Showing posts with label 2007. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2007. Show all posts

Friday, December 14, 2007

Top 10 stories of 2007: Age of realignment

Source: InfoWorld

2007 was a big year for IT, and we look back at the biggest stories, from the iPhone to Windows Vista to the growth of consolidation in the software market

This year has been a time of realignment and redefinition as Apple launched its second zeitgeist-defining product of the new century, Dell and Intel battled to regain their former dominance, the software sector consolidated, Google rallied industry heavyweights around a common mobile device platform, and major vendors scrambled to embrace social networking. These, not necessarily in order of importance, are the IDG News Service picks for the top 10 stories of the year:

Software consolidation: The big fish get bigger
While globalization has fueled IT mergers and acquisitions for several years, consolidation in 2007 fundamentally reshaped the software industry. Facing saturated markets and nimble, innovative rivals, SAP, IBM and Oracle have snapped up competitors and partners in order to expand customer lists and acquire expertise and technology in hot areas like business intelligence and software as a service. Some of the bigger deals this year included: SAP's $6.8 billion acquisition of Business Objects, IBM's $5 billion deal for Cognos, and Oracle's $3 billion buyout of Hyperion. As usual, Oracle provided the most drama with a $6.7 billion offer for BEA, which was successfully rebuffed -- at least, for now. While innovative entrepreneurs are bound to continue bringing startups to market, it's getting harder for medium-size vendors to refuse deals with the giants.

Dell reinvents itself
For years, Dell remained the world's number-one vendor in the cutthroat PC business by exercising unmatched control over logistics and sticking to its direct-sales model. But by 2006, HP unseated Dell as global PC leader. Dell seemed to lose its way as rivals adopted better supply-chain management techniques, and inquiries into accounting practices forced the company to delay earnings reports. In January, founder Michael Dell took back the CEO reins and the company expanded offerings for the enterprise, increased services for medium-size businesses, and departed from its traditional business model to start selling products in stores. Dell also plans to expand in growth markets globally. Early results are promising: Dell had record revenue growth for the third quarter, fueled by an increase in worldwide notebook sales.

The iPhone: Apple redefines a market, again
Some companies reinvent themselves. Apple, under the guidance of the mercurial Steve Jobs, reinvents markets. After redefining IT in the 1970s with the Apple II and then pushing the envelope in personal computing with the Mac in the 1980s, Apple stalled when its business model ended up giving the company a loyal -- but tiny -- user base. But the company started to ride high in 2001 after launching the iPod, and in 2006 breathed new life into the Mac by moving to Intel-architecture chips. Before the iPhone, there were many multifunction phones. But amid a June launch that had people lined up at stores from Tokyo to San Francisco, Apple proved its design mojo still works. The iPhone combination of cool design, phone functions, Internet connectivity, and multimedia features has raised the bar for any manufacturer of connected handheld devices. Apple's revenue and share price have never looked better.

The rise of the botnets: Software as a service ... for criminals
What do U.S. presidential candidate Ron Paul, the "Storm Worm," e-card invitations, and the country of Estonia have in common? They've all been associated with botnets -- groups of compromised computers, often numbering thousands or tens of thousands, that are remotely controlled by criminals. The scammers use the so-called "zombie machines" to pitch hot stocks or male-enhancement products, or simply to do damage, as when Estonian government Web sites were crippled in April. Botnets are now getting so sophisticated that they're being offered as SaaS (software as a service) products to scammers. That's what happened in November, when nearly 200 million spam messages supporting Paul for president were sent without permission from the campaign.

OLPC and the era of cheap laptops
The grand -- some might say grandiose -- plan of former MIT Media Lab chief Nick Negroponte to sell as many as 150 million $100 laptops by 2009, getting them to poor children around the world, this year looked more like a pipe dream. Production of the laptops, under the aegis of the One Laptop Per Child project, was delayed, promised government deals fell through, and the price of the XO "hundred-dollar laptops" turned out to be closer to $200. Current plans call for production of only about 300,000 laptops this year. But Negroponte's dream may not be permanently deferred, just co-opted by commercial vendors, which simultaneously face a slowdown in growth in mature markets and increasing pressure to cut prices and power consumption. For example, Intel has sold $200 Classmate laptops in Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Libya, and in November, Everex announced it would sell Linux-based PCs with x86 processors for less than $300.

Google's "Gphone" morphs into Android
Google's anticipated "Gphone" announcement in November was both less, and more, than what had been long expected. For almost a year, rumors circulated that the online search giant was going to offer an actual phone. Google and its partners ended up unveiling not a device but a Linux-based open software platform, called Android, upon which mobile phones can be built. The idea is that a common platform will allow developers to build applications that can run on devices from many manufacturers on many networks, reducing complexity for both developers and consumers alike. Skeptics were quick to point out that Android might instead add complexity as developers will have to build applications for it as well as existing platforms. Android-based phones, due out in mid-2008, will face entrenched platforms such as Symbian and Windows Mobile.

Viacom vs. Google: User-generated content hits speed bump
When media giant Viacom sued Google in March for $1 billion, citing unauthorized uploading of TV and movie clips to Google's YouTube site, it underscored a fundamental problem for user-generated content on the Web: How do sites ensure that submissions meet certain standards or are, in fact, legal? The dilemma is a problem of scale: Viacom charged that as of March, YouTube users uploaded nearly 160,000 video clips for which it owned copyrights and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. One answer to the problem may be systems like Video Identification, which Google unveiled in October. It matches user-uploaded clips with a repository of legitimate videos, allowing the company to flag and remove, if necessary, copyright-infringing material. With the cost of legal wrangling and monitoring systems growing, it is clear that user-generated content is not truly "free" after all.

Facebook controversy: Social networking hits prime time
Facebook's decision in October to sell a $240 million minority stake to Microsoft, which had been battling Google for the prize, solidified social networking's central place in technology. The stake values Facebook at $15 billion total even before it has truly figured out how to monetize its traffic. While social networking has been a growing trend for years, Facebook offers interactive features and a development platform that has Google, the social networking site MySpace, and others playing catch-up. But the problem of monetization has been compounded by privacy issues. The ability of Facebook's Beacon ad system to track user actions has whipped up a controversy that won't go away soon.

Barcelona: AMD's Waterloo?
AMD was hoping that the launch of its Barcelona quad-core chips would press a perceived technology advantage it had built up against archrival Intel beginning in 2003, the year the smaller company launched Opteron chips for 64-bit applications. As Intel stumbled, AMD gained market share. But Intel cut prices and launched new 64-bit and quad-core processors. The release of Barcelona, delayed until September, may end up being a counterpunch that was too little, too late. Dragged down by shrinking margins and costs from last year's acquisition of ATI, AMD in October announced its fourth-straight quarter of losses and this month said it has delayed volume shipments of Barcelona to fine-tune the chip.

Vista hoopla fizzles: Death of the big-bang upgrade?
Microsoft launched the consumer version of Vista in January after making it available to businesses last November. Microsoft officials hyped it as the biggest launch in the company's history and now say adoption is on a normal trajectory for new operating systems. In November it said that 88 million copies have been sold. But a range of market-analysis reports show that users, especially corporate professionals, have concerns about stability and compatibility and hesitate to upgrade. Though Bill Gates has said that big marketing events will always accompany major product releases, Vista may yet prove to be the last of the old-school upgrades in a world where users, on their own timetable, download incremental updates.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Top 6 Cisco acquisitions of 2007

.....; what it should buy in 2008

Source: NetworkWorld

Cisco made 11 acquisitions this year culminating in 126 purchases since Cisco's birth. It made three more acquisitions than it did last year, when it spent a measly $256 million buying ho-hum technologies. This year was different, not only in the sheer dollar size of some acquisitions, but also because of the breadth of technologies it acquired. From social networks to broadband wireless, we take a look at what Cisco Subnet has named Cisco's top-six acquisitions of 2007. We also look at what Cisco should have bought and what Cisco may be looking to buy in 2008.

Jon Oltsik, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, writing in Cnet, says Securent, which Cisco acquired for $100 million, gives Cisco application-layer street cred. Oltsik explains that the Securent deal, which closed late November, could be good for Cisco because it provides a set of role-based rules that enforce authorization policies across multiple heterogeneous applications on the back end.

Securent is privately held and based in Mountain View, Calif. The company's distributed policy platform lets enterprises administer, enforce, and audit access to data, communications, and applications in heterogeneous IT application environments. Securent's software will enable Cisco customers to protect application data regardless of vendor, platform, or operating system while still allowing access to content that workers need.

No. 5: Latigent, a maker of call center reporting tools

Cisco boosted its call center offering by buying up Latigent, a vendor of call center reporting tools. Cisco plans to integrate Latigent's products with its unified customer contact center systems. The integrated products will help businesses better manage voice, Web, e-mail and video interactions with their customers, Cisco said when the purchase was announced. The company declined to reveal the terms of the deal.

One of the interesting aspects of the deal was a blog post by Jason Kolb Latigent CTO, giving insight into what it's like to be acquired by Cisco (see here and more recently, here).

No. 4: IronPort helps to breathe life into Cisco's Self Defending Network

Eric Ogren, a security analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group gave Cisco's $830 million acquisition in January of IronPort the thumbs up, saying that "IronPort positions Cisco to finally implement intelligence that can breathe life into its 'Self Defending Network.'" But even with the inclusion of IronPort, there are still some holes in SDN - and in particular, IronPort's data-leakage capabilities, which appear to be missing, as Network World's Jim Duffy reported back in September.

At the time of the acquisition announcement, pundits were also unclear as to what Cisco might do with IronPort's core antispam and Web-filtering technologies beyond continuing to market existing IronPort appliances without disruptions. Also, Cisco and Trend Micro in August extended their three-year-old collaboration to now include Trend Micro's content security features into Cisco routers. Observers wondered where in the picture is the content security of IronPort.

No. 3: Navini Networks puts Cisco in the WiMAX

Cisco in October bought itself into the WiMAX business with its $330 million purchase of Navini Networks. After weeks of speculation over which WiMAX base station vendor Cisco would buy, came news that Cisco would pocket Navini Networks for $330 million.

The company offers Cisco an instant product line of both WiMAX base stations (for both fixed and mobile wireless) as well as client radios. Navini has about 70 customers worlwide, though many of them have deployed the company's initial run of "pre-WiMAX" radio products.

But will Cisco be able to repeat with WiMAX the success it reaped in the Wi-Fi WLAN market after acquiring (for a whopping $450 million) wireless switch vendor Airespace?

No. 2: Cisco wants to be hip in social networking

You couldn't sit in any keynote address that Cisco CEO John Chambers has given this year without hearing the phrases "social networking" and "Web 2.0" roll off his tongue - numerous times. This year, Cisco opened its wallet to buy up a few small social networking developers to boost its enterprise collaboration strategy. Little is known about how exactly Cisco will be using the social networking technologies it has acquired except for a few reports about Eos, a platform that about 40 developers in San Francisco are building which is expected to air sometime next year. Cisco developers describe Eos as a "software platform that serves as an entertainment operating system enabling consumers to have an interactive, personalized, community-based entertainment experience, WHILE simplifying the administrative experience for content owners in engaging audiences, and distributing and monetizing their content." Yeah, that makes everything crystal clear!


Cisco is expecting to be using bits of technology from its acquisitions in Eos. First up in February Cisco bought Five Across, which sells a software platform called Connect Community Builder. The platform includes a variety of features that enterprises can build into their Web presence for their customers, such as individual profile pages, friend lists, discussions, and posting of blogs, videos and podcasts.

Then in March it bought the selected assets of Utah Street Networks, a seven-person San Francisco company that operates Tribe.net, which hosts the online community of the hippie desert festival Burning Man. The best quote about the acquisition goes to Marc Andreessen, who is involved with a social networking start-up called Ning: "The idea that Cisco is going to be a force in social networking is about as plausible as Ning being a force in optical switches," said Andreessen.

With Cisco happy to open its checkbook for all things social networking, some pundits suggested that it should buy Plaxo, though we wondered if business users were still spooked by the security issues.

No. 1: WebEx for $3.2 billion

Cisco's biggest acquisition of the year was also the biggest head scratcher for observers. What would (as one pundit wrote) a rather boring hardware maker want with a sexy Web conferencing service? After shelling out $3.2 billion for WebEx in March, it's still unclear how exactly Cisco will leverage the software company, aside from making its technology part of its unified communications strategy. Last week, Cisco announced that Cisco Senior Vice President Don Proctor, would lead the company's Software Group, which would be charged with creating Cisco's strategy for its network, software, management, unified communications and collaboration technologies. Hopefully the picture will be clearer in the not-too-distant future.

In the meantime, since purchasing a firm for $3.2 billion, all Cisco is seen to be doing at the moment is offering users a 14-day trial period for the Web conferencing software. But it's sure fun to read back at what the pundits said about the acquisition back in March (see the comments here).

What Cisco should have bought, and what it will buy in the future

Just a month after the annoucement of its planned $3.2 billion purchase of WebEx, Cisco's chief shopper, a.k.a. Cisco Vice President Ned Hopper (at the tender age of 39) told BusinessWeek that more acquisitions of the WebEx size would be on its way. While Cisco's acquisitions in previous years were focused on carrier and enterprise networks, now its remit goes broader into the consumer, Web 2.0 and unified communications markets.

2007 was not short of speculation on whether Cisco was in line to buy this that and the other, while other pundits questioned Cisco's decision to buy what it did. Here are some of stories that got people chatting:

What's next on Cisco's shopping list?

With the market still buzzing from Cisco's purchase of WebEx, TheStreet.com mused on what could be next on Cisco's shopping list. Perhaps the Web site named Akamai, for its Web optimization technologies, and J2 Global Communications, which provides Internet faxing and conference calling. Both could fit Cisco's intention to provide unified communications to businesses. Are such acquisitions likely to happen in 2008?

What happened to Qovia?

In March, Maryland newspaper Gazette.net wondered what had happened to local firm, VoIP equipment maker Qovia, which Cisco had been reported to have acquired. Ron Piovesan, a Cisco spokesman was quoted in Gazette.net as saying: "Cisco absolutely did not acquire Qovia. We acquired certain assets of Qovia, but I can't say which ones." But the paper said that Choon Shim, a Quovia co-founder and its former CTO, confirmed Cisco bought the company in January. It's still a mystery as to what exactly happened to Qovia. Its Web site is lacking info (any info) and there is little on Cisco.com about the VoIP firm.

Cisco to marry Yahoo?

A bit of a long shot but John Gartner of the Marketing Shift blog back in May wrote that a tie-up between Cisco and Yahoo, "would be a marriage made in heaven - the companies are Silicon Valley neighbors that complement each other and have very little overlap. Cisco's IP networking expertise combined with Yahoo's reach and content and social networking services would open Cisco up to a world of new customers."


He was responding to another industry fantasy - the acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft.

Cisco bought the wrong WiMAX maker

Soon after Cisco announced its plan to buy WiMAX vendor Navini Networks, Zack Miller, vice president of investments at Profile Investments blogged that the network giant should instead buy Alvarion. While Navini has 'beamforming' technology, which ThinkEquity Partners believes is particularly attractive to Cisco, Alvarion has the largest installed base of fixed WiMAX deployments and is the only vendor currently shipping mobile WiMAX-ready base stations, wrote Miller.

He added: Miller adds: "CSCO seems to be making a technology bet if they scoop up Navini - a move that will give them a strong, but not dominating presence in WiMAX. I'd rather put my chips on ALVR, and its business and financial operating history, complete with cash on the books, and no debt."

Just Miller trying pump up his ALVR stock, or does he have a point?

What didn't make the list

Here are the other Cisco acquisitions made in 2007 that didn't make our list:

Cisco acquired wireless-management firm Cognio

Cisco agrees to buy BroadWare for video security

Cisco to acquire network processor company

Cisco acquires NeoPath

Cisco buys Reactivity for $135 million to bolster SOA offerings

So you've seen our list of Cisco's top 6 acquisitions, and the type of companies Cisco is likely to buy in the next 12 months. What do you think is in Cisco's sights for 2008, and what's your view as Cisco integrates this year's buys?