m&a

Big changes needed in the venture capital market

With the market for initial public offerings in a deep freeze and a dwindling number of potential buyers, start-ups have fewer opportunities to exit and retire to Costa Rica.

This is worrisome to entrepreneurs, but if anything, it should be of even greater concern to the venture capitalists that fund them, a point made by TechFlash's John Cook. Venture capital firms simply aren't structured to invest efficiently in this market.

VCs raised billions of dollars during technology's boom, and it's unclear where they can now profitably invest those dollars. IBM, Oracle, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft can … Read more

Essentials for open-source mergers and acquisitions

Software mergers and acquisitions have been on overdrive this week, with Adobe, Google, and Intuit collectively spending roughly $2.5 billion to add to their respective product lines. Against this backdrop, OStatic's Sam Dean asks, is the time ripe for open-source mergers and acquisitions? The answer is a resounding, "maybe."

Virtually all M&A is motivated by a search for strategic value. That value comes from acquiring expertise in emerging markets, like cloud computing or virtualization, or by delivering developer communities, as VMware got by buying SpringSource.

This is why Dean is right to point to … Read more

Oracle overtures to Sun customers mum on MySQL

Oracle has much to say to Sun Microsystems customers in a front-page advertisement it placed in Thursday's European edition of The Wall Street Journal.

The advertisement commits to greater investments in Sun hardware and Solaris software, but has absolutely nothing to say about MySQL. Is this a necessary omission to appease European regulators, or is it a sign of Oracle's intentions?

In the advertisement, Oracle commits to the following:

IBM, which has been cleaning up at Sun's expense, gets a warning from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: "We're in it to win it. IBM, we're … Read more

The EU's Christmas gift to Oracle

The European Union undoubtedly believes it is taking a principled stance against the specter of antitrust as Oracle attempts to buy Sun Microsystems. As I've written, however, the EU's delay threatens to gift Sun's customers to IBM and other competitors while doing little to no good for its MySQL business. Worse still, the EU may be paving the way for Oracle to drop its bid, only to return to scoop up Sun's software assets at a rock-bottom price.

Think this is far-fetched? Consider the following (increasingly likely) scenario:

Let's say the EU holds up Oracle'… Read more

EU fiddles with MySQL while Sun burns

IBM and Hewlett-Packard could not have planned it any better.

The European Union has launched an in-depth investigation into Oracle's acquisition of Sun, potentially delaying the merger by several more months. In doing so, the EU is actually guaranteeing the demise of Sun's hardware business and gifting it to Sun's competitors by misunderstanding the deal's impact on open source, generally, and on MySQL, specifically.

If you haven't been paying attention, the delay on the merger due to U.S. and EU scrutiny has already resulted in two shockingly bad quarters from Sun. Many enterprise customers … Read more

Examiner.com scoops up NowPublic

Citizen news site NowPublic has been sold to another company in the "hyperlocal" space, Examiner.com, the two companies announced Tuesday.

The two sites will operate independently, but Examiner will integrate NowPublic's technology into its site and will encourage NowPublic's contributors to also write for Examiner--right now, the buyer says it has grown 200 percent since the beginning of the year (it launched in April 2008) and has 15,000 active contributors, hoping to hit 30,000 by year's end.

NowPublic's executives, including CEO Leonard Brody, will join the management team of Clarity Digital … Read more

The disappearance of open source as a differentiator

As open source has become big to businesses, it has also become big business, with Gartner predicting that vendors will increasingly maintain the leading open-source projects. Vendors, and predominately "proprietary vendors," dominate open source today. Given this assimilation of open source into the proprietary software fabric, has open source won? Or lost?

In 2007 Tim O'Reilly predicted that "virtually every open-source company (including Red Hat) will eventually be acquired by a big proprietary software company." Red Hat still stands independent, though there is good reason to believe it could make an attractive target, but it … Read more

Why 'Joe Facebook' wants to cash out

Was there an unexpected rush of Facebook employees looking to cash out their stock? Yes, says BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy, who said that the $100 million buyback orchestrated by investor Digital Sky Technologies has been oversubscribed. Which means that a fair number of employees have been looking to cash out some stock even though it may be worth far more down the road when (and if) Facebook goes public. It's the sort of thing that would've left pre-IPO Googlers feeling awfully sheepish.

But what's more surprising, Lacy found, is that the high demand for Facebook cash-outs seems … Read more

It's official: MySpace to acquire iLike

MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta has confirmed in a Wednesday conference call that the News Corp.-owned social network has "entered into an agreement to acquire iLike," following rumors earlier in the week.

iLike's co-founders will remain at the company and stay headquartered in Seattle; the service will be "unaffected by the acquisition" in the short term.

Van Natta explained in the conference call that the acquisition is on behalf of MySpace Inc. rather than its MySpace Music division, a joint venture with the major record labels, because the company plans to extend its technology … Read more