Quick Note: Dropbox – Mailbox Marriage Is A Hail Mary Pass
This morning an acquisition news got techies excited about Dropbox buying the iOS app with lots of buzz but few invites, Mailbox. In short, this is a hail mary pass after Google announced that you can now attach large attachments with Google Drive integration in Gmail. Dropbox had to react and they reacted by buying [...]
Start-Up Success in SaaS? You Have to Bend the Odds In Your Favor. Some Thoughts on How to Do It.
Mark Suster put together a presentation (and a blog post) a few weeks ago that has really stuck with me me. I never, perhaps intentionally, looked at the odds of achieving a solid exit in a start-up. Actually it’s just this one slide that has really stayed with me … It turns out the odds of [...]
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.
The 10x Rule: What Raising $1 of Venture Capital Really Means
Recently, a good friend of mine asked me how much he should raise in his round. He was lucky enough to have a range of options. My simple advice was: assume you have to return a liquidity event (sale or IPO) of at least 10x the amount you raise. Valuations change from round to round. [...]
One More Reason to Take That M&A Offer – Sponsor Turnover
In the last 2 weeks, I met with two other CEO/founders whose companies had been acquired in the past 12-18 months. In some ways their experiences were different than mine. One was a consumer internet company acquired by an entertainment company. The other was a SaaS company, yes, but one that was basically pre-revenue. But [...]
A Real Life SaaS Case Study: Eloqua. Marketo. Pardot. There Are 3 Different Paths to Success, My Young Padwan.
I don’t know about you, but I really can’t stand case studies. They always seem either contrived (forcing contrasts in companies that aren’t really there) or else too hypothetical, because we know which way things really worked out in real life (Case Study: Company A had to decide whether to do action X or Y. [...]
IBM’s Worklight Acquisition: Few Thoughts
Two days back IBM announced their plans to acquire Worklight, the Israel based mobile development platform, to beef up their enterprise mobile strategy. IBM realizes that in this era of BYOD/Consumerization of IT, they need to had a strong mobile strategy supporting various platforms. In fact, at the recent Lotusphere 2012 conference, IBM showcased their [...]
PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: Engine Yard Acquires Orchestra
I am sure regular readers of this blog are convinced that PaaS is the future of Cloud Services. We are seeing this trend happening now with so much action on the PaaS front. Today Engine Yard (previous CloudAve coverage) reacted to the market trend and announced the acquisition of Orchestra, the Irish PHP PaaS 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 [...]
PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: Terracotta Is Software AG’s PaaS Play?
Software AG, the German software vendor with focus on business users, today announced the acquisition of Terracotta, the company behind distributed Java cache called Ehcache, signaling their intention for a serious cloud play. The details of the deal are unknown but it is a smart move by Software AG because Terrecotta has great expertise in [...]
Microsoft’s Skype Acquisition: My Immediate Concerns
Kara Swisher of BoomTown has confirmed that Microsoft has finalized the deal to acquire Skype for $8.5 billion. According to her Microsoft will announce the news early in the morning tomorrow. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier tonight that Microsoft–in what would be its most aggressive acquisition in the digital space–was zeroing in on buying [...]
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 [...]
Why Verizon’s Acquisition Of Terremark Is Not Exciting
Yesterday, Verizon announced that they are acquiring the cloud provider Terremark for $1.4 Billion According to Datacenter Knowledge, Verizon will acquire colocation and cloud hosting provider Terremark for $1.4 billion in a deal that will accelerate the telecom provider’s push into cloud computing. Verizon will pay $19.00 in cash for each share of Terremark, about [...]
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 [...]
