Changes Everywhere: Mergers
And Acquisitions
And Movements
Symantec Buys Veritas
We’ve
been thinking for some time that SOMEONE was going to buy Veritas.
It just looked too good, all that systems management software
in a period when too many big companies (IBM, HP, Sun, Oracle) were
making acquisitions to broaden their portfolios and others were
expected to act, too. Veritas
was the software storage management prize and it already been acting
to broaden its own portfolio in the direction of systems management.
What
we weren’t expecting was for Symantec to be the bridegroom for
this wedding.
On
the other hand, looking at the deal as a Monday Morning quarterback,
it makes perfect sense. Symantec
has been attempting to broaden out from being a vendor of individual
desktop anti-virus and utility solutions to being an enterprise
vendor for some time. Systems
management is utility software grown up.
The
new company will be a security giant, vying with a variety of
companies from Microsoft and EMC to HP and IBM for corporate
users’ business across the spectrum of security and data
applications.
IBM Acquires SRD
One
of the IBM SW groups that have been greatly enlarging its portfolio,
from both internal development and external acquisition and
integration has been its Information Management organization.
Under the direction of IBM GM Janet Perna, Information
Management includes such categories as database and database tools,
business intelligence, content management, and information
integration.
This
month they added SRD, a Las Vegas company specializing in identity
resolution. The
software lets organizations consider associations between
individuals and their relationships in real time, revealing patterns
that were previously not possible to discover.
It can be used with IBM’s business intelligence products as
well as in fraud detection, CRM, and in government security,
banking, insurance, and healthcare applications.
The technology is based on industry standards SQL and Java
J2EE for ease of development and deployment.
Some of SRD’s original customers – and a reason for its
Las Vegas location – are casino operators, interested in its fraud
detection qualities.
John
Slitz, the CEO of SRD was previously a marketing executive of IBM
and served as marketing vice president of Novell during the Eric
Schmidt period. He and Jeff Jonas, a founder of SRD and the inventor
of its technology will stay with the company, which will remain in
its Las Vegas location.
Oracle Gets PeopleSoft At Last
We
won’t add to the miles of text that have been spent on the ongoing
Oracle PeopleSoft saga except to sigh, at last, it’s over. Oracle has acquired PeopleSoft and is now in the process of
eliminating some 5,000 jobs (mainly non-development jobs at
PeopleSoft), as it integrates its new acquisition.
PeopleSoft customers have been promised ongoing support and
new versions, but that hasn’t stopped competitors from SAP to
Microsoft from offering migration assistance, discounts, and ongoing
comments on why they think that Oracle is unlikely to prove the
right vendor for existing PeopleSoft customers going into the
future.
I
guess we’ll see.
My
question is will Oracle be satisfied with its new toy or is this the
first of several acquisitions designed to reposition the company?
CA Opts For New Management
John
Swainson surprised both his colleagues at IBM and the software
industry with the announcement that he would be the new CEO of
Computer Associates. Certainly,
he seems like a good choice. CA
badly needs someone with the credibility and knowledge of the
enterprise software business that Swainson can bring.
And it’s well known that one of the problems of big
companies like IBM is that it’s tough to reward all the excellent
people at the top with the titles they deserve – there is, after
all, only one CEO per company.
CA
is in the process of reorganizing and restaffing and it’s way to
soon to stand in judgment. We’ll
give them some to put their new plans together and then give them a
full dress review. Till
then, we’ll wish John well in his new assignment.
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