Tag: acquisition

Samsung browses Blackberry

Posted on January 15, 2015 by - News

Samsung Browses BlackberryA breaking story  today entails Samsung’s approach to Blackberry Ltd. in talks to buy the embattled smartphone maker for a reported $7.5 billion – Samsung is apparently buffing up their intellectual property portfolio to stave off a continuing onslaught by Apple Inc. The news sent Blackberry’s stock price up 30 percent.

Samsung offered a trading range of $13.25 to $15.49 per share, a premium of 38 percent to 60 percent over Blackberry’s current trading price according to Reuters. What’s not clear is the depth of the deal and what it might entail – there’s speculation that the deal has several versions that are currently under discussion. That the story was leaked and by who leaves one wondering whether this is a negotiation tactic or just business as usual.

BlackBerry announced in November a high-profile security partnership with Samsung. The partnership aims to wed BlackBerry’s security platform with the South Korean company’s own security software for Galaxy devices.

Blackberry has been struggling to regain lost momentum in a competitively crowded market. Samsung’s smartphone business is experiencing losses from lower price Chinese competitors which now are affecting their semiconductor division – reports of bargain prices for NAND-Flash smartphone memory devices are widely circulated.

Techeye Take

Analyzing Samsung’s needs, wants and desires indicate the company is obsessing over security – key to the company’s entry into the electronic wallet market space. Secure communications is and will continue to be a premier element of the continued evolution of the smartphone market – even governments demand it.

The question remains, will this set off a bidding war for Blackberry?..,

Update

Both Samsung and Blackberry have denied that they are in talks for Samsung to takeover the Canadian company.

“BlackBerry has not engaged in discussions with Samsung with respect to any possible offer to purchase BlackBerry,” the company said in a statement Wednesday.

Post Script

Where there’s smoke there’s generally fire – stay tuned…,

Citrix buys intelligent storage firm

Posted on January 12, 2015 by - News

Citrix HQPrivately owned Sanbolic has been bought by Citrix for an undisclosed amount.
Sanbolic is effectively a company specialising in storage management, whether that be using SSD, flash or hard drives in NAS, SAN, server side or cloud deployments.
The company offers load balancing, application availability and high performance management.
Citrix said it will build the capabilities of Sanbolic into its XenDesktop, XenApp and ZenMobile product suites.
Citrix said the acquisition means that its customers can use virtual apps and VDI across their businesses, guaranteeing workload service level agreements.
It said over 200 of its customers already use Sanbolic to allow availability and clustering of XenApp and XenDesktop.
Momchil Michailov, the CEO of Sanbolic, said that it has 13 years of experience with enterprise customers using server side and converged storage management.
Citrix senior VP Geir Ramleth said the complexities of infrastructure hinder VDI and application delivery deployments. The acquisition of Sanbolic will help Citrix manage the problem head on.  Employees of Sanbolic will now work for Citrix.

IBM buys Xtify

Posted on October 3, 2013 by - News

ibm-officeIBM has bought cloud based mobile messaging company Xtify for an undisclosed amount.

Big Blue hopes the buy will help it further push its capabilities in mobile towards digital advertising, as well as helping shape its public sector offerings, through cloud services.

Xtify, IBM promises, will provide campaign creation, personalised content, and real time analytics for mobile devices and browsers. It was built to retain mobile app users and site visitors. Campaign management also tells users when new promos or content are available.

IBM veep for digital marketing, Kevin Bishop, pointed out there’s profit to be had in selling technology to companies trying to figure out mobile. “The acquisition of Xtify provides new ways for our clients to foster a direct, one-to-one communication channel with their customers,” Bishop said.

Big Blue wheeled out some figures of its own to highlight just how important mobile strategy can be, claiming 73 percent of those surveyed in an IBM Business Value study “experienced measurable results” from mobile initiatives. It cites companies like Disney Stores and 20th Century Fox as among those using Xtify push notifications on mobile to boost sales.

Vodafone to buy Kabel Deutschland for $10bn

Posted on June 24, 2013 by - News

vodafoneVodafone has agreed a $10 billion deal to pick up German’s largest cable operator, Kabel Deutschland.

The acquisition comes after the company buying out Cable & Wireless Worldwide, signifying an increased emphasis towards cabel services.

Vodafone has said the $110 per share deal will help it offer more competitive TV, fixed line and broadband services to mobile customers, Reuters reports, in one of its most important markets, a significant change of direction for the company that turns it into a quadruple play company.

American billionaire John Malone’s Liberty Global also had its crosshairs on Kabel Deutschland, but it is thought it was outbid by Vodafone.

Liberty Global is planning a push into the European market which it entered earlier this year when it acquired Virgin Media.

Senior analyst at CCS Insight, Kester Mann, believes the acquisition is both “offensive and defensive”. While it will allow it to attack the biggest European market with cable and TV services, it also shores up the company’s defenses from other cable operators like Liberty Global, Deutsche Telekom, and of course, Kabel Deutschland.

“The move reflects the severity of the threat from cable providers offering faster and lower-cost services,” Mann said.

By diversifying the services offered, with this acquisition Vodafone will be more likely to keep customers from straying to multiple providers – and offer benefits for those that use its services across the board.

Across the pond, Mann thinks that if Vodafone is offered a respectable amount for its stake in Verizon Wireless, leaving the US market entirely would be worth consideration. The acquisition of Kabel, as well as an increased focus on the European markets, could give Vodafone ample opportunity to improve EU networks.

Emeka Obiodu, an Ovum analyst, said the buy instantly transforms Vodafone into the biggest pay TV provider in the country – and the second largest fixed broadband provider.

This is the largest Vodafone M&A since the 2007 India acquisition. According to Obiodu, this indicates that Vodafone’s domestic European market is “sickly and requires a good dose of medicine to jolt it back to life”.

Ovum predicts that mobile telecoms revenues in Germany are subject to downwards pressures, so the acquisition is to diversify Vodafone’s product line up in Europe for additional revenue. “The implication,” Obiodu said, “is that if Vodafone becomes Germany’s largest pay TV provider, why would it not want to do the same in the UK, Spain, Italy or the Netherlands?”

Salesforce gobbles up Clipboard

Posted on May 10, 2013 by - News

pacpacSalesforce has taken over Clipboard but is refusing to spit it out, marking an end to the company.

The customer relationship company bought the service, which allows users to save and share content for a reported figure in the ball park of $10 – $20 million, in a bid to get its foot into the social enterprise arena.

However the company doesn’t seem to want to continue with the service, which was launched two years. In a blog post Clipboard told its users: “We have some bittersweet news.

“We are extremely happy to announce that salesforce.com has signed an agreement to acquire Clipboard, allowing us to pursue our mission of saving and sharing the Web on a much larger scale.”

It said the service would be discontinued on June 30, 2013.

Clipboard’s CEO Gary Flake will be vice president of engineering at Salesforce.com. The company said that its core engineering and design team will join the cloud computing company to work at its Seattle office and report to Flake.

Users of Clipboard can still preserve their personal data in an archive from which the clips and boards can be viewed offline.

HMV to be aquired by Hilco

Posted on April 5, 2013 by - Gossip, News

hmv-administrationTroubled HMV has grabbed a lifeline from Hilco buying it out.

The store, which went into administration earlier this year, putting thousands of jobs at risk, has been rescued by specialist restructuring firm Hilco in what is believed to be a £50 million deal.

Hilco now has 132 HMV stores, and nine branches of the Fopp chain. It is expected up to 2,500 jobs could be saved.

The chain is expected to be run by a combination of HMV and newly-appointed Hilco executives, while suppliers are also rumoured to have gone running back to the company offering new terms and given a positive nod to the deal.

HMV could be in safer hands with Hilco already having experience with the brand in Canada, which it bought two years ago.

The purchase rumours emerged a after Jessops was saved by Peter Jones.

Fortinet to purchase Coyote Point Systems

Posted on March 25, 2013 by - News

fortinet-logoFortinet has agreed to purchase Coyote Point Systems.

The network security company has entered into a definitive merger agreement to acquire the privately-held provider of enterprise-class application delivery (ADC), load balancing and acceleration services, which it claims will complement its offerings.

Fortinet also claims that the merger will help it and its channel partners to accelerate and further deliver on services to their clients.

Under the agreement no immediate changes will be made to Coyote Point products, customer support and channel programs or any existing ADC products that Fortinet markets, the company said.

However, as new products become available things could change.

According to industry forecasts, the annual end-user spending for Application Delivery Controllers will exceed $2 billion for 2013.

John Grady, research manager at IDC said as more enterprises turned to the cloud, data centres would require higher performance products coupled with strong security.

He said that, as a result, security and application delivery “must work hand-in-hand” to ensure quality of service while still preventing attacks.

“This acquisition places Fortinet in a unique position to deliver on both aspects in one [service].” he added.

 

 

 

BSkyB O2 Telefonica deal is “significant”

Posted on March 1, 2013 by - News

Hands across the waterThe acquisition of UK Telefonica’s O2 broadband by BSkyB is “significant” for both customers and the industry, an expert has said.

The comments by Andrew Ferguson, editor at ThinkBroadband, come as BSkyB announced it would buy its rival’s 500,000 customer accounts for £180 million, including the O2 and BE consumer broadband and home phone businesses. It said the by gobbling up its rival it would be able to provide advantages of scale for its home communications business.

Currently BSkyB has around 3.6 million customers, who pay for the company’s TV, broadband and telephone services

The deal is due to complete by the end of April, subject to regulatory approval. Once it has been signed off, all O2 and BE broadband customers will be switched to BskyB’s all-fibre network.

“The acquisition is significant both for the customers involved who have elected to join a partial LLU service, rather than the fully unbundled options sold by TalkTalk and Sky and for the industry overall, as we now have a new second largest retail broadband provider,” Mr Ferguson told ChannelEye.

“For the industry as a whole the sale of the O2/Be customers means that the last significant partial LLU service (where telephone is left on the WLR platform and only the broadband is ran over the providers own hardware) is vanishing, at least in terms of the consumer retail arena. This means that the vast majority of the unbundled services in the UK actually have both their telephone and broadband service provided over a Sky or TalkTalk MSAN (MSAN being a DSLAM providing multiple services).”

However, he added that the acquisition would also remove the Be retail network “which while  has remained small was well loved by its generally loyal customers”.

The company was also the provider that pushed ADSL2+ onto the UK market and also gave the people control over the various parameters of the ADSL2+ service, meaning customers could tweak the performance of their line to be the best in terms of line speed and latency.

However, this could be both good and bad news for both smaller providers.

“The Sky LLU platform tends to favour stability at the expense of a small amount of connection speed and latency, this means we are expecting to see a fair number of Be customers migrating to other smaller providers,” Mr Ferguson said.

“In terms of the regulatory position, it means Ofcom is now really regulating just five major players which control 94.4 percent of the retail sector in the UK.

“The problem with this dominance by a handful of major players is that it will be increasingly difficult for the small providers who service the pro-sumer and SME sector to get their voice heard,” he added.