m&a

A nice little summer shopping spree for AOL: Under the auspices of new CEO Tim Armstrong, the company has acquired "hyperlocal" news site Patch and hipster-oriented events listing site Going.com.

The acquisition of Patch isn't too much of a surprise. Armstrong founded and invested in Patch while at his former gig as Google sales chief. The start-up offers a model for local news on the Web and plans to have launched in a dozen cities by the end of 2009. Going, meanwhile, has been around since 2006 and offers event and invitation services along with ticketing. … Read more

According to BusinessWeek, Dell has amassed a $10 billion war chest with which it intends to buy BMC Software, Symantec, or another big technology company to expand into new markets--and particularly software markets--in a bid to boost profitability.

Yet even as Dell ponders where to spend its cash, it is reportedly rolling out a program to provide free, open-source applications to small and midsize businesses. The reason is simple, according to Amit Midha, president of Dell's Asia-Pacific and Japan region for the SMB business:

The more advanced the customers, the more likely they will adopt open source, because they … Read more

Oracle has spent tens of billions of dollars buying companies that give it a diverse, rich product portfolio. Such industry consolidation also, not coincidentally, has granted Oracle significant pricing power and a ready-made bevy of customers to which it can cross-sell its products.

I wonder, however, if this is the best way for Oracle to be attracting new customers in a slow-growth enterprise software market.

I've suggested before that open source provides an efficient way to distribute software and attract new customers. No, it currently doesn't generate Oracle-worthy billions in profits, but it wouldn't need to for … Read more

Katherine Egbert has predicted (again) that Red Hat will be bought, this time by IBM. While I have indulged my own Red Hat acquisition fantasies in the past, I just can't see a near-term acquisition of Red Hat by IBM.

Unless....

Unless, as Egbert predicts, Oracle will throw its weight fully behind Sun's Solaris, to the detriment of its Linux business:

It seems inevitable Oracle will favor Solaris. While Oracle has said publicly they will continue support of RHEL, there is a sense within Red Hat that an increased focus on Open Solaris over RHEL is inevitable, as … Read more

Caroline McCarthy rightly rebuts all the "so-and-so will buy Twitter!" nonsense, but there's a very good reason for this nonsense:

The microblogging service still makes little to no money, and the assumption is that it will continue to fail to do so, absent a big-brother type that can turn its community (that word again!) into cash.

As Google discovered with YouTube, however, big community doesn't necessarily equal big cash. The same is likely true of Twitter.

Some communities simply aren't designed to be monetized directly. Unfortunately, advertising isn't the panacea we once supposed, either, … Read more

Guess what! Google is going to buy Twitter! No, Facebook's going to buy it! Or Yahoo--oh, wait, they can't afford it anymore. The latest and most absurd rumor, floated by Valleywag, suggests that Apple has been looking at buying Twitter, too.

Yes, Apple. It's a hardware company that really only markets and hypes up software as a means to sell more hardware--like how iTunes really exists to sell iPods--and yet apparently it wants to buy Twitter. I'm not sure Twitter could convince me to buy any hardware, except maybe a water balloon to carry around in … Read more

SpringSource announced Monday its acquisition of Hyperic, a move that signals a new phase of commercial open-source competition.

Until recently, open-source vendors like SpringSource seemed content to play the low-cost commodity foil to the broader product portfolios of their proprietary peers. No more.

SpringSource, the company behind the Spring Framework, the leading open-source application framework for Java, has been nudging beyond its roots for some time. Most recently, SpringSource announced commercial support for Tomcat, arguably the world's most prevalent Java application server. It has also released tools to expedite and facilitate the development of Java applications.

In these ways, … Read more

Back in the early days of computing, there was no such thing as a "software vendor." Companies like IBM sold hardware/software integrated solutions and, really, software was developed simply to sell the value of the hardware.

With Monday's announcement that Oracle is acquiring Sun for $7.4 billion, however, Oracle is signaling its own "iPod moment," seeking to compete with Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and others in integrated hardware/software systems.

It's a bold move, and not for the faint of heart. But then, no one would ever accuse Oracle of being faint-hearted.

"I … Read more

Cisco has been on a software acquisition spree this past year, acquiring Jabber, PostPath, and now Tidal Software, among others. But as Cisco goes after the data center with its new Unified Computing push, one open-source company should be on Cisco's radar screen: Reductive Labs, creators of the Puppet project, a framework for automating system administration.

Tidal is a performance-monitoring solution for data centers. It's a nice start, and a definite upgrade over Cisco's baseline Unified Computing management tools. But as Forrester senior analyst Glenn O'Donnell suggests, "Cisco is the new kid in town in … Read more