M&A News in Technology

WARNING!  These are Kevin Benedict's personal thoughts and opinions pondered over a cup of my favorite coffee shop's bowl of soul on the outdoor patio in the warm spring sunshine of Boise, Idaho. My first thought when I received the news that SAP is acquiring Syclo, was, "Smart move SAP!" I respect the fact that SAP is willing to double down on enterprise mobility.  I also respect the fact that SAP is willing to brave the inevitable criticism for having bought the same solution twice.   SAP has smart leaders.  They have made an aggressive and brave decision with this acquisition.  I think they recognized an unmet need, estimated the impact, valued the market and fixed it.  I am sure this was not an easy decision.  It will raise many questions, but I am sure it will make Sapphire 2012 even more interesting (perhaps even more than Van Halen in concert). SAP has doubled ... (more)

IBM to Acquire Mobility Vendor Worklight - An Analysis

IBM has jumped into the MEAP (mobile enterprise application platform) competition with yesterday’s announced intent to acquire MEAP vendor Worklight.   Worklight is headquartered in New York and was founded in 2006 by CEO Shahar Kaminitz.  Worklight's software supports HTML5, hybrid and native applications for smartphones and tablets with industry-standard technologies and tools.   Their solutions include an Eclipse-based software IDE (integrated development environment), mobile middleware, mobile solution management and analytics. Worklight Studio competes with Appcelerator, Ver... (more)

VCs Spend $6.9 Billion on Cloud Startups

Watch CloudViews Unplugged Watch the latest edition of CloudViews Unplugged – a monthly video blog analyzing the top cloud news stories. Cloud News VMware introduced Accelerate Advisory Services, a set of IT benchmarking services focused on helping CIOs get more out of the investments they are making in virtualization and cloud computing. VMware recently acquired assets from Info Tech Health Check, an analytics vendor with IT performance metrics that span 20 industries and 4 geographical regions. Read more in this CRN article. This Wired article reviews Google’s recently launche... (more)

Storage Wars: Could XtremIO Steal EMC’s Thunder?

If the weekend IT press is to be believed, EMC are on the verge of acquiring solid-state array vendor XtremIO in a deal worth around $450 million.  This would be a remarkable outcome for a company that is still technically “in stealth mode” and has no obvious revenue or customers. Why would EMC do this?  Their normal acquisition process is to look for targets that have well established customer bases, such as Isilon or Greenplum.  XtremIO’s technology is unvalidated in the marketplace and there are already many other competitors out there; Violin Memory and Pure Storage to name ... (more)

Amazon Tipped to Buy webOS

Hewlett-Packard is negotiating the sale of its webOS platform to Amazon according to a source who claims to know what's going on. Amazon is reportedly now examining the patents that HP acquired when it bought webOS last year as part of its $1.2 billion purchase of Palm. HP CEO Meg Whitman told staff Tuesday that no decision would be made about the fate of webOS for another three or four weeks. Amazon's patent examination would explain the delay. It might also suggests that Amazon could walk away if it doesn't like what it finds or if financial terms can't be reached. webOS isn't ... (more)