Posts filed under 'Who Buys Who'
The word on the street says that Tripwire has been talking to potential suitors again. One set of negotiations were really close to a deal, or atleast offers were made, but the numbers were too far apart and talks stalled.
I was talking to an M&A professional recently and they said everyone wants their deal priced on the Opsware/HP multiples and valuations and that is just not realistics for most market segments, as they are not hyper-growth segments.
Then I read a press release from Tripwire today which has them re-positioning themselves or what seems like a re-position to “Continuous Data Center Compliance” … and it makes you wonder whether it is an effort to reposition into the Data Center space from the compliance space.
October 2nd, 2007
That is the word on the street. Given EMC’s foray into buying management tool vendors, would it make sense for them to buy a provisioning system?
February 16th, 2007
The Symantec, Altiris deal is the first recognition of the fact that traditional anti-virus, anti-phisihing etc is a dying market. And this is not because Microsoft (MSFT) has decided to put some of the features in its newly launched Vista release.
Many corporations have realized that traditional anti-***** products stop the “known bad” stuff from entering their infrastructure. But it is much easier to keep track of “known good” stuff which provisioning systems like Altiris do. They make sure that only “known good” where good is defined by the corporate policy or by Dell for consumers is kept on the machines.
Solicore Systems is another example of this, where enterprise change control policy is used to ensure the known good state of the machine. If it came in via enterprise change control it is good, otherwise it is not.
If you can ensure that only known good stuff is on the machine, traditional anti-virus, anti-spam etc is dead.
January 30th, 2007
There is a battle brewing out there: google versus citrix. Sounds absurd, its not. Google wants to become the place where people store thier data, run applications from and do all their computing. That is exactly what citrix does for the enterprise today.
A number of engineering people I have talked to have mentioned that Google’s strength is the distributed application environment they have built which allows people to develop scalable new applications very quickly. The question is whether newer technologies erode the advantages that google has and almost make them like yesterday’s technology when it comes to applications over the web.
The generally held consensus is that Citrix’s current architecture would never scale to something serving millions of people around the world. But that is of their current architecture. The advantage that citrix like approach is that you can take existing applications and just plop them in and they work.
The first question is whether being able to deploy current applications for use over the web be a strong differentiator. I think it will be. The next question is whether it can give Yahoo, Google or Microsoft (or Akamai) a lead over the other. I again think the answer is yes. Microsoft’s live initiative is heading in that direction although it will run into resistance from the cash-cow products of the company.The other angle this competition could come from is from the people who are putting a box in your living room …
That brings us to the question whether a virtualization based approach will get us there. I recently came across a company called Atlantis Computing which has the technology working. They signed up for the Amazon’s grid and have signed up over 5000 users all over the world for their beta. So while Citrix may not get there … the approach will definitely and it will turn the advantages of today dis-advantages of tomorrow for companies like Google.
January 17th, 2007
I was talking to a senior analyst (non-financial) and they mentioned that it is a possibility that someone may buy Opsware. There are several large companies who are not as strong on the datacenter/provisioning side of the business. Opsware and Bladelogic are the two strong companies in that space. Who ever might buy them, needs a fat checkbook though — so has to be one of the big players like MSFT, HP, CA, EMC?
October 31st, 2006
I was recently at a talk by Dave McQueeny, CTO IBM Federal, where he talked about some interesting trends in the industry. One of the things he mentioned was that for some time now it has become difficult for chip companies like Intel to increase the processor speed year after year by 30%.
So it is speculated that Intel stopped marketing giga Hertz as the main reason to upgrade and being smart has shifted the focus to number of core’s in the CPU. AMD has made heat consumption an issue, which again Dave mentioned is an issue because now the power consumed by a processor when its idle versus when it is working is roughly the same and so it never gets to cool down.
Another impact of this shift may be in how ODM’s select chipsets to put on a motherboard. Since they wont be touting giga hertz, they are also shifting to heat consumtion, number of cores etc. Will the graphics capability become an important selling point? You do need sophisticated graphics cards to work with 24″ or 30″ displays.
What do you think?
October 15th, 2006
Opsware stock is trading roughly 10x revenue, high for its sector? Good time to buy companies. Tripwire had about 35M in revenue in 2005 as reported in the Portland Business Journal (http://portland.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2006/06/05/daily51.html). If revenue this year is around 50 that would be a significant increase for Opsware. If they pay 200-250M for the acqusition the stock should go up 50% because of the revenue jump … making it effectively a 375M acqution … which should be a good outcome for Tripwire … which has raised about 60M.
October 8th, 2006
Ok. Its not driven by the alphabet soup. The rumor abounds though after EMC purchase of nLayers which got them into the CMDB space. There have been rumors about IBM buying BMC and of BMC being taken over by private equity. But EMC buying them may make some sense.
October 4th, 2006
Thats the word on the street … Check out http://news.tmcnet.com/news/2006/09/18/1901468.htm
September 26th, 2006
That would be a big one. But people say that HP today can’t fight IBM in mainframe territory. Almost every IBM mainframe account uses CA. So the acquisition can give HP access to most IBM accounts. Also CA’s stock is relatively cheap.
September 16th, 2006
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