Report: Infosys considering Capgemini acquisition
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Indiaâs second largest outsourcer, Infosys Technologies, is considering a bid for French IT services company Capgemini, according to a newspaper report.
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France's top bank BNP Paribas is "thinking" about a possible takeover of its rival Societe Generale, rocked by multi-billion-euro rogue trade losses, a spokeswoman said on Thursday.
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Singapore&#39;s state-owned Temasek Holdings   has approached Nasdaq  to buy its 30 percent  stake in the London Stock Exchange , a newspaper  reported on Sunday.
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Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. is considering making a concession to the banks financing its $26 billion leveraged buyout of payment processor First Data Corp. , according to a source familiar with the situation.
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Schering-Plough Corp.  is  seriously considering approaching Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.   about a possible merger, according to a report in The  Star-Ledger newspaper on Friday.
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The London Stock Exchange was considering making a bid of $2 billion to acquire Borsa Italiana, the operator of the stock exchange in Milan, two people close to the companies said. The two exchanges discussed a potential merger and were set to continue discussions today, a spokesman for Borsa Italiana said. The spokesman, Alessandro Pavesi, said the proposal from the London exchange is the only one being considered. Both exchanges have fended off takeover approaches in the last year, and a merger might help them avoid a takeover in the future, said Rupak Ghose, an analyst at Credit Suisse in London. âIt is not surprising that the L.S.E. is looking at different alternatives to become larger and hence avoid becoming acquired,â Mr. Ghose said in a note to investors.
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Management leads a $4.7 billion buyout bid. Are other bids on the way?
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SAP is buying a small Indian software company to help beef up the business process management capabilities in its NetWeaver applications platform.It is purchasing Yasu Technologies, a maker of business rules management software, which helps ensure that business processes automated through software are in compliance with a company&#39;s rules and regulations.SAP characterized the deal, announced at its Tech Ed conference in Munich, Germany, on Wednesday, as a &quot;fill in&quot; acquisition that would bridge a gap in its technologies. The deal is due to close this month and financial terms were not disclosed.Several vendors, including SAP, are providing software tools that allow companies to automate common business processes, such as issuing a purchase order or checking inventory levels, with the goal of making them more efficient.But SAP does not yet offer tools for managing these processes, and buying Yasu will help it to add such BPM (business process management) capabilities to NetWeaver.SAP will begin pilot tests of its first BPM product, code-named Galaxy, in the first quarter of next year. The technology acquired from Yasu will be integrated with Galaxy around the middle of next year, said Klaus Kreplin, SAP&#39;s head of NetWeaver technology.Yasu&#39;s software helps companies to enforce the rules that their business processes must abide by. If a company automates a project approval process, for example, Yasu will send projects under a certain budget to a midlevel manager for approval, and more costly projects to a senior manager.&quot;The nice thing is, you can define rules and make them available as a service that can be integrated with other applications,&quot; Kreplin said.Yasu was founded in 1999 and has about 120 employees. Customers include the automaker BMW, according to its Web site.BPM is one of several areas SAP is entering to compete better with its main applications rival, Oracle. SAP will also offer software for building composite applications, called the NetWeaver Composition Environment, and developing hosted applications for smaller companies, called SAP Business ByDesign.The Galaxy software will be integrated with NetWeaver Composition Environment next year. Eventually that, in turn, will be offered as a part of Business ByDesign, Kreplin said, although he wouldn&#39;t say when.Last week SAP said it would&#160;buy business intelligence vendor Business Objects&#160;for S$6.8 billion. A few days later&#160;Oracle offered to buy BEA Systems, whose software competes with SAP&#39;s NetWeaver, for $6.7 billion, but BEA called the offer too low.SAP CEO Henning Kagermann told the Financial Times of London over the weekend that SAP won&#39;t enter a bidding war for BEA, and that its strategy is still to grow its two core businesses -- applications and middleware -- organically.But he wouldn&#39;t rule out further big acquisitions in areas where SAP is not already strong. &quot;We are categorically not excluding further big acquisitions,&quot; Kagermann said, according to the Financial Times.The company also continues to snap up smaller companies. SAP has bought more than a dozen vendors in the past three years, according to IDC, including five in 2005, three in 2006, and six so far in 2007, including Yasu and Business Objects. That compares to more than 30 acquisitions for Oracle, a few of which were much larger deals.
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Orascom Telecom, a leading mobile operator in emerging markets, has raised the possibility that it could be sold as part of further industry consolidation.
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(InfoWorld) - Indian outsourcer Infosys TechnologiesÂ is expanding its facility in Brno in the Czech Republic, to boost its ability to deliver services to its European customers. The expanded facility will have a capacity of 350 seats by January, Infosys of Bangalore said on Wednesday. Infosys has about 130 staff in Brno, who deliver business process outsourcing (BPO) services such as sales order management, finance and accounts, market research and underwriting for clients in 16 European countries. Over 80 percent of the staff at Brno are hired locally, and operations are run in 13 different languages including German, French, and Spanish, Infosys said. The company is planning to also deliver IT services such as infrastructure management and package implementations such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) from Brno once the expanded facility is in operation. A number of Indian outsourcing companies including Wipro and HCL Technologies have set up operations in Europe or acquired companies there with an eye to the European market. Currently, the U.S. and U.K. account for most of the revenue of Indian outsourcing companies. Although companies in the U.K. outsource software development and business processes to India, the rest of Europe has been comparatively slower in outsourcing to India. Continental Europe accounts for only about 12 to 13 percent of India's outsourcing revenues, according to India's National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom). Infosys' revenue from Europe has grown by 60 percent year-on-year for the last three years. Europe accounted for about 25 percent of the revenue of Infosys in the last quarter, but most of that came from the U.K., according to a spokeswoman for Infosys. Besides expanding in Brno, Infosys is also setting up a development facility in Swindon in the U.K. The company also has a development center in Germany, and a center in Mauritius that is designed to address European customers because the population in Mauritius is multilingual, the spokeswoman said. Having centers in Europe helps Infosys build up capabilities in the specific European languages required by customers, and also comply with European Union regulations on data protection and privacy, which require that certain types of data should not be sent for processing outside the E.U., the spokeswoman added.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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U.S. investment firm General Atlantic Partners and other venture capital firms are in talks with Britain's Northgate Information Solutions Plc  over a possible takeover that could be worth more than 600 million pounds ($1.13 billion), a newspaper reported on Thursday.
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NEW DELHI -- Software maker Infosys Technologies Ltd. was set to become the first Indian company to join an elite Nasdaq grouping when the US stock exchange opens for trading today.
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(InfoWorld) - While consolidation can be a sign of a mature, slowing market, the M&A activity happening now, especially seen in context of this week's six-year Nasdaq Composite Index high, signals confidence in IT and prospects for growth. High-tech mergers and acquisitions hit a record number last year and the trend continues. Wednesday, Cisco Systems announcedÂ it will make a $135 million acquisition of Reactivity, a maker of XML gateway and security hardware to manage Web services. Tuesday,Â SAP said it would acquire Pilot Software, a supplier of strategy management software, while Wind River SystemsÂ saidÂ it bought FSMLabs' embedded Linux technology for real-time applications. SAP rival Software AG said Wednesday thatÂ it will be focusing on SOA products and services and plans acquisitions to broaden its product portfolio. Companies outside of traditional enterprise IT are also part of the M&A trend. Satellite radio operators Sirius Satellite RadioÂ and XM Satellite Radio Holdings, with total revenue of about $1.5 billion, announced Monday thatÂ they plan to merge. Though different sectors within IT are subject to unique market situations, globalization and trends in financing are the prime forces driving M&A, according to Eric Gebaide, managing director of Innovation Advisors, a New York investment firm. After the "general meltdown" in 2001, it's been hard for small companies, especially those under $75 million in revenue, to go public, Gebaide said. This makes them acquisition targets. "Another factor is the need to start having global solutions," Gebaide said. The globalization of technology is underscored by an Innovation Advisers study, based on using data sourced from Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's, that shows that the total percentage of U.S.-based companies participating in M&A activity continued to decline to 51.6 percent from 57.9 percent in 2005. Overall M&A transactions hit a record last year: The total number of transactions in 2006 was 4,669, exceeding 2005's total of 3,455, and the 2000 total of 2,871 deals at the peak of the dot-com boom, according to Innovations Advisers. But the total amount of dollars spent on M&A last year was less than in 2000: $295.8 billion, while the 2000 transaction total was $490.3 billion. Company valuations are more reasonable now than in 2000. Recent deals show software companies are being valued at two to four times revenue, while service companies are valued at one to two times revenue, Gebaide said. Historically, these numbers are more normal then the valuations of the dot-com boom. Meanwhile, services companies are forecasting solid revenue growth this year -- a sign that users are investing in IT, Gebaide points out. The Nasdaq close on Wednesday, at 2518.42, was the highest in six years. On Thursday it closed up again, at 2524.94. Coming right after earnings season, this is another sign that confidence is high. Although overall global revenue growth in IT is expected to be modest compared to the dot-com boom --- most estimates peg IT growth this year at about 6.5 percent -- the expansion is likely to be more sustainable than it was seven years ago. Though the IT market may not be as exuberant as it was in 2000, many investors are certainly willing to settle for more stable, rational growth. Â
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Interflora stakeholders are meeting to decide whether to accept a buyout offer from investment group 3i.
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Shares in Paris-based consultancy Capgemini and Indian software firm Infosys Technologies jump on reports of a possible merger.
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Infosys Technologies, India's second-largest software firm, has said it will be included on the Nasdaq-100 index, putting it among the biggest listed tech companies in the world.
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(InfoWorld) - French IT services company CapgeminiÂ will have more staff in India than any other country by the end of this year, as it expands its offshore services delivery from that nation. With about 19,000 staff, the company's largest operation by headcount is currently in France, but that will change as Capgemini plans to have over 19,000 staff in India by the end of this year, said Salil Parekh, executive chairman of Capgemini India on Thursday The company, which has 15,000 staff in India currently, plans to expand further in the country to employ 40,000 workers by 2010, Parekh said. The majority of the staff will work in IT services with the rest in BPO (business process outsourcing), he added. A number of large Indian and multinational IT services companies, including IBM and Accenture, have been hiring significant numbers of staff in India to take advantage of lower employment costs. Accenture, for example, said in January it will haveÂ more staff in IndiaÂ than in any other country by the end of its fiscal year on Aug. 31. The company's staff in India will increase to 35,000 in August, up by 52 percent from a year earlier, with the number of employees more than those in the U.S., which will have a little over 30,000 staff. The large-scale hiring by services companies has led to a shortage of quality staff and an increase in average salaries in India. However, Capgemini does not anticipate any obstacles to its hiring plans. The company's recruitment team is equipped to hire about 1,000 employees a month, both from university campuses and the services industry, Parekh said. "India remains cost-effective, and we haven't seen any evidence to the contrary yet," Parekh said. In addition to India's lower staff costs, the country remains attractive because it offers quality staff and Capgemini can scale operations to a level not possible in many other countries, said Parekh. By 2010, Indian staff will account for 70 percent of Capgemini's offshore services, down from 80 percent today, as the company ramps up operations in other countries like Argentina, Morocco, Romania, the Philippines, and Vietnam. China will also continue to serve as a key location. The company has about 1,000 staff in China, and will likely increase staff levels there three-fold by 2010, Parekh said. Capgemini also gained new business and staff in India through acquisitions. Last year, the company bought a 51 percent stake in Unilever India Shared Services, a finance and accounting BPO operation owned by consumer-goods maker Unilever Group. This business, which becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Capgemini by 2008, is a key center for the company's finance and accounting BPO practice, Parekh said. In February, Capgemini purchased Kanbay International, an IT services firm in Rosemont, Illinois, to boost its services delivery from India, and its business in the financial-services sector. The Kanbay acquisition brought Capgemini a number of customers in the U.S., Parekh said. As it grows in India, Capgemini plans to expand its business in areas such as infrastructure management, ERP (enterprise resource planning) development and maintenance, and non-voice BPO, Parekh said.