Archive for February, 2010
CA acquired 3Tera today. I caught up with Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, to discuss this and the slew of other mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector. Listen in to part of my interview:
We are seeing so many acquisitions these days…
It seems to be that time of the year. As we are looking at the end of the first quarter, companies are looking back at their performance over the past quarters and making some determinations about how well they can move forward. Others that have either been doing well or have deep pockets…It’s always a good time to keep your eyes open for bargains but there certainly seems to be an awful lot of acquisitions going on right now.
I think it’s hitting the economy is hitting some companies, especially smaller companies, a bit harder than others. The small vendors and specialty vendors it seems to me that when you’ve got a smaller pool of potential clients you are standing on a narrower ledge.
There was an SGI acquisition of a small storage specialist yesterday. SGI, which used to be Rackspace, has become a specialist at finding these highly-focused tech companies that are selling at fire sale prices. They did SGI last year. This company that they picked up for $2 million yesterday had received over $125 million in venture capital funding in the last couple of years. If you are one of those VC investors you are probably feeling a little bruised this morning.
Is the 3Tera a good acquisition for CA?
Whenever you see a deal like this where a company with a fairly broad technology offerings buys a company with a great deal of highly focused expertise, it reflects an ongoing issue in IT and that is, is it cheaper to build or buy? In this case, getting a small company with great people and an existing workable solution set will allow CA to get up and running and into the market much more quickly than it probably could have if it had built its own cloud management suite and GUI.
It looks like a good fit and it certainly is well aligned with CA’s strategy of broadening its very deep and well regarded expertise and data center management out toward the cloud. so it aligns well from a tactical financial point of view and should work very well strategically for the company as well.
February 24th, 2010
Iron Mountain on Monday acquired Mimosa in a $112 million deal. The deal makes a great deal of sense both tactically and strategically for Iron Mountain and the price seems reasonable, according to Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. You can read his perspectives on the deal below:
From a broader industry perspective, Iron Mountain has seen its core business come under a lot of pressure from traditional storage vendors. The archiving space was considered to be pretty un-sexy by a lot of people. There were some tape vendors out there that were certainly making a good deal of money on selling tape arrays and cassettes to companies that wanted their own on-site premises. Before permanent archiving, they would turn to companies like Iron Mountain, which is considered by most to be the leader in permanent archiving services.
But over the past five or six years, we’ve started to see the archiving market become much more stratified, both with higher capacity tape, very aggressive pricing from the traditional tape players as they’ve been pressured by dramatically lower prices in disc archiving solutions like EMC Centera and then the emergence of virtual tape libraries which basically allow companies to seamlessly blend tape and disc archiving into a single environment.
So what is a specialist like Iron Mountain do in a case like that? Its traditional business is being sliced and diced. So it make sense for them to become greater than they were. We’ve seen that in some previous acquisitions in some of the cloud-based archive offerings the company has been offering as well.
The conventional wisdom is that in the storage business certainly is that business information by definition is valuable. So its’ worth the time and effort for companies to save that information in case they need it for a rainy day. That’s certainly the case for compliance-sensitive data. If a former employee brings a wrongful termination suit against a company, and as part of the discovery process their attorney employee or people close to management were referenced, which can be prohibitively expensive and complex. That’s where these e-discovery solutions come in.
Beyond the compliance and e-discovery, the there’s also the whole issue of being able to take information, much of it captured on e-mail or company documents, what we call unstructured information, and be able to search that and leverage it with business intelligent tools and that’s another part of what Mimosa brings. They do offer enterprise technologies that can incorporate e-mail and SharePoint files as well as document files. Their solutions are meant to be used on-site at the company so it basically gives Iron Mountain an enterprise content management solution within the company that could be deployed within the company’s firewall that compliments its external archive services and cloud services strategy.
This is the kind of opportunities that the big companies fully understand. IBM has poured billions of dollars into the development and acquisitions aimed at this same area. The entire EMC Documentum work group or product group is dedicated to this area and SharePoint content management is a really hot topic right now.
With that type of competition, if Iron Mountain wants to stay in the game and make sure it can take advantage of future opportunities they need to be in this space. Mimosa is not a big company. $112 million is not a big price. It gives them a company with known solutions and with an established customer base in the enterprise. It should give them the chance to get a foothold there and bee one of the companies considered as more and more of these deals move ahead.
February 23rd, 2010
Just days after a Microsoft and Yahoo search-engine and advertising partnership was approved by U.S. and European regulators, Google has rolled out an upgraded ad-serving platform for publishers. Dubbed DoubleClick for Publishers, or DFP for short, the single platform replaces DoubleClick’s DART for Publishers and Google Ad Manager by combining Google’s technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick’s display-advertising and ad-serving experience.
Neal Mohan, vice president of product management at Google, said Monday that DFP is part of a suite of products (including AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange) to help online publishers maximize advertising revenues. “Ad serving is the machinery that powers the online advertising world,” he said, “so improving that technology can put a lot of money in publishers’ pockets.”
Read the rest of my story on NewsFactor.
February 23rd, 2010
One of the largest textbook publishers is taking textbooks where they’ve never gone before — to a digital publishing platform that paves the way for professors to customize the material. On Monday Macmillan launched the platform called DynamicBooks.
The new software lets instructors tailor textbook content to suit the specific needs of their classroom by editing or adding new text or media. They can add or delete entire chapters, add a syllabus, include notes, and much more. After instructors finish customizing the textbook, students can either purchase the digital text or a printed version through Lightning Source, Ingram’s print-on-demand service. Digital versions will cost as little as half the price of a printed book.
“Most college students don’t read textbooks anymore,” said Charles Grisham, a professor of chemistry at the University of Virginia. “Students jump from point to point, as they do on the Internet. It’s also safe to say that no textbook has completely matched every instructor’s syllabus. DynamicBooks offers instructors and authors a better way to convey content that is more relevant and creative-minded, and that mirrors the always interactive environment in which students live.”
Read the rest of my story on NewsFactor.
February 23rd, 2010
As South Florida Chinese drywall lawsuits head to trial in federal court, local construction companies are rushing to market with offers to remediate properties affected by the material.
But legal experts debate whether or not homeowners are signing their legal rights away in exchange for a property that can never be truly remediated.
In late December, Homestead residents Jason and Melissa Harrell saw movement in their lawsuit against Palm Holdings, Banner Supply, South Kendall Construction and Keys Gate Realty over Chinese drywall issues that forced them out of their home in 2006.
Their victory could open the door to a wave of new suits if homeowners don’t let builders attempt to remediate, according to Allison Grant, a member of the commercial litigation and construction litigation practice groups at the law firm Shapiro, Blasi, Wasserman & Gora in Boca Raton.
Read the rest of my story on Inman News.
February 23rd, 2010
As South Florida Chinese drywall lawsuits head to trial in federal court, local construction companies are rushing to market with offers to remediate properties affected by the material.
But legal experts debate whether or not homeowners are signing their legal rights away in exchange for a property that can never be truly remediated.
In late December, Homestead residents Jason and Melissa Harrell saw movement in their lawsuit against Palm Holdings, Banner Supply, South Kendall Construction and Keys Gate Realty over Chinese drywall issues that forced them out of their home in 2006.
Their victory could open the door to a wave of new suits — if homeowners don’t let builders attempt to remediate, according to Allison Grant, a member of the commercial litigation and construction litigation practice groups at the law firm Shapiro, Blasi, Wasserman & Gora in Boca Raton.
Grant said builders pressured homeowners into contracts to remediate their home from Chinese drywall. Now, she warns homeowners not to buy into the remediation hype — and speaks from personal experience. Her $200,000 investment property was diagnosed with Chinese drywall. She can’t rent the unit, and the property is now appraised at $17,000. Remediation wasn’t the answer.
Read the rest of my story on The Real Deal.
February 20th, 2010
On Thursday, Microsoft 
and Yahoo received something they’ve been waiting for since July — a nod from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission on a search agreement that could help the companies compete with Google. With the regulatory approvals, Microsoft and Yahoo can implement the deal that calls for transitioning Yahoo’s search platforms to Microsoft.
Once the transition is complete, Microsoft and Yahoo will offer a unified search experience the companies expect will breed innovation and better volume and efficiency for advertisers. They also expect it to provide better monetization opportunities for web publishers with a larger pool of search queries.
“Nobody is going to see any immediate changes. The question is whether or not this will somehow challenge, damage or threaten Google,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “The answer in the near term is no, and we’ll have to wait and see in the long term.”
Read the rest of my story on Newsfactor.
February 20th, 2010
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