Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

We have some very big news today at Pownce. We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart, the company behind such great blogging software as Movable Type, TypePad and Vox. We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all. We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products. Mike and I have joined Six Apart as part of their engineering team and we’re looking forward to being a part of the talented group that has created amazing tools for blogging and publishing. Source

Yes, Microhoo buzz is back, even if it never really went away. This time it was London's The Sunday Times stirring the pot, reporting that Microsoft will be making a $20 billion play for Yahoo!'s search business. BoomTown's Kara Swisher quickly shot holes into the story, and she has the Rolodex to confirm or debunk nearly all of the Microhoo chatter. The deal didn't make sense. The alleged new management team didn't make sense. The price -- significantly more than all of Yahoo! is worth -- certainly didn't add up. However, convincingly putting out one fire doesn't mean that another one isn't about to be rekindled somewhere else. Microhoo chatter will never die, because, quite frankly, it makes too much sense. Fool

Well, according to the Fools and also VMware's own staff, this Transitive was a great firm for a potential acquisition. Read on... You blew it, VMware (NYSE: VMW ) . Or maybe you didn't. But whatever the behind-the-scenes machinations, virtualization toolmaker Transitive is now in IBM 's (NYSE: IBM ) hands. (Big Blue acquired the firm last week for an undisclosed sum, Computerworld reports.) Transitive should have been yours, VMware. Here's what your team said about the company in a blog post from May, ahead of the digital VMworld.com conference: Transitive does something quite interesting -- they can dynamically translate from one machine architecture to another. This can be quite complementary to VMware and our flavor of virtualization. You can, for instance, take your apps compiled for the Solaris/SPARC platform, move them to your new x86 box running ESX and Linux and go to town. IBM's interest is easy to understand. Transitive's code is baked i...

Well these are rather grim news from a security standpoint. VMware's Determina's acquisition and its rather dubious Bluelane acquisition, where no one apparantly made any profit, are putting VMware under solid pressure. I really don't know if all this is because of the restructuring within VMware or merely that some other shift is going to happen. VMware surely is on some rather contradictory paths given that it is under tremendous pressure from the security community to provide some solid answers around Security and Compliance. VMware has made progress around the PCI DSS participation but strategically it is on the losing side. Bluelane's acquisition has left a lot of people with some bitter taste in their mouths. Speaking to a Bluelane employee, who wished anonymity, there was a lot at play since Feb 2008. during Cannes VMworld, some sort of deal was struck to buy Bluelane, VMware too placed its bets but didn't end up committing till the very end. Bluelane languis...

ARMONK, NY - 18 Nov 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it plans to acquire Transitive Corporation, a privately held technology company headquartered in Los Gatos, California, with a research and development team in Manchester, United Kingdom. Financial terms were not disclosed. Transitive is a leader in cross-platform virtualization and a pioneer in developing technologies that allow applications written for one type of microprocessor and operating system to run on multiple platforms -- with little or no modification. As a result, the technology will enable customers to consolidate their Linux-based applications onto the IBM systems that make the most sense for their business needs. Transitive's breakthrough technology has earned the company 48 worldwide patents and numerous industry awards. This acquisition is part of IBM's strategy to help clients optimize the efficiency and productivity of their computing infrastructure and improve the utilization of the servers that ru...

Mike Clesceri, vice president of marketing for Laurus Technologies in Itasca, Ill., said Symantec acquisitions also make things easier for clients. "Our customers don't want to manage a lot of vendors," he said. Clesceri also said that Symantec legitimizes the companies it acquires -- which makes those acquired products and services easier for partners to sell. VARs typically don't want to stake their reputations on niche technologies that have a lot of buzz but uncertain futures, but the Symantec name allays a lot of those concerns, Klein said. "Being an evangelist is not the way to go," he said. When Symantec combined its own channel program with that of Veritas, it created new processes and procedures that drew the ire of partners -- and Symantec didn't fully fix those problems until last year. Symantec has since learned from those mistakes, Klein said. "Veritas wasn't the best integration out there, but they've seemingly done a better jo...

Mike Arington reporting... Web hosting provider Rackspace has acquired JungleDisk, an online backup service, and Virtual Machine provider Slicehost in a deal designed to help bolster its offerings against top competitor Amazon Web Services. The announced acquisition price is $11.5 million in cash and stock, with the possibility of up to an additional $16.5 million depending on performance. Jungle Disk is a file storage and backup service that up until now has relied on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). With the new announcement the company says that it will begin offering the service using Rackspace’s similar service Cloud Files, but will continue to support storage using Amazon with plans to support even more services in the future. Slicehost offers developers “slices” in Xen-based virtual servers that are much cheaper and generally easier to use than a traditional dedicated server. The service is a direct competitor to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Source

Norman , the exec who quit last month did say something about "an exciting news". Obviously that makes more sense now as our friend Greg too left the boat. A typical acquisition means, employees cash out and find other things, if they do not wish to continue with the merged parties. Catbird would have been my obvious choice but anyways, we'll hear about that sooner or later. BlueLane had some good stuff going, its just that I didn't hear them sell as much. Although the knickknacks have long since been packed up from VMworld earlier this month, one rumor continues to make the rounds. Several sources have indicated that VMware, the host of VMworld in Las Vegas, has acquired startup Blue Lane Technologies for about $15m. The two companies have been technology partners for more than a year, with Blue Lane’s VirtualShield integrated with VMware’s VirtualCenter. Security and virtualization in general have been major concerns for VMware. To help shore up the hypervisor and ...

HP today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire LeftHand Networks Inc., a leading provider of storage virtualization and iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions. LeftHand Networks' solutions enable midsize companies and remote offices or branches of large corporations to easily and cost-effectively protect critical business data. HP has agreed to purchase LeftHand Networks for $360 million in cash, subject to certain purchase price adjustments. Founded in 1999, LeftHand Networks is privately held and headquartered in Boulder, Colo. It has 215 employees and more than 500 resellers and distributors worldwide. The company has more than 11,000 installations across 3,000 different customers. A pioneer of iSCSI SAN technology, LeftHand Networks delivers scalable storage software on industry-standard hardware that supports existing technology environments. LeftHand Networks' portfolio extends HP virtualization solutions to the midmarket with software that runs on...

Barclays will pay $330 million for two Lehman Brothers data centers it is acquiring as part of a larger deal to purchase assets of the bankrupt investment bank. The two data centers are both located in New Jersey, in Piscataway and Cranford. The valuation emerged from a bankruptcy court hearing in which the purchase price for the real estate components of the deal were adjusted to $1.29 billion, including $960 million for Lehman’s New York headquarters and $330 million for the data centers. Lehman’s original estimate valued its headquarters at $1.02 billion but an appraisal this week valued it at $900 million. Source

I have been toying and observing the markets for quite a while. Back in 2003, I ran a poll calling them mega-megers. HP, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft etc were involved in the poll. I did get quite a few responses then. First lets me tell you why this may happen. Simple as market is consolidating aggression. Several firms are doing the same things in different ways. Differentiation is there but over-capacitization and saturation of innovation limits are reached. Innovation Trap : Many firms are at the brink of the proverbial S-curve (as Clayton explained in his book: Innovator's Dilemma). Many firms need to shelve products that resemble and work on newer products. Innovation budgets cannot be in Billions of dollars anymore. Things change, so will the strategy. Call it CrowdInnovation , which is taking some form today, will still need to be contained as some IP Container will need to be locked and sealed as firms/Nations/Communities would want to retin their identities via product portfoli...

HCL Technologies' acquisition strategy is three fold; smaller tuck-in buyouts are targeted towards purchasing firms that bring intellectual property (IP) to the company. The company sees these buyouts are in the range of $100 million and less. Some of the recent acquisitions like Capital Stream, Liberata Financial Services and Control Point Solutions fall in this category. The IT giant is also scouting for Japan and Germany as part of its second level of inorganic growth strategy to expand its geographic reach. Apart from these, HCL's plan includes big buyouts that it calls 'transformation acquisitions'. "Next two years will be crucial for HCL Technologies because of our proactive research and search for transformation acquisitions. We are active in all three zones of acquisitions and we have a good balance sheet to fund our plans," said Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Technologies. The company has cash reserves of $580 million. When asked about the impact of the re...

Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's largest maker of personal computers, plans to eliminate about 24,600 jobs over three years as part of its integration of Electronic Data Systems Corp. The reduction amounts to about 7.5 percent of the workforce, Hewlett-Packard said today in a statement. It expects to incur $1.7 billion in costs this quarter for the cuts. Hewlett-Packard and EDS have about 320,000 employees combined. Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd paid $13.2 billion for EDS to more than double revenue at its services group, which manages corporate computer networks and data centers. Combined, the companies' service units had more than $38 billion in sales last year. The cuts are the biggest undertaken by Hurd, who eliminated 15,000 positions to revive profit after becoming as CEO in 2005. ``A headcount reduction over a multiyear period makes sense,'' said Michael Cuggino, who manages about $3.8 billion at Pacific Heights Asset Management in San Francisco, including 3...

Today is Sunday and having three calls means a lot. I will talk quickly about Citrix's offerings and how Microsoft can benefit from the Cloud plans with Citrix. People are stuck with their bounded awareness around the virtualization discussion, Citrix has a lot more to offer than that. As internet use increases (22% since last year!) and as applications get delivered from the web, Citrix can play a big role in Microsoft's overall strategy of GDM-aware web-ready Cloud Battle plan! Obviously there are also challenges around the virtualization discussion and there is no need buy the firm out merely for offerings that already work in tandem with Microsoft's own software, but liek I said there is a much bigger picture out there.

NEW DELHI: Amidst news of pink slips at Wipro, Infosys Technologies Ltd has some good news for tech geeks. The country’s second-largest software-services company plans to recruit 25,000 people this year. Infosys may also recruit about 1,000 workers in China in the next two to three years, according to CEO Senapathy Gopalakrishnan. The company also has plans for “selective” acquisitions in the pipeline. It plans to add capacity in China, Eastern Europe and Latin America, he added at a conference in Singapore. “We’re looking at consulting and geographical expansion in Europe and the emerging markets like India and the Middle East,” Gopalakrishnan said. “We want to be very selective in acquisitions.” The plans aim at narrowing Tata Consultancy Services Ltd’s lead and boost revenue in Europe as customers in the US delay orders. Source

“With this acquisition, Red Hat has clearly positioned itself as a competitor within the Virtual Desktop market," said Michael Rose, Research Analyst at IDC. "KVM not only represents a competent platform for hosting virtual desktops and other workloads, but protocols such as SPICE will increase the performance that users can expect to experience from their server-based computing environments, making the platform viable for a larger set of users.” “Red Hat is a global leader in innovative technologies and has collaborated enthusiastically with us since the very beginning,” said Benny Schnaider, CEO at Qumranet. “I, along with the entire Qumranet team, am pleased to be joining Red Hat to create market-leading virtualization solutions. Qumranet's technologies, when combined with Red Hat's business, product and channel capabilities, will be well-positioned to provide virtualization solutions that really meet customers' business needs – for the server and the desktop. ...

SAN FRANCISCO - August 20, 2008 - Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced the acquisition of InStranet, the leading provider of knowledge management technology for business to consumer (B2C) call centers. The acquisition brings powerful knowledge base Dimensions technology to Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support, enabling customers and call center agents around the world to quickly find the answer they need, the first time. The addition of this game-changing technology and approximately 350,000 global call center agents aggressively accelerates the momentum of Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support in the growing customer service and support market, which is currently estimated at $3.4 billion by Gartner (Gartner, Market Trends: CRM Software, Worldwide, 2007-2012, March 31, 2008). "I'd like to welcome the InStranet team to salesforce.com," said Marc Be...

San Jose, California-based Cisco has bought its way into a number of application software-dominated markets, including cloud computing, social networking, collaboration, and now email. With cloud computing and social networking blurring the lines between networking hardware, application software, and services, a number of traditional IT gear companies led by Cisco have moved into the software application business. And for good reason: The emergence of cloud computing is changing the economics of networking hardware and software markets, according to analysts. Cloud computing is corporate computing that does not reside at users' premises. Instead the computing resources are owned and managed by a service provider and businesses access the resources via the Internet. Customers pay only for the level of service they need so they can dial up or dial down the service level based on the current needs of their businesses. So where companies once bought hardware devices, they are now payin...

As firms check their bank balances and continue to pursue their data center dream, VMware remains a very interesting acquisition for firms who have a larger dream. The larger dream is the stake in the $100 Bn Cloud Computing market. Stock-market site theflyonthewall.com says the spike in VMware ( VMW) shares today reflects speculation that Cisco (CSCO) might want to increase its stake in the company. Cisco currently owns 6.9% of VMW’s Class A shares, or about 1.5% of the company’s stock overall. Cisco acquired its stake prior to VMW’s IPO . Intel (INTC) also bought a pre-IPO stake in the company that it continues to hold. VMW today is up $1.14, or 3.1%, to $38.12. Barron's Reporting

With Infosys buying in UK (although that may not have anything directly to do with the euro weakening, it was the pound that took the pounding that prompted Infosys to go strike). Will the increasingly euro lead to Asia companies going after SI and other Consulting firms within the Euro such as CapGemini etc? The Ifo index had been expected to fall this month, but recent falls in oil prices and the euro – which has dropped about 8 per cent since its mid-July peak against the dollar – had been expected to boost optimism about the future. The latest weak data sent warning signals to the European Central Bank, said Julian Callow at Barclays Capital. “Even Europe's biggest economy, which had in recent quarters been supporting overall euro area growth, is stalling - providing further evidence that the euro area will require an easing in monetary conditions,” he said. The ECB publishes revised eurozone forecasts next week but with inflation in the 15-country region still double its targe...