Microsoft bids $1.2 billion for Norway's Fast
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Microsoft Corp  has bid 19 crowns  per share for Norwegian Internet search software firm Fast  Search & Transfer , valuing the company at about $1.2  billion, the companies said on Tuesday.
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NEW YORK: SBC Communications, the No. 2 US telecoms company, has agreed to pay US$400mil to Microsoft Corp for software that can deliver television via high-speed data lines, the New York Times reported yesterday.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Rapidly rising Internet star Facebook Inc. has sold a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, spurning a competing offer from online search leader Google Inc.
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SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK  - Microsoft Corp offered to buy Yahoo Inc for $44.6 billion, in a bold bid to transform two ailing Internet businesses into a worthy competitor for market leader Google Inc.
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1,23 mld dlr per acquisire societa' software norvegese
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Microsoft buys a $240m stake in the social networking site Facebook, beating rival Google
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Microsoft continues to make acquisitions to boost its online services and advertising strategy. Early Wednesday, the company said it snapped up Multimap, a U.K. company that provides online mapping for Europe, North America, and Australia.The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal. Multimap, based in London, will act as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, and employees will be integrated into the company&#39;s Virtual Earth and Search teams in its Online Services Group (OSG), Microsoft said.Multimap has staff in the United Kingdom, the&#160;United States, and Australia, and Microsoft said it is not sure yet if those employees will stay where they are or move to other offices. The Multimap office in the United Kingdom will remain open and employees will continue business as usual there, the company added.In addition to providing online maps, Multimap also offers location-based services to find local businesses, hotels, and restaurants, as well as business services to provide mapping, proximity searching, routing, aerial images with map overlay, and local information to business Web sites.Microsoft has been looking for ways to boost the value and, thus revenue, of OSG, which oversees MSN and Windows Live. Microsoft hopes to leverage these properties to sell online advertising and generate revenue in this area to compete with Google.Last week, the company said it&#160;purchased Seattle startup WebFives, formerly Vizrea, which provides a Web-based file-sharing service for Internet and mobile video, photos, audio, and blogs. Microsoft also made its largest acquisition to date to boost the revenue of OSG with its&#160;purchase of aQuantive digital advertising and marketing services firm for $6 billion&#160;earlier this year.In addition to making acquisitions, Microsoft also has been partnering with online content and service providers to offer online advertising. On Monday, the company announced a deal to be the&#160;exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising for CNBC.com, a deal similar to ones it already has&#160;in place with Facebook globally&#160;and&#160;Digg in the United States.All of these efforts are part of a now two-year push to add services and content for its online brands to boost the revenue of its Online Services Business segment. To date, Wall Street analysts have said they are unimpressed by the growth of this segment, and Microsoft&#39;s moves seem to be evidence the company is getting that message loud and clear.Revenue from online services grew only 8.7 percent from $2.3 million to $2.5 million for Microsoft&#39;s fiscal year 2007, ended June 30. For the company&#39;s first-quarter 2008, during which the aQuantive deal closed, revenue from OSG was better, up 25 percent year over year. But even Microsoft chief financial officer Chris Liddell acknowledged when first-quarter earnings were revealed that Microsoft would like to see more growth from this business segment.
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SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK  - Microsoft Corp   offered to buy Yahoo Inc  for $44.6 billion, in a bold  bid to transform two ailing Internet businesses into a worthy  competitor for market leader Google Inc .
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Microsoft Corp  has offered to buy Norwegian Internet-search software firm Fast Search & Transfer  for 19 crowns per share, valuing it at about $1.2 billion, the companies said on Tuesday.
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Rapidly rising Internet star Facebook Inc. has sold a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, spurning a competing offer from online search leader Google Inc.
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Nokia has offered to buy Trolltech, the Norwegian developer of a widely used application framework, for $153 million.
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Microsoft Corp  beat out rival  Google Inc  on Wednesday in a battle to invest in  socializing Web site Facebook, agreeing to pay $240 million for  a roughly 1.6 percent stake in the Web phenomenon and expand a  deal to sell advertising.
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Mobile telephone giant Nokia Corp. on Monday announced a deal to take over Oslo software company Trolltech ASA with a cash offer that values the Norwegian company at nearly $153 million.
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Microsoft Corp  said on Monday that it controls 92.6 percent of Norwegian search software firm Fast Search &amp; Transfer , and extended its takeover offer to Thursday from a Friday deadline.
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Microsoft plans on Tuesday to unveil what could be an industry-changing effort in application modeling and SOA with its "Oslo" project, which could significantly change the equation in the Windows application deployment space.Part of Oslo involves delivering a unified platform integrating services and modeling, Microsoft said. But instead of models describing the application, models are the applications themselves.Oslo is a codename for a set of technical investments that will be delivered in the next major versions of Microsoft's platform products, said Steven Martin, director of product management in the company's Connected Systems division. These products include Visual Studio, System Center, BizTalk Server, BizTalk Services, and the .Net Framework. Beta releases of Oslo technology are due in 2008."Oslo is a set of technologies that we think will help take model-driven design mainstream," Martin said.With Oslo, Microsoft is making investments aligned with a vision to simplify the effort needed to build, deploy, and manage composite applications within and across organizations. The effort builds on model-driven and service-enabled principles and extends SOA beyond the firewall.Release dates of Oslo-driven products have not been set. "This will make existing products we have better. Oslo doesn't have any new products. It's being injected into existing projects," Martin said.The products include:* Microsoft .Net Framework "4," which will further enable model-driven development within the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web services platform and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF).* Visual Studio "10," to follow the upcoming Visual 2008 package. Version 10 focuses on application lifecycle management with tools for model-driven design of distributed applications.* BizTalk Server "6," which will continue to offer technology for distributed SOA and BPM and include capabilities for composite applications.* BizTalk Services "1," which provides BizTalk capabilities within the cloud, will feature Web-based services for hosting composite applications that cross organizational boundaries. Advanced messaging, identity, and workflow will be featured.* Metadata repositories will be aligned across server and tools products, including System Center "5," Visual Studio "10," and BizTalk Server "6." Each will utilize repository technology for managing, versioning, and deployment models."System Center will be able to grab an application from the repository and deploy it easily without any intermediate steps," said Martin. Also, Microsoft anticipates that WCF and WWF will collapse into a single technology, he said.Analysts at Gartner called Oslo "ambitious.""It's pretty ambitious, and as a matter of fact, I believe we're not going to see anything concrete until well into 2008 and possibly 2009," said analyst Massimo Pezzini, vice president of the application platform strategies group at Gartner.Featured in Oslo are three fundamental components: a modeling environment, a business process server, including a significant evolution of BizTalk Server, and a new deployment model, Pezzini said.Oslo makes sense on paper, he said. "So far, there are only ideas and plans and prototypes, etc., so we have to see," said Pezzini.He added that he senses Oslo is mostly focused on enabling Microsoft Dynamics applications as work as enterprise applications via a SaaS (software as a service) model.Microsoft will need industry backing for Oslo to succeed, said analyst Nick Gall, vice president at Gartner."It's doubtful that it could really have the kind of major impact that I'm sure Microsoft and all of us would like to see unless they get the industry behind the approach," Gall said. Microsoft said it is evaluating whether to submit Oslo to an industry standards body and whether to seek industry-wide use of Oslo.SOA is related to Oslo because a services piece is offered, in which tooling and integration are improved with the .Net Framework. Also, there will be better connectivity to BizTalk Services, which provides Web-based services for messaging, identity, and workflow.Modeling, meanwhile, is important to application development, said Martin. Microsoft sees stumbling blocks with modeling as it is now: that modeling represents the application or business logic at a specific time, thus providing only a snapshot, and that models exist in isolation."Anytime you're looking at a model, you're only looking at a piece of the application because each of those models is separate," Martin said.Solving these problems involves taking modeling mainstream, he said. "Today, modeling is really only something that a select group of users and a select group of companies can do," said Martin.Whether a user is designing, developing, or deploying applications, Oslo "will simplify your job," Martin stressed.Microsoft's approach is not about Unified Modeling Language (UML), a technology of which Microsoft has not been a big supporter. But UML is a great example of a modeling language and Microsoft wants to unify its approach to modeling in general, Martin said.A modeling language is part of Oslo, but Microsoft is building a modeling language, a set of tools, and a unified repository. Microsoft's modeling language provides a way to unify existing modeling languages, similar to Microsoft's Common Language Runtime for application development.Oslo expands beyond UML to cover deployment and management, which UML does not address, Pezzini said.Key to Microsoft's effort is a unified metadata repository. Users get a view of a model being pulled out of this repository, Martin said. Deployment and policy information, workflow, and rules are maintained in one location, to prevent loss of data useful when deploying and managing an application or writing business rules against it."We think this will allow a much broader set of users to collaborate on applications," Martin said. "We think the process of building applications will be more efficient when anybody can see the application holistically."If Microsoft is successful with its plan to have application components automatically deployed based on models in the repository, it will be "a very huge benefit for the IT operations," said Pezzini.Microsoft is making available tools and guidance to take advantage of "real-world SOA." Featured are SOA resources from Microsoft and industry partners. Meanwhile, the new Microsoft SOA and Business Process Solution Center offers resources such as patterns and practices based on customer implementations.Microsoft's approach to SOA is to start out with a business problem and build services. The company will continue to work with partners such as AmberPoint and SOA Software to help round out SOA offerings, said Martin.Also at the conference, Microsoft plans to demonstrate an upcoming technology preview of BizTalk Services, with additional support for interoperability, Web 2.0 services, identity standards, and workflow in the cloud.The Oslo vision will be the subject of a keynote by Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, at the Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference in Redmond, Wash., on Tuesday morning. Microsoft's SOA strategy will be covered in the presentation.
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In November, Microsoft representatives began to comment that the enterprise search market had reached &quot;a tipping point&quot;; on Tuesday, the company backed up that claim with a bundle of cash,&#160;offering to buy enterprise search software company Fast Search And Transfer (FAST)&#160;for 6.6 billion Norwegian kroner ($1.2 billion).Analysts and other search firms said Tuesday the move means that enterprise search has truly arrived as a software category, and also that further consolidation will likely occur in the space, creating opportunities for niche players.No immediate stumbling blocks appear to be in the way of Microsoft buying FAST, which is based in Oslo. The company&#39;s board has recommended that shareholders accept the offer, which represents a premium of 42 percent over FAST&#39;s share price at close of business on Friday. The companies expect the deal to close in the second quarter.&quot;It&#39;s a great bit of technology acquisition for Microsoft,&quot; said Mike Davis, senior analyst with Ovum Group.Microsoft is buying FAST as a way to break into the high-end enterprise search market and also offer customers a full range of search products. In November, it&#160;introduced Search Server 2008 and Search Server Express 2008. Microsoft is pitching Search Server 2008 as a cheap entry into enterprise search, while the Express version is free for single installations.FAST&#39;s rivals include Autonomy -- which recently acquired Meridio and Zantaz -- and Endeca.Davis said it would not surprise him if a rival vendor, such as Oracle, follows up Microsoft&#39;s move with a high-end search acquisition of its own.He and another analyst suggested Tuesday that Microsoft has not only scooped up a solid company but got a bargain in the process.Guy Creese, an analyst with Burton Group, argued on his blog that FAST&#39;s recent financial troubles, which led to layoffs last year, probably helped drive down its price tag.&quot;While the operational wheels fell off, the FAST technology is strong at its core,&quot; added Creese, who called the pending deal &quot;a huge coup&quot; for Microsoft.But cost was not the driving factor in Microsoft&#39;s choice of FAST over other high-end search vendors in the space, according to Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft&#39;s business division.Raikes insisted during a conference call Tuesday afternoon that FAST simply had the best people and technology.The executive didn&#39;t shed much light on the negotiation process that led up to Tuesday&#39;s announcement, but did indicate one aspect of Redmond&#39;s immediate plans, assuming the deal closes as expected.&quot;I can simply say that part of what we will look at ... will be to marry the strengths we have with our software-plus-services model with what FAST is doing.&quot;Raikes said FAST&#39;s technological strengths, such as its scalability and domain-specific searching capabilities, proved attractive to Microsoft.He declined to say whether the FAST acquisition will have any impact on Microsoft&#39;s Internet search products, but did not rule out the possibility.Raikes asserted that Microsoft will emerge as the go-to vendor for enterprise search customers once the deal is finalized.&quot;We think most customers are recognizing that they don&#39;t want their enterprise search to be fragmented across the organization,&quot; he said. &quot;Customers are going to want to choose a search strategy and the offerings from one vendor.&quot;Despite that view, Tuesday&#39;s news had smaller, specialized enterprise search vendors, such as Brainware, brimming with confidence, at least publicly.&quot;We&#39;re excited because it really heightens the importance of enterprise search applications,&quot; said Brainware&#39;s CFO and general counsel, James Zubok. &quot;But the biggest reason we&#39;re excited is that technology like ours is highly complementary [to broader offerings],&quot; he said.Brainware claims its search software can return useful results even when search terms are misspelled, or from illegible documents.Robert Tennant, CEO of Recommind, a search company that focuses on e-discovery, said Microsoft&#39;s move foretells a changing role for search. &quot;We believe that search is really important to the next generation of all software,&quot; he said. &quot;It provides information access with context. We believe that you&#39;ll see search ... woven within the fabric of other applications.&quot;Tennant also predicted it will be &quot;many years&quot; before Microsoft will produce specialized, vertical search products like those offered by Recommind.Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivisimo, which makes the Velocity Search Platform for enterprises, echoed the notion that Microsoft&#39;s investment is good for the market overall. &quot;I think we will have, eventually, one less competitor and many more partners,&quot; he said.But he also argued that the real beneficiaries of such consolidation could be companies like his own. &quot;I think there&#39;s a lot of uncertainty, and in this environment enterprise customers are going to look for predictability.&quot;Microsoft&#39;s stock was down $1.14 in late trading Tuesday to $33.47, on a bad day overall for the market.IDG News Service&#39;s Peter Sayer contributed to this report.
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Microsoft&#39;s $1.2 billion acquisition bid for Oslo-based Fast Search and Transfer and a dour report on Amazon marked the new year&#39;s first full trading week in the United States, as technology company share prices continued to slide.