m&a

Intalio planning '8 to 10' open-source acquisitions

When I commented on The 451 Group's report on open-source mergers and acquisitions in 2009, this is not what I was thinking:

Open-source BPM (business process management) vendor Intalio turns 10 this year and is looking to celebrate by raising the funds necessary to finance a spending spree to acquire 8 to 10 open source vendors.

Intalio buying open-source companies? Well, they'd have to be really small, as Intalio is itself still somewhat small, earning less than $50 million in revenue (likely much less, but I'm not privy to its revenue data).

"Small," however, is part of the plan. … Read more

Proprietary buys of open-source firms to flourish?

The 451 Group's Matt Aslett believes that a perfect storm is brewing for serious mergers and acquisitions around open source in 2009. Having a (literally) vested interest in the matter, I'd like to see his prophecy come true.

Aslett provides a long list of reasons to suppose that 2009 is the year of the open-source buyout, among them:

Proprietary vendors see open source as a means of entering adjacent markets. Proprietary vendors see open source as a means of expanding reach and a potential source of upsell opportunities.

I've written on this second reason before, arguing that … Read more

IAC hands over 236.com joint venture

236.com, a comedy site developed as a joint venture between liberal news site The Huffington Post and Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, will be a joint venture no more. The site will become a Huffington Post subsidiary and is slated to be re-branded as "Huffington Post Comedy." Financial terms were not disclosed.

"After a successful first year as a standalone comedy site we are excited to bring 236 into The Huffington Post as we launch our comedy vertical," Huffington Post co-founder and namesake Arianna Huffington said in a release Tuesday. "We look forward to … Read more

AVG to acquire ID theft prevention specialist Sana

Antivirus provider AVG Technologies on Tuesday announced that it is acquiring Sana Security, which sells identity fraud prevention software.

Under the deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, the Redwood City, Calif., headquarters of Sana will serve as Amsterdam-based AVG's first office in Silicon Valley.

Sana's products use behavioral technology to block attackers from stealing sensitive information. The software analyzes normal application behavior and recognizes abnormal behavior caused by malware infections, user configuration errors, and software bugs.

M&A prospects better for small companies, new media

Two reports released this week shed some light on just what types of technology sector merger and acquisition deals are expected to show resiliency in 2009. Among the winners: small companies and nontraditional media companies.

Technology M&A deals fell 17 percent to 3,751 transactions in 2008 over the previous year, according to a report released Friday by ICON Corporate Finance. But small technology deals of under $100 million fared better, posting only a 15 percent decline.

These smaller deals, which account for 95 percent of all IT mergers and acquisitions, are expected to show more resiliency in … Read more

M&A market may be dead, but Sun's still buying

Apparently, someone forgot to tell Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz that the market for tech mergers and acquisitions is dead.

On Wednesday, Sun announced that it has acquired Q-layer, a cloud-computing management and automation company (see CNET's coverage here):

Imagine scaling up instantly to massive capacities to meet changing needs. Then imagine doing it on the Web, without having to invest in new infrastructure, train new personnel, or license new software. That's cloud computing, and Sun is making it a reality.

That's Sun's pitch, and it sounds promising. Cloud computing is a great fit with Sun'… Read more

Two big reasons Dell should buy Red Hat

Dell's biggest problem is that its one-time differentiation--low-cost hardware assembly and distribution--is now common industry practice. Indeed, it now routinely gets beaten at its own game, as called out in a recent article by Ashlee Vance in The New York Times.

Dell's growth, to revenue of $56 billion in 2006 from $5.3 billion in 1996, has come from within. But company executives now concede that they need to make a large acquisition, or a series of them, to tap the repeating, higher-margin revenue streams that come from the software and services businesses....

"It's not a … Read more

EMC reportedly buys SourceLabs, but for what purpose?

TechFlash is reporting that EMC has purchased SourceLabs for an undisclosed fee. The unanswered question in TechFlash's report is why EMC would buy SourceLabs, a provider of support tools for Linux and other open-source software.

It's not that SourceLabs isn't a good company. I have followed SourceLabs since its inception, meeting with founder and CEO Byron Sebastian back at OSCON (in 2003) before the company was founded in 2004, and spent some time in the SourceLabs office in 2004 getting a demo of its technology. It was cool back in 2004, and has improved since then.

In … Read more

Mickos: a New Year of 'radical transparency' for MySQL

Marten Mickos, SVP of Sun's database group, could be forgiven for resting on his billion-dollar laurels, having sold MySQL to Sun in early 2008 for $1 billion (despite an S1 to go public in the works). But on New Year's Eve, Mickos sent out a missive to "customers, partners, users, colleagues, [and] friends," declaring MySQL's "radical transparency" a commencement and coda for how the open-source database leader does business, pre-Sun and post-Sun.

Importantly, as Mickos calls out, it was Sun's acquisition that brought to a furious boil all the somewhat private tensions … Read more

A new M&A for open source?

OStatic's Sam Dean speculates that 2009 could be the year of open source mergers and acquisitions, what with the super-low valuations of Sun, Novell, and Red Hat. He may be right, though we might also see these (and others) snapping up the low-hanging fruit of even smaller open-source companies in an attempt to unify a growing open-source ecosystem under one corporate roof.

As I fell asleep last night, however, a different thought struck me: do Eclipse and Mozilla suggest an entirely new form of M&A for open source?

Yesterday I suggested that creating an OpenOffice foundation might be the best way to resolve its alleged management problems. … Read more