And So Begins the End of this SaaS M&A Cycle
… and hence the acquisition dies due to excessive capital requirements. It’s almost impossible to blend a profitable entity with a new acquisition that is burning tens of more millions per year, unless it’s a total make-the-company bet like Android.
Apple – Color Acquisition Rumors
So people are scratching their heads on news rumors (OK, rumours for some of you) on Apple buying failed (?) startup Color (Colour, if you insist). All I can say is: back to 1977 Related articles Apple Said to Acquire Color (thenextweb.com) Apple Buying Color Tragically Makes Sense (informalprotocol.com) Apple to acquire photo/video sharing app company [...]
Citrix Acquires Cloud.com: An Analysis
Citrix (previous CloudAve coverage), the virtualization player who is gaining some decent traction recently, today announced the acquisition of Cloud.com (previous CloudAve coverage), the open source cloud platform player with considerable traction on the side of Telcos, Service providers and even enterprises. Initially, Citrix will push the Cloud.com product lines and Citrix branded versions will [...]
Out of Left Field: Vmware Acquires Sliderocket
Quick initial reaction: scratching head. Vmware recently shook up the Cloud Computing world with the launch of Cloud Foundry and I think most of us would have pegged them as an infrastructure company. Then all of a sudden they buy Sliderocket, the great collaborative presentations company. Why is this a big deal? Probably not for [...]
Salesforce Acquires Radian6 To Help Their Customers Become Socially Adept
Salesforce.com (see previous CloudAve coverage) today announced that they are acquiring Radian6, a company helping organizations monitor and engage with their customers on social media, for $326 Million to boost the social intelligence of their products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com. Anyone who had seen the demo of their Service Cloud 3 [...]
Acquisitions, Trust And Cloud Services
Last week, Salesforce.com acquired the web conferencing provider DimDim for $31 Million. Immediately after the news was out, DimDim sent a mail telling their users that free and month by month subscription plans will end by 15th March, 2011. Those with annual subscription will be allowed to continue till the end of their subscription period [...]
Salesforce.com Acquires DimDim
Image via CrunchBase Salesforce.com (see previous CloudAve coverage) today announced that it is acquiring DimDim, a low priced Webex competitor, for approximately 31 Million in cash. DimDim was founded in 2007 with its development office in Hyderabad, India. They offered real time collaboration service with video, presentation, whiteboard, etc.. I have been using/following DimDim ever [...]
Why acquisition beats retention
In a short conversation with Graham Hill today, the topic of acquisition versus retention was brought up. My response to Graham’s initial question was “human nature”: @GrahamHill: If only banks, utilities, telcos put as much effort into retaining customers as they did into acquiring them < human nature and my second one was elaborating on [...]
Salesforce.com’s $212 Million Acquisition of Heorku – A Sparkling Gem In Radiant Future Of Cloud And PaaS
I met James Lindenbaum, a founder of Heroku, in early 2009, at the Under The Radar conference in Mountain View. We had a long conversation on cloud as a great platform for Ruby, why Ruby on Rails is a better framework than PHP, and viability of PaaS as…
Software Is The New Hardware
Today Intel announced that it is buying McAfee for $7.7 billion. This acquisition made people scratch their heads. Why McAfee? The obvious arguments are that Intel has hit the growth wall and organic growth is not good enough to satisfy the shareholders. But this argument quickly falls apart from margin perspective. Why dilute their current [...]
AbleAdvisory: Foursquare Halts Talks With Facebook, Completes Next Round
According to Kara Swisher, Foursquare is close to completing a funding deal with the Andressen Horowitz, the firm that "had publicly dissed the hot social location site and walked away from earlier talks.The last curve came with serious talks for Foursquare to be acquired by Facebook, which very close to happening–”one inch to the end [...]
Quik-Fire Bloggers Have a Big Happy Picnik:-)
Oops. We’ve just posted two articles on the Picnik acquisition. As first reactions to the news, they do overlap quite a bit. Apologies for the oversight, but let me quickly add, it may happen again… As we stated a number of times, we do not have an editorial calendar, assignments..etc – we simply trust our [...]
If You Wonder What Happens When You Get Bought Out Check Out FriendFeed’ s Traffic
I am not saying that this happens to everyone or that everyone is ticked that Facebook bought out FriendFeed. But obviously I have been disappointed by FriendFeed being bought out by Facebook. While I have a Facebook page, and am seeing FriendFeed user’s crossing over from FF to Facebook (thanks!), it is interesting what has [...]
Amazon, the World’s Default Shopping Destination (or is it Zamazon now?)
Recently I wrote about PaaS by Amazon – an no, as much as we like thinking of Amazon as the the key Cloud Computing infrastructure provider, it wasn’t about Platform as a Service. It was about Pasta as a Service. Yes, I am buying Al Dente Carba-Nada as a subscription. After all, before it become [...]
