Google gets discounted Droids
Posted by Brenon Daly on August 16, 2011
Contact: Brenon Daly Google didn’t have to reach too deeply to fatten its patent portfolio as it also becomes one of the few vertically integrated smartphone and tablet makers. Sure, it will have to hand over $12.5bn in cash for Motorola Mobility to cover its planned purchase of the hardware manufacturer. But it will immediately [...]
More than just Chatter at salesforce.com
Posted by Ben Kolada on January 11, 2011
Contact: Ben Kolada, Kathleen Reidy Fresh from closing its $249m acquisition of Ruby developer Heroku, salesforce.com recently announced, and closed, its purchase of Web-conferencing startup Dimdim for $31m. The Lowell, Massachusetts-based target provided a cloud-based open source Web-conferencing service for businesses, and with this deal salesforce.com now claims 60,000 Chatter users, though with its ‘freemium’ [...]
Not pretty, but it’s done at Novell
Posted by Brenon Daly on November 22, 2010
Contact: Brenon Daly After holding out for more than eight months, Novell finally accepted on Monday a $2.2bn buyout offer from private equity-backed Attachmate. From the outside, it looks like a case where the buyer – or maybe more accurately, the hedge fund that put the company in play – simply wore down Novell. Under [...]
Making a middleware mini-mammoth
Posted by Brenon Daly on November 12, 2010
Contact: Brenon Daly, Dennis Callaghan Imagine combining Informatica and TIBCO Software into a middleware mammoth. Now, shrink the scale by almost 100. Move it from the US to Europe. And make it open source rather than proprietary software. In a roundabout way, that’s what we see in Talend’s recent acquisition of SOPERA. At least in [...]
Any deals to be done in open source content management market?
Posted by Brenon Daly on September 17, 2010
Contact: Brenon Daly, Kathleen Reidy Following a massive wave of consolidation that swept through the enterprise content management (ECM) market, the list of significant vendors has basically narrowed to a handful of tech giants. Essentially, it’s just one stand-alone ECM provider with other software companies offering ECM as part of their broader portfolio. All of [...]
Same old, same old at Novell?
Posted by Brenon Daly on August 12, 2010
Contact: Brenon Daly Ever since hedge fund Elliott Associates put Novell in play five months ago, we’ve said that the company was going to be a tough sell. It’s a mixed bag of businesses, both in terms of what those businesses sell and how they perform. (Or rather, how those businesses underperform, as we were [...]
A nope from Novell
Posted by Brenon Daly on March 22, 2010
Contact: Brenon Daly The only surprise about Novell turning down the unsolicited $2bn offer from Elliott Associates was the timing. In an unorthodox move, the software vendor said ‘thanks, but no thanks’ to the hedge fund on Saturday morning, when most thoughts were turning to a full day of March Madness. (And what a maddening [...]
Pouring cold water on the latest Sourcefire rumor
Posted by Brenon Daly on February 9, 2010
Contact: Brenon Daly At the tail end of last week, the market was buzzing that Sourcefire may be back in play. Of course, that’s not all that unusual for the Snort shop, which has seen two publicly disclosed acquisition offers in the past four years come to nothing. (Recall that Check Point Software failed to [...]
Red Hat rumors: a reheat or something more?
Posted by Brenon Daly 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 [...]
VMware: a ‘table-clearing’ bid for the clouds
Posted by Brenon Daly 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 [...]
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