IT researcher Gartner to acquire Meta Group
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DECEMBER 27, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - IT researcher Gartner Inc. will pay about $162 million to acquire Meta Group Inc., which also does IT research as well as consulting, Gartner announced today.
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Three of the top 10 PC vendors will be pushed out of the business by 2007, research firm Gartner predicted Monday. By Gregg Keizer.
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Global Tower Partners, a U.S. wireless tower operator, is to be bought by a consortium of infrastructure funds managed by members of Australia's Macquarie Group.
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Taking further aim at one of Microsoft's core franchises, Google said yesterday that it would acquire the e-mail security and management company Postini for $625 million. The deal underscores Google's ambitions to become a serious player in the business of selling software to companies and organizations, in competition with Microsoft and others.
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(InfoWorld) - Security software is mandatory for enterprises facing an Internet community of aggressive hackers and criminals. But enterprises shouldn't feel locked into deals with their security vendors, a Gartner analyst said. Under the right circumstances, switching vendors may make financial sense, said Peter Firstbrook, research director with Gartner. And with security vendors making a gross profit margin of 60 percent, enterprises may have more leverage when renegotiating deals, he said. "These guys [security vendors] are pretty fat and happy right now," said Firstbrook, who spoke at Gartner's IT Security Summit in London Tuesday. "They've got a very healthy profit margin. Don't feel sad for your antivirus vendor or your antivirus sales rep." Oddly, the antivirus security software market is mature, but softwareÂ costs aren't going down, Firstbrook said. The major security vendors aren't worried about losing clients because customers believe that changing products would be costly, he said. Before switching, IT managers should think about the complexity of rolling out new software. The companies best situated to make a change are those confident in their abilities to distribute software, test new products, and educate users, Firstbrook said. When slugging it out in negotiations, enterprises can do several things to ensure they get the best deal. First, companies should get quotes from a number of vendors and not be afraid to play one vendor off against another, Firstbrook said. Perpetual licenses are good, but organizations should remember that they can only negotiate a price once. Enterprises should also aim for rich packages that include home user licenses and some support, Firstbrook said. Licenses for desktops and e-mail security services should be calculated on a per-seat basis, but server license costs should be based on number of CPUs, Firstbrook said. Companies should not increase their seat count merely to meet a vendor's price list. Gartner expects an increasing number of security functions to be incorporated into single software packages, Firstbrook said. "I think that over time, vulnerability assessment, patch management, software configuration management will all merge with our antivirus software so we have one view of the security status of a PC, and if it's broken we can update it," Firstbrook said. Â
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State purpose, roles, and consequences for security practices and compliance, Gartner analyst says.
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Could blogging be near the peak of its popularity? The technology gurus at Gartner Inc. believe so.
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Storage company EMC has agreed to buy Document Sciences, a developer of software for personalizing mailshots and other communications. The acquisition will allow EMC to extend its offering in the field of transactional content management, which it sees as the fastest-growing part of the enterprise content management market. It plans to incorporate Document Sciences into its content management and archiving division.Using xPression, Document Sciences&#39; flagship application, companies can automate the creation and delivery of personalized communications such as brochures and contracts. The data can be drawn from CRM (customer relationship management), ECM (enterprise content management) and ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, it said.Automating the processes can save companies money or speed deals along, Document Sciences said. It has more than 500 customers using its software, it said.Document Sciences and EMC have been partners since 2004, when Document Sciences signed an agreement to integrate its xPression software with EMC&#39;s Documentum platform.Acquiring Document Sciences will allow EMC to further its goal of delivering systems for handling business problems end to end, it said.The xPression software could be useful for companies building transaction-intensive consumer financial applications such as new account enrollment, wealth management, brokerage and claims processing.The acquisition, for $85 million in cash, already has the approval of the companies&#39; boards of directors. Subject to customary closing conditions, including the approval of regulators and Document Sciences&#39; shareholders, the companies expect to close the deal by the end of March.EMC went on a buying spree in 2003, buying Legato and&#160;Documentum&#160;and has added around 20 companies since then, including security and encryption company&#160;RSA Security, virtualization specialist&#160;Rainfinity, and other companies such as Acartus,&#160;Captiva,&#160;and&#160;Internosis.
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The worldwide server market continued to expand in the second quarter, analyst firm IDC said in a report Friday that mirrored findings by Gartner Inc.
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Google has agreed to buy messaging security company Postini for $625 million, a move intended to increase the appeal of Google's hosted software applications among big businesses, the companies announced Monday.
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CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Symantec Corp. said Thursday it is acquiring digital security consulting firm @stake Inc. Financial details were not disclosed.
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Indian firms are increasing their IT budgets an average of 13 percent this year, far more than the global average of 3.3 percent, research company Gartner said Wednesday.The country&#39;s domestic IT market is also forecast to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.3 percent, reaching $24.3 billion by 2011.While there are fears of a global recession, India is showing rapid growth, said Peter Sondergaard, global head of research at Gartner, in a conference call.The increased spending by Indian CIOs is directed primarily towards building new business capabilities, with 30 percent of IT spending allocated to business growth and 19 percent to business transformation, Gartner said.Indian enterprises will make heavy investments in bringing the base infrastructure up to global standards, said Partha Iyengar, Gartner&#39;s head of research in India.A key problem for Indian CIOs is attracting and retaining quality staff, as they are competing with Indian and multinational IT services companies, Iyengar said.India&#39;s IT services market is forecast to grow to $10.73 billion by 2011 at a five-year CAGR of 23.2 percent, propelled by Indian companies that are outsourcing some of their work to other Indian and multinational companies due to staff shortages, Gartner said in January.
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The company that publishes the Washington Post has announced that it will acquire Slate, the online magazine pioneer, in a deal that signals the accelerating integration of the old and new media sectors.
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(InfoWorld) - Google has jumped into the anti-malware market, snatching up browser-based security software maker GreenBorder Technologies for an undisclosed amount of money. Officials with the search market leader confirmed the deal on May 29, but said that the two firms signed an acquisition agreement roughly two weeks beforehand. Google representatives would not provide further details about the deal itself or a timeframe for the GreenBorder acquisition to be closed within. GreenBorder, which is based in Google's hometown of Mountain View, Calif., announced news of the buyout on its Web site over the weekend. The company is a venture-backed provider of browser-based host intrusion protection (HIPs) tools for both businesses and consumers. Google officials said that the company moved to make the deal based on its perception that GreenBorder had a crack security software engineering team that could help boost security across all of its products. "This is pretty straightforward, it's primarily a talent acquisition for us, they have a small team of engineers that we were really impressed with," said Aaron Zamost, a corporate communications representative with Google. "The idea is that these guys have great expertise in the security domain which can provide obvious benefits to Google, its users and its advertisers." The company would offer no further details of its plan to integrate GreenBorder's security tools into its own products, which have branched far beyond search into Web-based productivity applications that compete with Microsoft's ubiquitous Office products. The Google Apps Premier Edition, launched in Feb. 2007, offers businesses e-mail, calendar, instant messaging and word processing capabilities. GreenBorder had been offering both a free consumer version of its programs, as well as paid editions of its applications marketed at enterprise users, including a version that specifically promised to secure computers using Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Outlook products for business users, dubbed GreenBorder Professional Edition. The software also runs in coordination with other browsers and Web-based e-mail systems, including Firefox. GreenBorder has pitched its technology as the security industry's "first desktop DMZ software for Windows" that promises to stop malware code from running on browser-based applications by forcing untrusted content sent through the programs to run in a virtualized protected environment. By running unknown code in such a "time-out" setting, where the content remains isolated from a local host and any trusted network it is connected to, GreenBorder claims to prevent malware programs from delivering their nefarious payloads. Any content arriving on a user's desktop from an untrusted source is visually hosted in a controlled virtual environment highlighted by a green border surrounding programs such as Outlook and IE. As with other companies previously acquired by Google, GreenBorder has halted downloads of its software. However, the firm said on its site that existing users will maintain uninterrupted access to its products with its support team is still available during the transition. The company said it will continue to support existing customers through the end of their current subscriptions to its software. "GreenBorder's proactive, always-on protection against malicious code is fundamentally more effective than reactive, detection-based approaches," Drew Hoffman, president and chief executive officer of GreenBorder told InfoWorld at the time of Professional Edition's 2005 introduction. "With the ever-changing, unpredictable nature of Internet-based threats, organizations are realizing that the race to plug holes in defenses can never be won," Hoffman said. Google has made a series of recent moves to boost its profile in regards to improving security for its customers, launching an official blog on the topic in May and issuing a research paper at the HotBots 2007 conference in Boston in April. According to the HotBots report, roughly one in ten Web sites that Google can find with its powerful Internet crawling technologies carries some form of malware. In late 2006, the company quietly began offering warnings to users about potentially dangerous sites found via its search engine in a manner very similar to McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology. While the company remains coy about its overall security aspirations, industry watchers said they were unsurprised by Google's GreenBorder acquisition as the HIPs technologies gained via the deal could be used to improve security for any number of the firm's products. "With Google moving into online software-as-a-service type applications that are all based on the browser, they're trying to show people that this platform is being secured," said John Pescatore, analyst with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. "They can combine these security tools with the online applications, as well as Google toolbar and Google Desktop, and promise a level of automatic protection for end users." The GreenBorder tools do represent a more aggressive form of security than traditional anti-virus technologies, but Pescatore said that users would still need to rely on a combination of both types of software to retain the malware removal capabilities of signature-based applications. The analyst pointed out that Google had previously experimented with applying HIPs technology in its browser-based toolbar via a partnership with WholeSecurity, which was eventually purchased by Syamtec in late 2005. While anti-malware market leaders Symantec and McAfee have both brought similar HIPs products in house via acquisitions over the last several years, Microsoft, which is aggressively expanding its security business, has not offered competing applications as of yet. Pescatore highlighted the fact that the software giant did take ownership of some HIPs capability through its buyout of anti-virus specialists Pelican in 2003, but said the company hasn't moved to launch any technologies as a result of the deal. However, the company may have something currently in development, he said. "Symantec and McAfee both have this type of host intrusion protection, but Microsoft doesn't, and this is the sort of thing that Google can point people to consider if they were worried about using Google Apps through a browser," Pescatore said. "Microsoft acquired HIPs technology from Pelican but never used it, but they've been looking in this area and will have something under development."
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The New York Times Company announced the acquisition of Baseline StudioSystems, a leading online supplier of data and information about the movie and television industries.
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Silver Lake Partners has agreed to acquire a quarter of the Gerson Lehrman Group, the upstart Wall Street research firm that has come under scrutiny from regulators.
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BT Group confirmed this morning it is to buy the Californian telecoms group Infonet Services Corp for Â£965 million. The news followed reports which said that the UK telecoms