acquisition

Surgient Partners With Capgemini, IPO or Acquisition Imminent?

August 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

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Capgemini, provider of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, announced today that Capgemini Financial Services USA has signed an alliance agreement with Surgient.

“By partnering with Surgient, we can now offer clients access to environment configurations through a centrally managed, shared service, eliminating manual provisioning work and delivering much higher utilization of expensive pre-production infrastructure. The results expected are shorter response times, reduced costs and ultimately, better business support,” said Charlie Li, vice president of the Quality Management and Testing Practice at Capgemini’s Financial Services Strategic Business Unit. “Delivering quality applications is closely tied to performance and reputation — and with this innovative virtualization solution, we can help global firms become more agile and better focus on their frontier application strategy in meeting their diverse and growing business needs.”

Meanwhile, VMblog points to a month old article on Austin Business Journal about Surgient, speculating about a future IPO or acquisition.

Surgient apparently hit its stride this year after tweaking its sales approach last summer, allowing companies to buy licenses for its virtual lab management software. President and CEO Tim Lucas says the growing popularity of virtualization gave Surgient the boost and a chance to double its revenue this year.

Lucas expects revenue to exceed $20 million for 2008. And the company has recently signed 20 large customer deals, including German tech companies SAP AG and Siemans AG. “We’re profitable now and cash flow is funding the growth of the business,” he says.

A report by The 451 Group cites HP and Borland Software as possible buyers of the Austin company. Lucas agrees that acquisition is a possibility but says an initial public offering could be considered as well.

Surgient

Symantec Acquires nSuite Technologies, Moves Into Endpoint Virtualization Management

August 5, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

NetworkWorld is reporting that Symantec has agreed to acquire nSuite Technologies, a small firm specializing in virtualization solutions for the healthcare industry, for an undisclosed amount in cash. Symantec aims to build out its portfolio of virtualization security and management technologies.

nSuite makes software called PrivacyShell Virtual Workspace Management, which is primarily used by hospitals for secure desktop management on behalf of physicians and medical staff. The nSuite software works to create a container around an individual’s authorized applications and data. When a user is authenticated, the user’s applications and data can quickly be ported to the Windows-based desktop where the individual is working, and later removed. PrivacyShell Virtual Workspace Management balances centralized control with the flexibility needed to provide tailored user environments. It leverages virtualization and authentication technologies to optimize the way hospitals deliver and manage end user workspaces.

After the nSuite acquisition is completed, which is expected this month, Symantec anticipates integrating the nSuite software with its Altiris SVS and AppStream management consoles in the future. It will announce product updates at ManageFusion, a hands-on lab and training event held in various cities worldwide.

nSuite Technologies

There We Go Again: EMC Shares Rise On Acquisition Rumors

July 31, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

This is one rumor that just keeps coming back: Reuters is reporting that EMC shares rose as much as 6.3 percent yesterday on market speculation that the world’s largest maker of corporate storage equipment could be acquired. The company stills holds a majority stake in virtualization juggernaut VMware.

Shares of EMC rose as high as $14.92 in trade on the New York Stock Exchange, before retreating to $14.75 in afternoon trading.

EMC spokesman Dave Farmer declined to comment, saying the company never responds to market rumors or speculation. Pacific Growth Equities analyst Kaushik Roy said the most likely company to be interested in buying EMC would be Cisco Systems. Last May, we reported on rumors of a possible merger.

A popular phrase says there is fire where there is smoke, but we’re getting a bit skeptical. These rumors have been floating for years now, and although a Cisco-EMC combo would seem like a pretty logical combination, you can ask yourself if it why a deal would be in the works now, when a merger or full acquisition should have already happened if both companies and their shareholders agreed.

EMC Corporation

Cisco Systems

Double-Take Software Picks Up emBoot for $10 Million in Cash

July 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Double-Take Software announced (PDF) today the acquisition of emBoot, experts in network booting technology. emBoot network boot technologies allow organizations to easily assign and re-assign computing workloads to any available Windows or Linux physical servers or desktops or any virtual machine in their environment.

The acquisition follows Double-Take Software’s development of full system protection and recovery technologies as well as the acquisition of CDP recovery with TimeData as key components of the company’s Dynamic Infrastructure Strategy that aims to optimize, protect, monitor and recover workloads on any resource, anywhere and to any point in time.

The technology acquired with emBoot allows separation of the operating system, applications and data associated with a workload from the hardware it runs on. IT organizations can now move those workloads around in a matter of minutes whether it is because a disaster has occurred, a data center is moving, the company has decided to virtualize its infrastructure or an application needs more capacity.

Moving entire workloads around independent of the underlying physical or virtual hardware they are running on has been painfully complex and time consuming for IT administrators. By storing workloads on networked storage resources and making them available to physical and virtual servers on-demand, Double-Take’s new solutions now make it is easy for IT administrators to move critical applications and data according to their value and desired service level agreements and to optimize the use of test, production and disaster recovery computing resources.

emBoot’s technology is based on the growing iSCSI storage standard (Internet Small Computer System Interface). Double-Take’s new offering will provide two key capabilities for customers in support of movement to a more dynamic IT infrastructures:

Using any iSCSI compliant storage solution, those customers will be able to create bootable images of their production workloads and use a centralized workload management console to assign those workloads to any available physical or virtual machines in their environment.
Optionally, companies will be able to build a software-based iSCSI Storage Area Network (SAN) using standard server hardware and storage using included iSCSI Target software.

IT professionals will be able to quickly create an IP SAN in minutes using commodity server hardware and disks they may already have. The iSCSI-based network booting features will make it easy to migrate workloads to new hardware, to virtual machines or back based on changing demands.

The company acquired emBoot for a total cash purchase price of $10 million.

Double-Take Software

[Source: Hypervoria]

Breaking: VMware To Acquire B-hive Networks

May 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware today announced (PDF) it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire B-hive Networks, a privately-held application performance management software company with headquarters in San Mateo, California and principal R&D facilities in Herzliya, Israel.

With this acquisition, VMware intends to leverage the B-hive team and technology to offer proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running within VMware virtual machines – on both servers and desktops.

In addition, B-hive’s R&D facility and team will form the core of VMware’s new development center in Israel.
The terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed during the third quarter of 2008, subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed.

“As customers increasingly standardize on the VMware platform to run their business-critical applications, it is critical for virtual infrastructure administrators to ensure the performance of applications from an end-user’s perspective,” said Stephen Herrod, Ph.D., chief technology officer, VMware. “B-hive’s agentless, virtual appliance-based approach goes beyond traditional monitoring approaches to proactively manage application performance to specified levels. These capabilities, combined with VMware’s proven virtualization platform, can allow our customers to consistently deliver on their application service level objectives. For example, if B-hive identifies degradation in application response time, it can remediate the problem by automatically instructing VMware Infrastructure to adjust the resources allocated to the application or provision an additional virtual machine with an additional instance of the application. In conjunction with VMware’s automated IT service delivery and business continuity capabilities, B-Hive’s service level management capabilities further deliver on the vision of an automated, always-on, virtual datacenter.”

Founded in 2005, B-hive has a solution that gives infrastructure groups visibility into application performance in virtual environments such as end-user transaction response time, virtual machine utilization and cross-virtual machine dependencies. According to the press release, the B-hive solution is designed to measure performance across multi-tier or service-oriented architecture applications that are distributed across clusters of ESX hypervisors and virtual machines.

Its flagship product, B-hive Conductor, monitors end-user performance and issues service level reports, but can also proactively resolve application performance problems by automatically triggering actions such as dynamically allocating more resources, migrating the application to a different server, provisioning additional VMs, changing transaction routing, or system re-boots. B-hive Conductor is agent-less, packaged as a virtual appliance and provides open, standards-based interfaces.

[Source: Globes]

IBM / Cisco Eyeing Acquisition of Citrix?

April 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Good thing we have a ‘Rumors’ category to assign to this type of speculations: several news outlets are running a story about Citrix possibly being an acquisition target for Cisco or IBM.

A late April fool, or plausible?

Nasdaq traders bid up Citrix stock Tuesday on takeover rumors that have either IBM or Cisco purchasing the application delivery vendor.

Citrix’s stock went from a low of $30.60 Tuesday to a high of $33.75. Rumors of Citrix being purchased fueled the higher trading prices, says Jeffrey Gaggin, an enterprise software analyst for Avian Securities. Gaggin cautions that he has no way of knowing whether the rumors hold any truth.

But it would make sense for IBM or Cisco to purchase Citrix because Citrix’s acquisition of XenSource last year made it a strong player in the virtualization market, Gaggin says.

TheStreet adds the following financial analysis:

But even at what seems like a bargain price, Citrix isn’t cheap: With a market cap of $6 billion and expected revenue growth of 17% to $1.63 billion this year, the stock could command a fair premium, taking the potential buyout price north of $7 billion, assuming a premium of 15%.

IDC analyst Stephen Elliot sees some rationale for IBM and Cisco to go after Citrix. IBM could make the XenSource hypervisor its preferred brand and could better compete against VMware and Microsoft. This would run counter to H-P’s strategy, which has professed to being indifferent on the hypervisor question, Elliot said.

On Citrix’s side, IBM would lend “a lot more credibility” to the XenSource virtualization platform and provide development resources. “There are a lot of opportunities,” Elliot said.

[Source: ChannelWeb]