In mobile gaming, a company is only as valuable as its users

Posted by on April 29, 2011

Contact: Ben Kolada A pair of mobile gaming acquisitions in the past half-year has proven that an ability to monetize an audience is just as important as the audience itself. In the latest deal, GREE is paying $104m in cash for OpenFeint. While that’s certainly a handsome payout for the startup’s investors, it’s a considerably [...]

SuccessFactors pays a peak price for Plateau

Posted by on April 27, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Plateau Systems certainly got a peak price from SuccessFactors. At $290m, the cash-and-stock acquisition is the largest purchase of a privately held human capital management (HCM) vendor. In fact, the pending purchase of Plateau is larger than a half-dozen acquisitions of public HCM companies we have recorded in recent years. Similarly, the [...]

Echoes of Oracle in Infor’s reach for Lawson

Posted by on April 26, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Now that Lawson Software has agreed to a sale to Infor Global Solutions, it’s perhaps worth speculating about just how much Charles Philips learned about the art of M&A during his previous job. Philips, of course, currently serves as CEO of Infor after seven years at Oracle, which has a reputation as [...]

Another marketing maker heading to market?

Posted by on April 25, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Will Eloqua respond to Responsys? Does the rival on-demand marketing vendor perhaps have an IPO of its own planned? We couldn’t help but wonder that last Thursday as investors showed that they could hardly get enough of the Responsys offering, which priced above range and then tacked on another 28% in its [...]

A warm welcome on Wall Street

Posted by on April 21, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Against a backdrop that has the major stock market indexes at their highest level in about three years, investors have apparently signaled that they are ready to take a chance again on new issues. A pair of IPOs came to market Thursday at significantly higher-than-expected prices, and promptly surged in aftermarket trading. [...]

A responsible debut valuation for Responsys

Posted by on April 20, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Reversing a trend that has seen many of the major marketing software providers disappear inside larger players, Responsys is ready to step out onto the public market. The on-demand company, which filed its IPO paperwork just four months ago, plans to sell 6.6 million shares at $8.50-10 each. It is likely to [...]

China becoming social in public

Posted by on April 19, 2011

Contact: Ben Kolada While talk of social companies hitting the public markets has so far focused on US firms such as Facebook, GroupOn and LinkedIn, the first vendor to do so may actually come from the Far East. Dubbed the ‘Facebook of China,’ Beijing-based Renren filed its prospectus on Friday and will reportedly hit the [...]

Looking up at the data warehousing incumbents

Posted by on April 18, 2011

Contact: Matt Aslett The face of the data-warehousing sector has changed considerably in the past 18 months. A series of acquisitions has seen Vertica Systems, Greenplum and Sybase snapped up by Hewlett-Packard, EMC and SAP, respectively. Further, Teradata and IBM have strengthened their hands to compete with Oracle and Microsoft with their respective purchases of [...]

A new era at Google?

Posted by on April 14, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly It’s a new era at Google. After the market closes, Google’s once-and-future king Larry Page will give his first report to Wall Street since returning to the throne at the search company he helped found. Page took over at the beginning of the month, with Google shares trading essentially where they were [...]

Cisco shares are a flop for Flip’s owners

Posted by on April 13, 2011

Contact: Brenon Daly Since the purchase of Flip, Cisco Systems shares have been a flop. That’s actually an important consideration for the former owners of digital camera maker Pure Digital Technologies, which Cisco shuttered on Tuesday. Recall that when the networking giant (somewhat inexplicably) reached for Pure Digital two years ago, it covered the $590m [...]

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