INDUSTRY MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS
Key IT industry acquisitions in March Acquirer
Activity
Acropetal Technologies Acropetal Technologies
IT services IT services
Bottomline Technologies Payments s/w Callidus Software Capita Group Cisco Cisco eBay
Facebook GXS IBM Intel Intel
Logicalis McAfee
Morrisons
PC Connection Polycom
Prism Informatics Radian6
Research In Motion
Salesforce.com Serco
SunGard Western Digital
HQ Target India India US
Sales performance mgmt s/w US Outsourcing svcs & s/w Networking equipment Networking equipment Online auctions Social networking
Supply chain integration svcs US Systems and IT services Microprocessors Microprocessors IT services
Security s/w
Supermarket retailer IT services
Videoconferencing IT services
Social media monitoring Mobile devices
UK US US US US
US US US UK US UK US US
India US
Software-as-a-service CRM US Outsourcing svcs
Financial services s/w & svcs US Hard drive devices
US UK Activity LineBeyond Inc
OpTech Consulting Allegient Systems
Salesforce Assessments Talis (library s/w division) NewScale
Inlet Technologies GSI Commerce Snaptu
RollStream Tririga
Silicon Hive
Sysdsoft (assets) Inca Software Sentrigo
FreshDirect (stake) ValCom Technology
Accordent Technologies GOD Barcode Marketing 6Consulting
Canada tinyHippos Radian6
The Listening Company ValueLink Information Services
Salesforce.com continues its social media makeover, while Talis sells off its library management business to focus on the semantic web
“Why can’t enterprise software be more like Facebook?”
SALESFORCE.COM CEO Marc Benioff frequently asks at public appearances. Benioff, it seems, is determined to give
Salesforce.com a social media makeover. It began with Chatter, the Facebook-like collaboration tool that allow users to follow their colleagues’ activities on real-time stream of events.
In March 2011, the theme continued with
Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Radian6, a Canadian company whose web-based technology allows customers to monitor social networks to see what people are saying about their brands.
Salesforce.com said it would integrate Radian6’s technology into its CRM application, making it easier for businesses to use social media as a channel to both win new customers and support existing ones. It will also integrate with Chatter, so workers can monitor social networks as well as their colleagues’ activities in the same place. In functionality terms, the deal makes good sense, but one or two eyebrows were raised by the $326 million price tag. Privately owned by a trio of venture capital firms, Radian6 does not report its revenues, but
Salesforce.com says it expects the
www.information-age.com
Healthcare IT services Healthcare IT services
HQ US US
Vendor / spend mgmt s/w US Sales assessment svcs
US
Digital video s/w and systems US eCommerce svcs
US
Mobile phone app dev Community mgmt s/w Energy management s/w Parallel processing s/w
Israel US US
Embedded wireless systems Egypt IBM Cognos reseller Database security s/w Online grocery site IT services
Enterprise video systems Supply chain systems Social media consulting
UK US US US US
Germany UK
Mobile app dev & testing tools Canada Social media monitoring s/w Canada Telecommunications svcs Data services
UK UK
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Hard drive devices Japan Canada
Library mgmt & semantic web UK Cloud service mgmt s/w
Price
n/a n/a
$48m n/a
£18.5m n/a
$95m
$2.4bn n/a n/a n/a
Netherlands n/a n/a
£8.65m n/a
£32m
$11.6m n/a n/a n/a n/a
$326m £55.9m n/a
$4.25bn
acquisition to contribute roughly $50 million to its sales in the current financial year.
Salesforce.com is a fast-growing company, and it can justify its meagre margins to investors by telling them it is investing in its platform to enable even further growth. But if it is paying more than six times annual revenue for a start-up, they might wonder how wise an investor the company may be.
SEMANTIC FOCUS
In 2005, UK library management software vendor Talis began working on semantic web technology, in which online data and documents are ‘marked up’ with metadata describing their meaning. That led to the Talis Platform, a web-based repository that allows customers to mark up their data using the RDF semantic web standard. In March 2011, Talis sold its library management division to CAPITA, the outsourcing services and public sector software provider, for £18.5 million, plus a further £2.5 million depending on the division’s performance in the coming year. This decision will allow Talis to focus on the semantic web, and it may prove to be a canny one, as there are signs that the technology is at last taking off in the private sector. Computer maker Dell revealed in March that it is using semantic technology to map all of its business objects and processes.
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