Will 2010 be a year of acquisitions?

January 8, 2010  |  Tech Worth Talking About  |  1 Comments

It’s only the first week of 2010 and the technology acquisition space is H-O-T. What an exciting week.  With the second day of CES off and rolling plus a slew of exciting technology acquisitions announced this week, it’s why I love this business.

Amongst the most exciting are:

Cisco acquired network security start up Rohati Systems

BMC acquired Phurnace Software (the third acquisition in six months)

Oracle acquired Silver Creek Systems

Seesmic acquired social media syndication site Ping.fm

Dot Hill acquired Cloverleaf and rumored to take on 3PAR

And in more rumors, VMware could acquire Zimbra. (Random, I know.)

Mashable today debunked the myth that AOL was going to be an acquisition and Google sweetened their offer for local On2 Technologies acquisition pending vote in February.

This is an exciting time for technology companies, to rise out of a recession and demonstrate a strong M&A strategy right out of the gates.  If we look deeper into these deals, you’ll see what areas of technology are rising in importance.  For example, managing apps better in cloud and virtual environments made Phurnace look attractive to BMC.  BMC was itself already rumored to be a 2010 possible M&A target. Dot Hill’s acquisition of Cloverleaf and rumor to take 3PAR next points to the need for storage infrastructure in virtualized environments.

In the world of social media, nothing is getting more complicated for users than managing multiple social networks.  And as big brand names begin to embrace social media more and more, it will be particularly important to be as productive as possible. Seesmic, which makes access apps for Facebook and Twitter will now have a syndication tool on its side.

I think we’ll see more social media and IT management acquisitions happen in 2010 – it’s like that saying, “when you can’t build, buy.”

Am I a Mac or PC?

December 2, 2009  |  Advice for local companies, Tech Worth Talking About  |  3 Comments

Clearly, I’m a Mac.

But for the past 15 years, I was a PC.

I never even thought of switching to a Mac until I went out on my own and my husband convinced me to convert. Yes, I was dazzled by how beautiful of a machine it is and the iPhone was of course the smartphone of choice once I left my BlackBerry behind. It took awhile to learn the new OS, but once I got the hang of it, we added our own Apple network and backup system, and starting managing multiple accounts – I became a devoted fan.

Start up companies often contemplate which direction to go and what the major issues are with each. This post is not to convince you to change over to Mac – which by the way as an average price point of $2500/pp.

Quite the contrary. Steve Jobs may be a god and I hear he runs a tight ship over there in Cupertino. If you want to read something great, learn how Jobs starting shopping the iPhone and told many wireless service providers to go jump in a lake.

While we‚Äôre all dazzled by the Apple Store and convenience of iTunes, we have to remember that Apple doesn’t make many products — six Macs, variety of iPods, two iPhones, and a debatable-even-worth-it, Apple TV. Oh, plus accessories. A recent Forrester analyst made this point: ‚ÄúIf Apple tried to build a car, it would take it three years just to design the dashboard. Now it would be an extraordinary dashboard, but Job’s fabled micro-management would stall the delivery of a finished automobile.‚Äù

There are limitations for BtoB companies if they’re thinking of turning into a Mac shop. And this isn’t even about cost. The biggest problems with piecemeal approaches to your IT infrastructure is that at some point these systems won’t work flawlessly together. We even have problems working with a “Mac-friendly” Brother printer, consistently resetting itself because of difficulty working with our network and the Mac OS. That’s ok for us small shops, but for larger companies a printer or network breakdown can mean major loss in productivity.

As I mentioned, I was dazzled by the branding and simplicity of the machine. I look at Dell and HP laptops today and think ‚Äì ‚Äúthose bulky things.‚Äù And the PC product lines are trying harder and harder to be like Apple ‚Äì take the Dell Adamo line for example. At the heart of it, Apple designs for the consumer and the creative. There don‚Äôt have complex systems or IT problems. I also know developers love their Macs, but let’s face it — even internally at large enterprises the dev team works their own rules.

Jobs runs a highly specialized, super focused business on design and speed. It’s why he packages so many software elements into each Mac – he knows it will work and work the way he wants it to. That might always be the best fit for an enterprise.