LOGIN | REGISTER NOW | SUBSCRIBE
 
 
News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>


   

 
 
Download Current Issue
ISSUE 2/1/2010 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?


 
blogs tab
Is Microsoft eyeing Office subscription pricing?
Microsoft may be preparing to offer a new Office pricing option called "union," which charges the same for cloud as on-premises.
02/01/2010 09:38 AM EST

Facebook rewrites PHP runtime
Facebook is about to open source its own PHP runtime, written from scratch for speed.
01/30/2010 08:53 PM EST

There WILL be a JavaOne this year
JavaOne will happen in 2010, as a co-located event with Oracle's OpenWorld, on Sept. 19-23 in San Francisco.
01/27/2010 01:02 PM EST

 

Events calendar tab
Macworld 2010
2/9/2010 to 2/13/2010
San Francisco
IDG World Expo

SPTechCon 2010
2/10/2010 to 2/12/2010
San Francisco
BZ Media

PyCon 2010 (Python Conf.)
2/17/2010 to 2/25/2010
Atlanta
Python Software Foundation

Southern Calif. Linux Expo
2/19/2010 to 2/20/2010
Los Angeles
SCALE

IBM Pulse
2/21/2010 to 2/24/2010
Las Vegas
IBM


 
print Printable version 
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Facebook brings HipHop to PHP
HipHop compiles PHP to speed up the Web layer at world's most popular social networking si...

Syncfusion announces component suite for .NET 4
Essential Studio 2010 has business intelligence, reporting and UI controls, ready for .NET...

Oracle acquires AmberPoint
Today's merger will probably affect most of AmberPoint's existing partnerships with other ...

Digg!  Digg
Reddit  Reddit
Slashdot  Slashdot
Share on facebook  Facebook
Share on Twitter  Twitter

Opening the Checkbook


By SD Times News Team
October 1, 2005 — 
There were four corporate takeover announcements in September. Does this indicate a return to the go-go 1990s, and the era of unfettered mergers and acquisitions? No. These acquisitions tell separate stories and were all of companies that were ripe for the picking, and so it’s no surprise that someone picked them.

The two biggest recently announced acquisitions are Oracle’s takeover of Siebel Systems, and Access Company’s purchase of PalmSource.

Oracle’s announced US$5.85 billion acquisition of Siebel should not have been unexpected. For several years, Siebel has been on the ropes: its customers nervous and agitated about the complexity of the company’s CRM software, its executive suite in disarray, its stock price battered and defenseless. Meanwhile, Oracle was not yet sated after its hostile digestion of PeopleSoft at the end of last year, which itself snapped up JD Edwards, giving Oracle two product lines for the price of one.

What does Oracle get out of all this? Presumably, it’s not source code it’s after—but instead, an installed base of 4,000 enterprise customers and 3.4 million end users that will require support contracts, and that can be migrated over to Oracle’s own application. As Oracle president Charles Phillips said in a statement, “We will embrace Siebel’s best-in-class CRM products and make the features of those products the centerpiece of our Project Fusion CRM.”

It’s harder to predict the impact of Access Company’s planned purchase of PalmSource for US$324 million. The Japanese company’s CEO, Toru Arakawa, indicated that his primary interest in PalmSource wasn’t its core technology, Palm OS, but rather the market access provided by China MobileSoft, which PalmSource acquired late last year, and also China MobileSoft’s mLinux platform. Given that, it’s hard to see how this merger will be good news for PalmSource’s installed base of 39 million end users and 400,000 developers.

The other deals are smaller. JNetDirect, which historically has offered Java connectivity tools such as JDBC solutions but which also has moved into the business integration space, has snapped up Vanward Technologies, which offered a quality management dashboard and automated testing framework. This merger, whose terms were not disclosed, should be good news for all parties, since it rounds out JNetDirect’s product line and gives Vanward’s products a higher profile and more marketing horsepower.

Finally, Mercury Interactive bought BeatBox Technologies, which sells tools for real-time testing of Web applications based on user behavior, for US$14 million, and also acquired wireless testing technology from Intuwave, a British company. The terms of that latter deal weren’t disclosed. Both moves should advance Mercury’s reputation as the biggest player in business-centric testing and QA products and services, but otherwise won’t affect the testing industry.

So, despite this flurry of acquisition activity, we’re not going back to the merger mania of the past. The market seems to be more cautious, and more mature. We expect that it will stay that way.


Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/28899
 

Add comment


Name*
Email*  
Country     


  • Comment
  • Preview
Loading