of electronic design automation (EDA) software. However, the relative financial performances of the trio show the advantages of consolidation. As is true for most mature [...]

eBay bids high for GSI

Posted by on March 28, 2011

Contact: Ben Kolada In its largest deal in the past half-decade, eBay is set to acquire e-commerce vendor GSI Commerce for $2.4bn. The company hasn’t made such a move since September 2005, when it forked over $2.6bn for VoIP provider Skype. And while hindsight shows that eBay certainly overpaid for that property, on an equity [...]

Buying a new look

Posted by on March 25, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly In any business, it’s tough to take the old and make it new. In fact, that sometimes requires a little outside help. That came through in Walgreens’ purchase Thursday of Drugstore.com. After all, here is Walgreens – a 110-year-old chain that’s the largest drugstore in the US – saying it can’t necessarily [...]

Oracle has gone silent

Posted by on March 24, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly While investors will be tuning in for Oracle’s Q3 report after the market’s close today, we can’t help noting that there hasn’t been much news from the consolidator recently. It has yet to announce a deal in 2011, an uncharacteristic dry spell for a company that averaged an acquisition every six weeks [...]

AT&T does Sprint a favor

Posted by on March 23, 2011

Contact: Ben Kolada If the rumors that Sprint was eyeing T-Mobile USA were actually true, then AT&T did its competitor a big favor by taking in the divested business. From our view, T-Mobile would have been a bigger bite, both financially and operationally, than Sprint could have swallowed. The transaction would likely have introduced a [...]

A post-recession spending record — and then some

Posted by on March 22, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly The first-quarter M&A totals for the tech industry suddenly look a lot different. AT&T’s announced acquisition of T-Mobile USA from parent Deutsche Telekom dramatically inflates the spending, more than doubling the collective value of the 750 transactions announced so far in 2011. The $39bn deal (the largest purchase in the telecom industry [...]

Ma Bell’s mobile move

Posted by on March 21, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly In the largest US telco deal in a half-decade, AT&T will hand over $39bn in cash and stock for T-Mobile USA. Assuming it goes through, the combination would create the country’s largest wireless provider, with some 130 million subscribers. The consolidation move, which has been a hallmark of AT&T over the past [...]

Could CenturyLink’s Qwest buy prevent a future cloud infrastructure play?

Posted by on March 18, 2011

Contact: Ben Kolada Almost exactly one year after they announced their intention to merge, CenturyLink and Qwest Communications are set to close the largest US wireline consolidation play in the past half decade. But while the deal will more than double CenturyLink’s revenue, the debt assumed could prevent it from making another significant acquisition anytime [...]

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