How much longer for tech's acquisition addiction?
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Everybody's seemingly for sale these days, but some companies may be trying to compensate for a lost ability to innovate.
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This recent study finds that IT executives are challenged by timeliness, relevancy and sheer access to data when trying to measure the value of application development investments. Only 4% have visibility into application maintenance spending. Are you accounting for 100% of your AD value? Review this report by IDG Research & MKS today.
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Google leads the charge of indexing information outside the web as it turns to TV. Also: Video-game maker Take Two buys a chunk of Sega & hellip;.  Google hiring practices raise eyebrows and speculations on future projects & hellip;. and more.
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The thirst to acquire new neat stuff never seems to go away.
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First, let me gloat.  I bought $49,761 of AAPL on Oct 8.  My investment is now worth $54,933. That's 10.5 percent growth in less than a month. Hah! I bought the stock because I was going to buy everything Apple sold from now until forever. The last product I had yet to purchase was the company's stock. That was a mistake. The beauty of owning the stock is that you can use the increase in value to fund the hardware habit. So far so good.  My very dear friend Sylvia Paull bought an iPod a month ago. In a blog post today she calls it a gateway drug. Having read early reviews of the new operating system, she's ready to buy a 24 inch iMac.  I recognize the signs.  It's like a virus I tell you.
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Falls just shy of the magic number -- is it too much yet?
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By Balas, Janet L  Sometimes I feel that I am becoming a technology curmudgeon. I don't just jump on the bandwagon at each announcement of a new technology; instead I wait to see if it has any advantages besides being new.
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By Paul Gromosiak  I must admit that I am a bit of a Luddite, but I have accepted my fair share of technology in my daily life. What concerns me is how rapidly technology seems to be taking complete control of our lives. Once our servant, I think it is now our master.
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The United Network Equipment Dealer's Association, a group of used-equipment resellers, wants to change corporate tech-buying perceptions about the aftermarket for Cisco and other network hardware products.  This week UNEDA released a study of its own members that could further its efforts. The study of more than 128 pre-owned network equipment dealers worldwide found 95 percent said they can deliver used network gear to customers within one or two days, which the group says is a contrast to the typical 10-week delivery cycle of OEM vendors such as Cisco and Nortel.
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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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Direct sales aren't working the same magic they once did for the PC maker. Can it now cash in at retail?
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This looks like the *real* beginning of the end for Itanium. The workstation market is two-fold. There are those that use workstations for computing tasks (scientific, visualization, whatever) and those that
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People once bought just-on-the-market gadgets because they wanted the innovative functionality those gadgets provided. Now, it&#8217;s common to buy a device and then immediately try to figure out how to change or enhance its capabilities.
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How much longer can investors count on Walgreen's stellar numbers?
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By Conrad de Aenlle  It takes more than great technology to make a great technology company. Years after the millennium bubble burst, the lesson is still being learned - the easy way if you own stock inGoogle and the hard way if your money is in Yahoo.
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Is the chip giant bargain-shopping or just wasting money?
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I'm guilty.  I'm a Software Pirate!  Not just one or two copies of DOS but probably hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of software.  Growing up my parents didn't have much money.  Certainly not hundred of thousands of dollars for me to blow on software.  I was curious and had a passion for computers that I couldn't control.  I simply wanted to learn and couldn't afford to pay for software.  Luckily I did this when I was a kid so hopefully I won't be prosecuted.  I also believe that everything I did was ethical.  I didn't take any money out of the hands of the software industry and I've already contributed WAY more to the industry than a few hundred thousand in software sales.  This is th ...