The 451 Group: Inorganic Growth submits:
By Brenon Daly
Strictly from the view of the corporate treasurer’s office, Salary.com (SLRY) got paid while on Wall Street. The compensation management vendor went public at a valuation that – in rather short order – would never again be available to the company. The outsized chunk of money that it raised in its early 2007 IPO, which came right before the window for new offerings slammed shut, has helped fund its money-burning operations since then.
Trader Mark submits:
Aside from the David Hasselhoff roast, this might be the funniest two minutes of video I’ve seen in the past six months.
It is especially ironic because (a) in my personal life I’ve tried to short Salesforce.com (CRM) over the past decade [not in the past few years] due to valuation and always lost, and (b) I currently am long the name and have it placed in the "valuation does not matter" wing of the portfolio, where of course it is doing great… despite a nonsense valuation!
The 451 Group: Inorganic Growth submits:
By Brenon Daly
The tech industry has another bidding war. No, we’re not talking about the parrying over 3PAR (PAR) or even the private equity shops slugging it out over Phoenix Technologies (PTEC), a company that had largely been consigned to the corporate ash heap. Instead, we’re talking about the latest M&A moves by the virtuosos of virtualization, Citrix Systems (CTXS) and VMware (VMW).
Kris Tuttle submits:
Today Kenexa (KNXA) announced the planned purchase via tender of Salary.com (SLRY).
On the plus side, the cloud technology space is begging for consolidation as companies find themselves using scores of vendors across their many business areas and processes. Companies are trying to broaden their offerings and companies are trying to consolidate their many vendors.
Jeffrey M. Kaplan submits:
Years ago, I considered the week leading into Labor Day as the final hurrah of the summer and tried to preserve it for an end of season vacation to cap off the warm weather months in New England. Then my kids became school age and schools started kicking off before the holiday weekend. (Don’t get me started on this silly practice.)
Now, the tech industry is also making a habit of getting back into stride for the new Fall season before the dog days of August are behind us. One of the important annual venues for kicking off the new season of activity is VMworld.
Ravi Nagarajan submits:
This is the sixth in a series of articles covering “unpopular” larger companies. Benjamin Graham believed that such companies may present opportunities for enterprising investors. We discussed the Graham approach in more detail in a recent article.
At the turn of the century, few observers could have possibly foreseen that Microsoft (MSFT) would become a favorite bargain purchase for value investors in 2010. The dot com boom was in the process of peaking and any company even vaguely associated with software or technology traded at stratospheric multiples of earnings.
Silicon Graphics International Corp (SGI)
F4Q2010 Earnings Call Transcript
August 31, 2010 5:00 pm ET
The 451 Group: Inorganic Growth submits:
By Ben Kolada
Just a month after Greenplum was swallowed by EMC for an estimated $400m, fellow data-warehousing startup Kickfire was sold for probably one one-hundreth of that amount to Teradata (TDC). Why did the two data-warehousing vendors – both venture-backed, Silicon Valley startups targeting the same market – see divergent outcomes? The answer to that multimillion-dollar question lies in each company’s targeted markets.
Dennis Byron submits:
Just as with presidential politics in the US, there are a lot of ways to find out who the leaders are. But a straw poll is not the best way.
I make that link because there is an article up on it.toolbox.com that purports to draw a distinction between Gartner’s Magic-Quadrant-type subjective (some would say "bought") analysis of enterprise software and a more statistically sound analysis. In this case, the subject is ERP enterprise software but the problem with the it.toolbox article’s premise holds for any type of information technology,
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