Dell shares rose as high as 4.5 percent Wednesday, following reports that founder Michael Dell acquired nearly $100 million in shares in the computer maker.
Dell climbed as high as $23.18 a share in intraday trading, before closing out the session at $22.70 a share, up 2.34 percent.
Dell's founder, according to a report in MarketWatch, purchased 4.5 million shares between June 27 and July 1 at an average price of $22.14 a share.
Dell's buying spree comes after the company reported respectable first-quarter results, which came off a challenging 2007 when it was feeling the effects of missing out on some big industry trends.
During the first quarter, Dell told analysts, the company's unit shipments grew 22 percent, while the industry rose by 14 percent. And Dell's notebook revenue climbed 22 percent over the past year.
Michael Dell's stock purchase not only marked the largest he's ever made of the computer maker's shares, but also puts him at the top of conducting the largest purchase ever at the company by an insider, according to MarketWatch's report.
Last year (almost to the day), I wrote a post that detailed how JBoss went from $0 to a $350 million acquisition by Red Hat and scored a range of paying customers along the way. The research for that post was actually done in preparation for an OSCON presentation I was to deliver, which is the same impetus for this post.
One year later, my analysis of JBoss has proved to be remarkably accurate (at least for Alfresco). However, I was a little off on my timing (see the slide at right), and I didn't give enough credit to the power of open source to drive sales.
One year later, I'd add the following observations to my original analysis:
- You don't need much in the way of field sales for the first three years, and maybe four, but you must balance this lack of quantity with exceptional quality. Basically, you want your field sales person (and it probably should just be one person per major geographic) to cover the big strategic accounts. It's not that inside sales can't do these but rather that you want them going for volume and the field sales person developing depth within a few strategic accounts.
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