
Workday and Peakon. My take.
Workday agreed to acquire Peakon. There is an obvious logic to this deal. Engagement tools are an important part of HRTECH today, and the cycle of larger vendor absorbing edge innovators continues. Cue Disney circle of life music. Engagement tools have done well under COVID-19, with the move to more remote work etc. Whereas 2 […]

Verint Acquires KANA Software: The Analysis
EVENT On January 6th, 2014 Verint announced their intentions to purchase KANA Software for a reported $514 million mix of cash and loan obligations. The expected close date is first quarter of 2014. ANALYSIS I cannot say I am surprised that Verint finally got into the multi-channel customer service market. I have been expecting this […]

One More Time, with Feeling!
One More Time, with Feeling! Oracle announced another software company purchase. Its acquisition of Responsys makes a few founders, VC’s, and assorted vested employees very happy for the holidays. Good for them. Really, I mean it. Good for anyone who has a liquidity event like this, regardless of time of year. Now what? Over the […]

PwC-Booz: The seven year itch
The recent PwC decision to acquire Booz took me back to younger days when I was an reluctant accountant at PW (the C came later after it merged with Coopers). I had little desire to do time in auditing or get a CPA certificate, but that was a requirement back them to qualify for its […]

Enterprise May Be Sexy, But….
Snapshot from today’s TechMeme. Crazy gamers (OMGPOP) dropped by even crazier gamers (Zynga) as they fall out of favor by even crazier gamers (the whole World). So what. On the very same day Salesforce.com acquires Exact Target in their largest ever transaction valued at $2.5B and it does not even make TechMeme. Heck, even ActiveState’s acquisition […]

Enterprise Headlines and Highlights, 2012-07-22
Highlights of enterprise software and solutions news from the past week: Two IPOs come out strongly after Facebook IPO disappointment – Kayak and Palo Alto Networks. Google Nexus 7, with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, is becoming the first general purpose worthy competitor to the Apple iPad. Workday files for IPO, using JOBS Act to avoid […]

Social Market Consolidation – It’s Here
In case you haven’t been paying attention, the Social Media/Marketing marketspace is starting to consolidate – rapidly. What’s driving this consolidation is M&A activity by the large cap market leaders, most notably Salesforce.com who is apparently about to purchase Buddy Media for more than $800M. This follows Oracle’s just-announced $300M acquisition of Vitrue. Salesforce started […]

Cloud-y Days Ahead
Good to be a Cloud Software Shareholder (but not a customer!) Any doubts anyone had about the legitimacy of cloud application software should have been laid to rest the last few weeks. When Oracle weighs in to buy RightNow as part of a larger acquisition strategy to acquire cloud software products, then the landscape of […]

Will Adobe wreck EchoSign?
Congratulations to the team at EchoSign on the company’s acquisition by Adobe (see also Techmeme coverage). I’m sorry to say, though, that if Adobe’s previous SaaS acquisitions are anything to go by, today’s news is likely to be less of a cause for celebration than commiseration with EchoSign’s users and fans over the next few […]

Citrix buys Cloud.com – Brief Note
Citrix announced the acquisition of Cloud.com this morning hoping to flesh out its long-running cloud road-map. This Brief Note covers what this means for Citrix and provides some background. Summary There’s some clear motivations for Citrix: Filling whitespace – Citrix has long spoken about cloud computing, but they’ve yet to make a big splash on […]