Briefly Noted:
Sybase Acquires Xcellenet
New Rulings In The SCO Cases
SCO has been back in court (again).
In its case with Red Hat, the Delaware judge has scheduled a
delay until the Utah case (vs. IBM) is heard.
That could be quite a while.
In Germany, SCO has lost.
They can’t sue anyone for anything.
Nor can they claim that Linux infringes on UNIX unless and
until they can prove it. This
could be useful precedent for other cases wending their way through
the courts.
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Lindows
We like gutsy little Lindows because
it’s so much fun to watch them succeed in markets bigger,
theoretically wiser companies have written off.
They saw the possibility for a desktop Linux market when
others thought it was impossible or very far away and they correctly
guessed it was all about ease of implementation, lower price, and
access to software.
Of course, there’s always a price for
success. In Lindows’
case the ultimate price is going to be that they are attracting a
lot of bigger, stronger players into their market.
They were probably prepared for that.
What they hadn’t counted on was
Microsoft’s very aggressive legal battle over their name.
Microsoft says customers will be confused and think Lindows
is Windows. Microsoft
has been less than fully successful in is preliminary U.S. court
battles and has been delaying the next step – because it could
lead to their loosing protection of the Windows name.
But in the meantime, they’ve successfully sued Lindows and
been granted relief in a number of European courts.
So on April 14, Lindows will change its
name on its web site (because European customers can access it) and
in Europe – at least until the suits are settled.
In the meantime, the very aggressive
little company has opened another marketing front, starting to sell
Spanish-language versions of Linux systems on both desktops and
laptops in the U.S. at 58 locations. More info on Athena and Spartan at www.pcclub.com.
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IBM’s Dev Mukherjee Joins Microsoft
You may have noticed that there’s a
fairly steady movement every year of mid-level and higher managers
between systems and software competitors in our industry.
Never mind the sinister conspiracy theories – most of
it’s just about good people looking for their next step up the
ladder and big companies looking for really great talent.
Inevitably, some of those matches are outside the company you
currently work for.
So we note with interest and good wishes
that Dev Mukherjee, most recently in charge of the Hosted Services
Strategy for IBM will be showing up in Redmond later this month, as
General Manager of Marketing for Microsoft’s Windows Server
Systems.
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The Acquisition Bonanza Continues
No slowdown here.
We continue to be amazed at how many companies there are to
buy – but perhaps less so at who’s doing the buying.
This week, one surprise, in that IBM
didn’t buy another middleware company – or another specialty
consultancy – but rather an Indian Call Center – Daksh
e-Services – a big one, with 6,000 employees, at an estimated
price of $160 million (obviously small change for an IBM, but
probably just about right for a company in a hot market that grossed
$60 million last year).
IBM already has about 6,000 employees in
India, serving both the Indian market, and for outsourcing purposes,
and planned to add about 2,000 this year.
(They’ve balanced this with the information that they’ll
hire about 5,000 employees in the U.S. this year; outsourcing has
become a somewhat controversial issue for U.S. companies.)
IBM apparently intends to grow its new
acquisition in the direction of its more complex work, such as
providing financial transactions services and other transformation
processing.
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Sybase Acquires Xcellenet
Sybase has acquired mobile device
management company XcelleNet, providing it with leadership across
all of the mobile categories as part of its Unwire the Enterprise
strategy. The company
will be integrated into Sybase's iAnywhere Solutions subsidiary.
This acquisition will give Sybase
leading products in mobile database, mobile middleware and mobile
and remote device management categories as well mobile data security
solutions.
XcelleNet was purchased from Francisco
Partners, for a net purchase price of approximately $95.2 million,
all cash. The
transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2004. .
Sybase expects to gain 2,200 global
customers through this acquisition, as well as new and expanded
relationships with partners and independent software vendors (ISVs)
including HP and Microsoft.
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