Trying to figure out a company's acquisition strategy is often complex. Some companies have very purposeful approaches to scoping out companies, products, and market segments, while others' approaches are much more scattershot.
Acquisitions of open-source companies have been a big topic of conversation ever since Red Hat acquired JBoss in April 2006. Many of us in the software industry thought that one or two large companies would snap up and consolidate several open-source companies in attempt to offer a complete open-source stack. But an open-source consolidator has yet to materialize.
In recent conversations with a number of open-source executives, it's come to light that many potential acquirers are less attracted to open-source companies that require more investment before generating revenue.
Considering that there are few private open-source companies generating beyond $15 million in annual revenue, an acquisition of an open-source company could certainly be tough for a public company to explain to Wall Street.
While a focus on the bottom line makes sense, product investment comes from many angles, not the least of which are users and developers, key drivers in VMware's acquisition of SpringSource.
If you follow the way Oracle and IBM acquire others, you see them expand portfolios--sometimes to the point where they own several similar product offerings. But from a competitive perspective, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
IBM already offered BPM, or business process management, products but acquired Lombardi to gather the revenue streams under their umbrella. Oracle, on the other hand, offered a whole suite of middleware before it acquired BEA Software but did so to achieve the economy of scale and single-source purchasing power that buyers seem to want. Oracle also acquired and immediately shut down Virtual Iron to get the product out of the market.
They may not be pretty, but these are smart tactics.
... Read MoreLAS VEGAS--2010 indeed many the year of the tablet. Intel Senior Vice President Sean Maloney said his company's customers are working diligently on tablet designs.
And Intel should know. It supplies the core silicon to virtually every PC maker in the world. "We have lots and lots of tablet designs going down with our customers," said Maloney in an interview Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Intel Senior VP Sean Maloney speaks at CES Thursday.
(Credit: Brooke Crothers)Maloney favors the larger size tablets. "It seems likely to me that you have a large screen. And you want a pure Internet experience," he said about potential tablet designs. "The larger the screen, the more likely you are to want to connect peripherals lying around your home," Maloney said.
Maloney would not give any specifics about shipment dates, but some tablets could be expected to appear later this year. And he wouldn't predict if the tablet would be a hit. "The closer you get to the consumer design, the more fickle and unpredictable it ... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog
LAS VEGAS--The smartbook is now a tablet, at least according to Nvidia, whose upcoming Tegra 2 chip will power these mobile computers in 2010.
Device makers using Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip will, for the most part, initially bring out tablets--not classic clamshell designs--according to Mike Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia's mobile business. "A year ago there was a lot of talk about clamshell devices," Rayfield said, speaking in a teleconference before the Consumer Electronics Show. But that's changed, according to Rayfield, because consumers may mistake a clamshell-design smartbook for a Windows-Intel-based Netbook.
"The tablet is a good entree from a (telecommunication) carriers standpoint. It would avoid confusion of people getting clamshells and assuming they're getting a Windows PC," he said.
On the CES floor, Nvidia was showing prototype tablets using its new Tegra 2 chip
(Credit: Brooke Crothers)Rayfield described the devices as having "screen sizes between 5 and 10 inches, all touch-capable...most of them are very thin, well under an inch," he said, adding that they will have one ... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog
SINGAPORE--Enterprise adoption of Netbooks running Google's Chrome OS will follow the path of its hosted apps, in which small businesses were the initial adopters, says a company executive.
Speaking at a press event here Thursday, Caesar Sengupta, product management director for Google's Chrome OS project, explained that Netbooks powered by the platform will be adopted first by smaller enterprises before garnering support from large multinationals.
Read more of "Chrome OS to follow Google Apps adoption" at ZDNet Asia.
The potential merger between Comcast and NBC Universal will be under the regulatory microscope of the Justice Department.
The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed Wednesday that it would be the agency to spearhead a review of the $30 billion deal that would give Comcast majority ownership of NBC, Universal Studios, and a host of cable TV franchises. Both the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission typically look into mergers that involve potential antitrust issues, but DOJ is taking the lead on this one. Ultimately, the Federal Communications Commission will also need to examine the deal.
First revealed last October, the merger would create a joint venture 51 percent owned by Comcast and 49 percent by NBC parent company General Electric. Comcast would pay GE about $6.5 billion in cash upfront. A special option would allow GE to eventually sell off pieces of its stake in the new venture to Comcast over a period of seven years.
Comcast is already the nation's largest cable provider with 23.8 million cable TV customers. The company also owns a few select cable channels, including E! Entertainment and two sports channels--the Golf Channel and Versus. If the NBCU deal is consummated, Comcast will also claim ownership of not just NBC and Universal Studios, but also an array of popular cable networks, including CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, USA, SyFy, and Oxygen. NBCU also has a minority share in Hulu, while Comcast has Fancast, its own video streaming site.
Since the merger would turn Comcast into both a provider and distributor of news and entertainment, the DOJ has reason for concern. One hot button issue has been Comcast's treatment of cable channels outside its ownership.
On Wednesday, the Tennis Channel filled a complaint with the FCC accusing Comcast of giving preferential treatment to Comcast-owned sports networks. Comcast's Golf and Versus channels are free as part of a basic cable subscription, while the Tennis Channel is only available through a premium sports package that costs $5 to $8 extra per month, thereby hitting a smaller number of subscribers.
The National Football League also fought a lengthy battle with Comcast over the same issue. The two sides finally came to peace last May after Comcast agreed to move the NFL Network from its premium sports package to a less pricey digital package that would reach more customers.
Before the DOJ can begin its initial review, Comcast will need to file the necessary paperwork under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act. That should be done shortly, a Comcast spokesperson told CNET. That would then give the DOJ 30 days in which to file a second request looking for more detailed information, which is typical in mergers of this size.
Comcast also confirmed that it would be filling a public interest statement with the FCC at the end of January.
Updated at 9:30 a.m. PST with response from Comcast.
Intel's Sean Maloney speaking at CES Thursday.
(Credit: Brooke Crothers)LAS VEGAS--Intel announced more than a dozen new processors at CES 2010 here Thursday.
The Consumer Electronics Show roll-out includes the new mobile Core i3 and mobile Core i5, and additions to the Core i7 line. Performance and features generally increase with the size of the i identifier number. In other words, Core i7 processors are typically faster than Core i5 chips.
Intel is touting the better-integrated graphics of the Core i3 and i5 processors. The new "Arrandale" graphics technology has 20 percent more shaders--an important component for 3D graphics, Intel senior vice president Sean Maloney said here Thursday. Intel claims that the graphics performance is roughly 70 percent better than the integrated graphics in the current Core 2 silicon.
"This is a big leap in graphics performance," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight64. Brookwood said Intel has done a better job with its graphics drivers and less-demanding games run significantly better than the current Core 2 technology. But high-end gamers will continue ... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog
Google has announced new, more lucrative terms for its desired acquisition of On2 Technologies, a "final offer" intended to sway reluctant On2 shareholders.
In a Dec. 29 regulatory filing, On2 twice postponed a shareholder meeting to consider the offer--0.001 shares of Google Class A common stock for each share of On2 stock--to give itself more time to persuade shareholders of a deal that the video compression technology company wants to conclude. On Thursday, On2 and Google announced that Google would pay an extra 15 cents in cash per share as well.
On2's stock closed at 59 cents per share Wednesday, valuing the earlier deal at $107.4 million based on Google's closing share price on Wednesday of $608.26. The new cash incentive, worth $26.5 million, increases the offer nearly 25 percent to $133.9 million.
"By increasing the consideration offered to On2's stockholders by an additional $0.15 per share in cash, On2's stockholders will receive additional value for their On2 common stock that Google and On2 believe better reflects the value that On2's stockholders would have received had the acquisition closed closer to the time of its announcement in August 2009," the companies said in a statement. "This increase in the consideration that Google is offering to On2's stockholders constitutes Google's final offer."
On2 shareholders will be able to vote on the acquisition at a February 17 meeting. The company's board has approved the sale to Google. The companies had hoped to complete the acquisition in 2009.
It's not exactly clear what Google sees in On2, a company that licenses "codec" technology for encoding and decoding video data. Google has a strong interest in Web-based video streaming through its popular YouTube site. The company also has been involved in work to build video abilities into Web browsers--including its own Chrome, which today can handle both the H.264 and Ogg Theora video codecs.
Update 7:21 a.m. PST: In morning trading Thursday, On2's share price rose 15 cents, or 26 percent, to 74 cents.
BMC Software said Thursday that it is acquiring privately held Phurnace Software, which makes automation software to deploy Java applications in the enterprise.
BMC, which is a company worth monitoring in 2010, plans to take Phurnace's technology and embed it into its BMC BladeLogic automation portfolio. BMC's software is widely used to automate processes and application deployment in data centers.
Phurnace's technology will make it easy to model and deploy Java Enterprise Edition applications from the likes of Oracle's BEA, Red Hat's JBoss, and IBM's Websphere.
Read more of "BMC picks up Phurnace Software, adds Java enterprise automation to lineup" at ZDNet's Between the Lines.
One of the most enjoyable blog posts I read over the holiday break came from Reuven Cohen, a longtime cloud evangelist and CTO of cloud management software vendor Enomaly.
In a post titled "Is cloud computing actually environmentally friendly," he points to one of the most perplexing aspects of the claim that cloud computing is green:
The problem is there is no uniform way to measure this supposed efficiency. None of the major cloud companies are providing utilization data, so it is not possible to know just how efficient cloud computing actually is--other than it sounds and feels more green.
He addresses the environmental impact of both building data centers and choosing their power sources. He then discusses consumption:
We now have the ability to run our applications on thousands of servers, but previously this wasn't even possible. To say it another way, we can potentially use several years worth of energy in literary a few hours, where previously this wasn't even an option. So in direct contrast, hypothetically we're using more resources, not less. On the flip side, if we bought those thousand servers and had them running (underutilized), the power usage would be significantly higher. But then again, buying those servers would have been out reach for most, so it's not a fair comparison. There we are--back, at where we started. You may use 80 percent less energy per unit, but have 1,000 percent more capacity, which at the end of the day means you're using more, not less energy.
He's right. How can we claim to be creating a greener world through cloud computing with no data to back it up? In fact, there is some significant evidence that the cloud is encouraging more compute consumption, which would erase much or all of the energy savings that the cloud's increased utilization efficiencies would achieve.
Simon Wardley, software services manager at Canonical, discussed this several months ago in his blog:
The shift of common and well defined IT activities from products to standard components provided as online services should lead to a dramatic explosion in innovation.Standardization always creates this potential.
...Cloud computing is all about providing standard components as services (it's pure volume operations). The problem of course is that we will end up consuming more of these standard components because it's so easy to do so (i.e. in old speak, there is less yak shaving) and it becomes easier to build new and more exciting services on these (standing on the shoulders of giants).
We might end up providing more efficient virtual resources but we will end up consuming vastly more of them.
So, in a sense, the "greenness" of cloud computing is a kind of Schroedinger's box problem today, in which we won't know the actual savings to the environment until someone actually observes--or measures--it.
Krishnan Subramanian, a commentator for CloudAve, is also aware of this paradox, but he points to a story out of Finland that shows some hope that there are additional ways we can help the environment through cloud computing. Apparently, the city of Helsinki is using a data center operation to heat homes--a perfect way to gain value at both ends of the heat exchange process.
I believe one thing to be true: the increased efficiency of the hardware components in most cloud data centers and the increased utilization of these components mean that we are almost certainly doing more work per unit of energy consumed than before. However, I think we'll have to wait awhile before there is evidence of the overall effect of cloud computing on the planet...one way or the other.
While Google Voice and Skype get most of the VoIP attention because they're, well, Google and Skype, VoxOx appears committed to making them work for their reputations. Announced in Las Vegas for CES, VoxOx's Personal Assistant 2 is the latest update to the sub-features that provide inbound call management as part of the full VoxOx program.
From Southern California-based TelCentris, VoxOx for Windows and Mac is a free desktop multi-protocol program that supports standard instant messaging, social networking, and Voice over Internet Protocol. The upgraded Personal Assistant features focus on remote access, and that's really the killer feature here. Once you set it up on your desktop, you can use it on both smartphones and standard cell phones, which are far more prevalent than their apped-up cousins.
(Credit:
VoxOx)
New features in the Personal Assistant 2 let you check voicemail, initiate a regular call or outbound conference calls of up to 20 people, and manage "Find Me" settings so that, for example, your wife can always reach your phone, but your boss ... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog
