Acquisitions on Agenda for Quanta Computer BUSINESS ASIA By Bloomberg
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By Tim Culpan  Quanta Computer, the largest maker of notebook computers in Taiwan, said it was in talks to buy as many as five electronic parts makers in China, Taiwan and the United States, as the company seeks to lower costs and add products like music players.
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The immediate future of the computer industry -- and its biggest players -- took center stage Tuesday after IBM announced it is selling its PC business to a Chinese technology giant.
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Dell CEO Michael Dell hinted Monday that his company could be shopping for more acquisition targets, and that they could be larger than the companies it has acquired to date.Speaking in Tokyo at a news conference, Dell made the comments after giving his views on a recent run of acquisitions in the PC market, such as the&#160;purchase of Gateway by Taiwan&#39;s Acer.&quot;I think the pace of consolidation will increase,&quot; he said. &quot;It think that it favors the larger companies, particularly as the growth is skewed towards emerging countries. In the last two years Dell has acquired five companies, two related to the consumer business, one related to software, and two related to services. These have all been relatively small companies but I would not be surprised if the nature and pace of acquisitions increases somewhat.&quot;He added that his company had looked at Gateway when it was available but decided against purchasing the company.Dell was in Tokyo to launch the company&#39;s &quot;simplify IT&quot; program. It aims to cut corporate IT management costs, thus freeing up spending for use on new computers and servers. He estimated that 70 percent of IT spending at Japanese companies over the next year will be related to maintenance of old systems and management and only 30 percent on new hardware.&quot;We need to flip that 70/30,&quot; he said.On the consumer side of Dell&#39;s business the company has recently begun&#160;offering PCs through retailers&#160;-- a break with its successful direct sales model. With a handful of retailers already selling its systems, Dell said more are on the way.&quot;The first steps that we have taken with the partners mentioned earlier are really just that, first steps,&quot; he said. &quot;So I think you can expect over the next several quarters or year or two, that in all major countries around the world like Japan, Korea, China, India, U.S., France, U.K., Russia, etc., you would see Dell having a small number of key partnerships which allow consumers to purchase Dell products at retail. It&#39;s really about making our products available in more places.&quot;&quot;I believe we can grow the direct business both on telephone and online and I believe we can grow a channel, a partner business. And we are also working very hard to extend the capabilities that Dell has to our channel partners,&quot; he said.Looking ahead, Dell promised new x86-architecture based products during his speech at Oracle Open World on Nov. 14. The products, which he didn&#39;t detail, will have &quot;breakthrough performance and power capability relative to others in the industry.
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IBM going Chrismas shopping The year may be coming to a close, but IBM keeps the acquisitions coming with this week's purchase of risk management specialist Consul.â¦
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the industry's most comprehensive range of resources for business partners using open source technologies.
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Koninklijke Philips Electronics has completed the sale of an 80.1 percent stake in its chip division to a group of private investment houses, the company said Saturday.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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IBM &lt;IBM.N&gt; and Lehman Brothers &lt;LEH.N&gt; have agreed to pay nearly US$17 million for 7.7 percent of Kingdee International Software Group Ltd. &lt;0268.HK&gt;, aiming to establish an alliance under which Big Blue will help the Chinese software firm re-design its...
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China's biggest computer maker said Tuesday it is in acquisition talks with a major international technology company, a disclosure which follows reports it might buy IBM Corp.'s personal computer business.
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Last November's buyout by IBM of SOA software provider Cognos is already having a major impact on businesses that use vertical market software. That impact is being felt in the way these businesses warehouse and access their data.
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Shares of the Taiwanese manufacturing company Quanta Computer rose quickly today on reports that it had landed a contract to produce five million second-generation iPhones, with production to start in September of this year. The news broke early in the morning in Taiwan&#39;s Chinese-language newspapers, the Commercial Times and the Economic Daily News.
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A new report from Forrester Research declares that the wave of mega-acquisitions in the software industry is over for now, though big vendors will continue to snap up smaller firms as they round out their portfolios.&quot;We do expect more consolidation to occur, but predict that the acquisitions of&#160;Business Objects by SAP,&#160;Cognos by IBM, and&#160;Oracle&#39;s renewed bid for BEA&#160;will be the last hurrahs in this cycle for super-sized acquisitions within the software industry of vendors with more than $1 billion in revenues and deal sizes of $5 billion or more,&quot; analysts R. &quot;Ray&quot; Wang and Andrew Bartels said in the report.The analysts noted that the market could see hardware vendors like Cisco make major software buys, but said such scenarios do not constitute software vendor consolidation in the traditional sense.Three major factors will staunch the flow of megadeals, they argued.Citing projections showing double-digit growth in global software revenue for 2007 and 2008, Wang and Bartels argued that vendors will not need to grow through large purchases in the immediate future, and will instead choose &quot;organic growth and spot acquisitions&quot; to satisfy shareholders.Second, the credit crunch caused by the subprime mortgage meltdown is making it harder to borrow large sums. And thirdly, there are simply fewer large ISVs to buy, the analysts noted. They identified 18 large independent software vendors that are potential targets and said many of those can be eliminated because of &quot;poor fit with strategy, financial or business questions, high price, or other considerations that stymie acquisitions.&quot;IBM will be the most aggressive with acquisitions and may go after packaged applications, a field it has largely avoided to date, according to the report.&quot;The most likely scenario involves smaller acquisitions of key ISVs building on Websphere. But if IBM makes a move for packaged apps to compete with Oracle, top apps targets could include IBM partners like Infor, IFS, Lawson, or even SAP. Industry-specific targets could include Amdocs, Deltek, and Primavera Systems,&quot; the authors state.Wang said he was comfortable making this prediction despite IBM&#39;s insistence that it has no designs on packaged applications. &quot;Last year, they spent the whole year saying they were never going to buy a BI vendor,&quot; Wang said, referring to IBM&#39;s deal to buy Cognos.As for Oracle, it will buy companies tied to middleware and vertical business applications, according Forrester. &quot;We expect Oracle to make midsize bets in key verticals like project base solutions (e.g., Computer Methods International or CMiC, Manhattan CenterStone), financial services (e.g., Temenos), retail (e.g., Escalate), and telecom, utilities, and public services (e.g., SunGard).SAP will make small purchases to flesh out NetWeaver, according to the analysts. These may include vendors of user interface tooling, master data management software and business process management products, they said, citing SAP&#39;s recent buy of Yasu Technologies, which makes a business rules engine, as evidence. &quot;Additional acquisitions could come from existing partners like AmberPoint SOA Management, F5, Magic Software Enterprises, OpenText, Savvion, and Worksoft,&quot; they added.Among the big four players, Microsoft will be &quot;the least active&quot; in terms of acquisitions, according to Forrester. &quot;Expect the Redmond giant to make selective acquisitions that do not conflict too much with its ecosystem strategy,&quot; they wrote. Possible targets include &quot;middleware solution providers like VisionWare in the customer data integration space, Riversand Technologies in the personal information manager space, and Web 2.0 specialists that enhance its Information Workplace platform.&quot;Software executives offered mixed reactions. Tom Hogan, senior vice president of HP&#39;s software division, said his firm will likely continue to acquire companies, but is focused more on organic growth. Last year HP spent about 70 percent of its roughly $3.5 billion research and development budget on software, according to Hogan.&quot;That&#39;s a lot of internal R&amp;D that should ... generate commercially viable software over the next couple of years,&quot; he said. &quot;If you want to really hit the home run for shareholders, you build it yourself. When we can&#39;t build it because we don&#39;t have the DNA or the time, then we will turn to strategic M&amp;A.&quot;Executives at smaller vendors offered other takes. Informatica, a data integration vendor, is competing with the likes of IBM but enjoying strong growth, reporting this week that its 2007 revenues rose 21 percent to $391 million. CEO Sohaib Abbasi said mergers and acquisitions in the software industry should be examined beyond the size of a given deal.The pace of consolidation is much more aggressive in established categories like business applications, he noted. &quot;At the other extreme is emerging categories such as software as a service, where there is no consolidation to speak of.&quot;Informatica is doing well thanks to the relative newness of its space, he said: &quot;We are in the very early days of the data integration market. Half of our deals are uncontested.&quot;Patrick Durbin, CEO of the portfolio-management-software company Planview, said in a recent interview that his privately held firm, which has 450 customers, has &quot;critical mass&quot; and can survive as an independent.Durbin&#39;s firm partners with various companies, including Microsoft. He couldn&#39;t say for sure what would happen if it or another firm came knocking: &quot;The moment I tell you I&#39;ll never sell is the moment someone&#39;s going to back up a truck with a boatload of money.&quot;
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If there were any lingering doubts that we are in the post-PC era, several big stories this year should have cleared them up. The sale of IBM's PC business to China's Lenovo Group and the death of Comdex were powerful reminders that IT is in a transitional stage. When one of the hottest business stories of the year involves an IPO of a company whose technology helps people find information on the Net, it's certain that the network, to paraphrase the well-known dictum of Sun Microsystems, has become the computer.
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TechWeb - Apple is reported to have turned to longtime manufacturer Quanta Computer to ramp up production.
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IBM&#39;s planned purchase of Venetica provides Big Blue with one more piece in its on-demand computing strategy. The challenge will be to seamlessly meld Venetica&#39;s unstructured-data expertise with structured-data management.
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China&#39;s biggest computer maker said it is in acquisition talks with a major international technology company, a disclosure that comes amid reports it might buy IBM&#39;s personal computer business.
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The Town of Marana has selected IBM (NYSE: IBM) services, servers, storage and software to improve speed and performance for all town departments and support the town's rapid growth.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) has announced an initiative to make Linux applications available across the company's entire hardware line.