Monthly Archives: July 2012

Gaikai, M&A Activity, PlayStation, SCE, Sony Computer Entertainment, Video game

Sony Computer Entertainment Acquiring Interactive Cloud Gaming Company

Image representing Gaikai as depicted in Crunc...

Sony Computer Entertainment today announced that it entered into an agreement to acquire Gaikai Inc.,  an interactive cloud-based gaming company, for approximately USD 380 million. Through the acquisition, SCE will establish a new cloud service, ensuring that it continues to provide users with truly innovative and immersive interactive entertainment experiences.

“By combining Gaikai’s resources including its technological strength and engineering talent with SCE’s extensive game platform knowledge and experience, SCE will provide users with unparalleled cloud entertainment experiences,” said Andrew House, President and Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. “SCE will deliver a world-class cloud-streaming service that allows users to instantly enjoy a broad array of content ranging from immersive core games with rich graphics to casual content anytime, anywhere on a variety of internet-connected devices.”

“SCE has built an incredible brand with PlayStation and has earned the respect of countless millions of gamers worldwide,” said David Perry, CEO of Gaikai Inc., “We’re honored to be able to help SCE rapidly harness the power of the interactive cloud and to continue to grow their ecosystem, to empower developers with new capabilities, to dramatically improve the reach of exciting content and to bring breathtaking new experiences to users worldwide.”

Established in 2008 and headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California, Gaikai has developed the highest quality, fastest interactive cloud-streaming platform in the world that enables the streaming of quality games to a wide variety of devices via the internet. With this acquisition, SCE will establish a cloud service and expand its network business by taking full advantage of Gaikai’s revolutionary technology and infrastructure including data centers servicing dozens of countries and key partners around the world.
The transaction is subject to certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
SCE will continue to aggressively expand a new world of entertainment through the introduction of innovative technologies and the delivery of amazing experiences.


Avnet, Avnet Technology Solutions, EMEA, M&A Activity, Magirus, Middle East

Avnet Aquiring Magirus Group

Avnet, Inc. announced today that it has agreed to acquire the Magirus Group (Magirus), a leading pan-European distributor of data center solutions and services. Magirus is a leading value-add distributor of software, systems and related services encompassing virtualization, storage management, cloud computing, security, intelligent networks and information life-cycle management services. Through its professional services portfolio and knowledge of the IT sector, Magirus enables business partners to take new technologies to market in eleven markets throughout Europe and the Middle East. The transaction, which is subject to normal regulatory approvals, is expected to close in October 2012.

Phil Gallagher, president of Avnet Technology Solutions, Global, commented, “The acquisition of Magirus will significantly enhance our competitive position in Europe and the Middle East by expanding our suite of solutions in high-growth technologies. Magirus increased its revenue 20 percent in calendar 2011, delivering powerful, flexible and cost-effective data center solutions from a breadth of suppliers, including Cisco, VMware and EMC. We welcome the knowledge and expertise of their talented management team and staff, who will allow us to further enhance the value we provide to our customers and suppliers.”

Founded in 1981, Magirus has 400 business and technical professionals that help over 4,500 resellers, system integrators and IT service providers develop and deploy IT infrastructure solutions that bring together traditional server, storage and network operations so that constantly changing business requirements can be supported more efficiently. Its services span demand generation, pre-sales, consultancy, training, certification, implementation as well as support from its pan-European, multi-lingual support center. Magirus generated revenue of approximately US$530 million in the 2011 calendar year, and will be integrated into Avnet Technology Solutions’ EMEA business.

Graeme Watt, president, Avnet Technology Solutions EMEA added, “Magirus is a high quality focused business and represents an excellent expansion to our current operations as it adds complementary product lines across the region while meaningfully increasing our scale in important markets including Germany and France. Magirus’ position with market-leading suppliers in high growth technologies will bolster our solutions practices and create significant cross-selling opportunities in the combined customer base. Its business model is a strong fit with our strategy to provide more value-add services, and the combined expertise of both organizations will enable us to accelerate the success of our customers and suppliers.”


CollabRx, M&A Activity, Medical, Tegal

Tegal Corporation Acquiring CollabRx, Inc.

Tegal Corporation today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CollabRx, Inc., a privately held technology company in the rapidly growing market of interpretive content and data analytics for genomics-based medicine.

CollabRx offers cloud-based expert systems that provide clinically relevant interpretive knowledge to institutions, physicians, researchers and patients for genomics-based medicine in cancer and other diseases to inform health care decision making. With access to approximately 50 clinical and scientific advisors at leading academic institutions and a suite of tools and processes that combine artificial intelligence-based analytics with proprietary interpretive content, the company is well positioned to participate in the $300 billion value-added “big data” opportunity in the US health care market (as reported by McKinsey Global Institute), over half of which specifically targets areas in cancer and cancer genomics.1

The Chief Executive Officers of the two constituent companies, Thomas Mika of Tegal and James Karis of CollabRx, plan to serve as co-CEOs of the combined, publicly traded company, with headquarters in San Francisco, CA. Tegal entered into an employment agreement with Mr. Karis that will become effective at the closing, and Mr. Karis will also be appointed to Tegal’s Board of Directors. Tegal will continue to operate under its current name and ticker symbol for the time being, but plans to seek stockholder approval at its upcoming annual meeting in September 2012 for an amendment to its Certificate of Incorporation, changing its corporate name to CollabRx, Inc.

Originally founded in 2008 by Silicon Valley Internet pioneer Jay (Marty) Tenenbaum, CollabRx has developed clinical advisory networks, expert systems, proprietary tools and processes, and a pipeline of commercial data products and applications (“apps”) for cancer. CollabRx Therapy Finders™, its first commercial product, provides sophisticated, credible, personalized, and actionable information to physicians and patients for rapidly determining which medical tests, therapies, and clinical trials may be considered in cancer treatment planning with a specific emphasis on the tumor genetic profile.

CollabRx Therapy Finders™ are web-based apps that serve as one type of user interface to access proprietary CollabRx content. CollabRx content is dynamically updated and organized in a knowledgebase that includes information on molecular diagnostics, medical tests, clinical trials, drugs, biologics and other information relevant for cancer treatment planning. Capturing how highly respected practicing physicians use this information in the clinical setting further refines the knowledgebase.

Upon the acquisition’s closing, Tegal will issue an aggregate of 236,433 shares of common stock, representing 14% of Tegal’s total shares outstanding prior to the closing, to former CollabRx stockholders in exchange for 100% of the capital stock of CollabRx, Inc. Tegal and certain former CollabRx stockholders will enter into a Stockholders Agreement providing for, among other things, registration rights, transfer restrictions and voting and standstill agreements. Tegal also will assume $500,000 of existing CollabRx indebtedness through the issuance of 5-year promissory notes in substitution for outstanding notes previously issued by CollabRx. In addition, Tegal will grant a total of 368,417 RSUs and options as “inducement grants” to newly hired management and employees, all subject to four-year vesting and other restrictions.

“Medicine is entering a new era of low cost genome sequencing and the proliferation of personalized treatments based on specific genetic mutations,” said James Karis, CEO of CollabRx. “With the technology platform and expert system leadership position that CollabRx has developed over the past few years, we believe that the new company is in a position to lead the market for accurate, credible and current genomic information in the cancer space. We are excited to be joining the Tegal management team in a well-resourced, publicly-traded entity.”

“This acquisition marks both the successful conclusion of a transition process and the beginning of a new chapter for Tegal Corporation,” said Thomas Mika, Tegal’s Chairman, President and CEO. “We are excited to help drive the rapid growth of this market while we meet a critical and consequential human need. This is a mission Tegal’s board has embraced wholeheartedly. I am very pleased to be working with James Karis as Co-CEO and fellow director, and look forward, along with the entire team at CollabRx and Tegal, to building a dynamic company in a new era of genomic medicine.”


Uncategorized

Cloud Computing: Piston & Gridcentric to Deliver OpenStack-Based VDI

Piston Cloud Computing has arranged an exclusive license with Gridcentric, the virtualization optimization company.
Their partnership marks the first commercially available VDI solution built on OpenStack, the open source cloud framework Piston’s widgetry is built on.
Every Piston Enterprise OS license now includes Gridcentric’s Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS) technology. The arrangement is supposed to double virtual machine density for Piston customers and require less physical RAM without impacting user customization or application performance.

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Dell, M&A Activity, Quest, SonicWALL

Dell Acquiring Quest Software

Image representing Dell as depicted in CrunchBase

Dell and Quest Software today announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for Dell to acquire Quest, an IT management software provider offering a broad selection of solutions that solve the most common and most challenging IT problems.

Dell recently announced the formation of its Software Group to build upon its existing software expertise. The Dell Software Group will add to Dell’s enterprise solutions capability, accelerate strategic growth and further differentiate the company from competitors by increasing its solutions portfolio with Dell-owned intellectual property.

Quest’s family of software solutions and key technologies are strongly aligned with Dell’s software strategy. The acquisition provides critical components to expand Dell’s software capabilities in systems management, security, data protection and workspace management. In addition, Quest’s software portfolio is highly complementary to Dell’s scalable design approach to develop solutions that scale with customer needs. Some examples include:

  • The Quest One Identity and Access Management solution family adds to
    Dell’s very strong set of security assets with SonicWALL and
    Secureworks, creating a comprehensive set of security solutions to
    address important customer needs.
  • Quest’s Performance Monitoring solutions for applications, networks
    and databases address a rapidly growing need for our customers.
    Industry analysts have consistently ranked Quest Foglight as a leading
    application performance monitoring solution. Businesses of all sizes
    are looking to reduce their IT complexity and automate workloads for
    their IT departments. Customers worldwide leverage Foglight to
    continually monitor their IT environments, proactively identifying and
    remedying performance issues before they become bigger problems.
  • Quest’s Windows Server Management solutions complement Dell Services’
    rapidly growing application modernization practice with recently
    acquired Clerity Solutions and Make Technologies.
  • Effective database management is critical to the successful operation
    of most organizations. Quest’s Database Management capabilities offer
    a strong complement to Dell’s enterprise offering. Today, millions of
    DBAs, developers, and analysts around the world rely on Quest’s
    database management tools to simplify their work.

Quest has a diversified software portfolio and generated $857 million in global revenue based on its fiscal year 2011 results at gross margins of 86 percent and operating margins of 11 percent. Quest supports heterogeneous and next-generation virtualized environments across leading platform vendors. The addition of Quest, including its 1,500 software sales experts and 1,300 software developers, to Dell’s existing software expertise in systems management, security and cloud integration, is the foundation of a $1.2 billion software business, based on annual revenue.

Quest, established in 1987, is headquartered in Aliso Viejo, Calif. and serves more than 100,000 customers worldwide, including 87 percent of the Fortune 500. The company has approximately 3,850 employees and operates 60 offices in 23 countries.


Cloud computing, Featured, hybrid cloud, Private Cloud, Saas

The Cloud is Dead! Long Live the Cloud! Twitter Chat Recap

Last week, Cloud Commons hosted a Twitter Chat on the end of Cloud Computing. If you’re not familiar with a tweetchat, they are discussions hosted on Twitter where people can join at a specific time by following a certain hashtag. The Cloud Commons tweetchats usually have around ten panelists and have been kicked off with a few thought-provoking questions. The participants then respond and share ideas in real time. The discussion is focused enough to be useful – 1 hour session, responses limited to 140 characters, but large enough to capture different perspectives.

This week’s tweetchat began with several questions:

  1. Adoption rates are rising for private cloud. Is this a stepping stone to hybrid/public cloud?
  2. What needs to happen before enterprises start to fully embrace cloud computing?
  3. What does the future model for enterprise cloud adoption look like?
  4. What should CSPs be doing more of to meet the needs of the enterprise?
  5. What needs to happen so that cloud becomes so ubiquitous that it’ll no longer be referred to as cloud? When will it happen?

The first question, “Is private cloud a stepping stone to hybrid/public cloud?” drew approximately 32 tweets. From the transcript, it appears as though participants in the marketplace are improving their understanding of cloud computing in terms of service and delivery models (private, public, hybrid, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS). The popular viewpoint was that private cloud is not exactly a stepping stone to hybrid/public cloud. A few tweets took the position that private cloud is seen as an alternate path to hybrid/public cloud. Many tweets indicated that IT departments want to retain tight control of their environment. Interesting tweet… “private cloud does not necessarily mean on-premises.” More on this later.

47 tweets in response to the second question, “What needs to happen before enterprises start to fully embrace cloud computing?” Overwhelmingly, the responses in this part of the chat were filled with terms like “services led,” “business value,” “SLA,” and “reduce FUD.” The responses to question 1 covered some territory here as well – enterprises will fully embrace cloud computing if and when they agree to give up some control of their infrastructure. There was an interesting tweet that mentioned transparency – “…it’s not always about control, as it is transparency.” We would argue that transparency is not needed here. To me, full transparency would require that the business is able to access minute detail about infrastructure, such as the amount of RAM installed on the application server that runs their slice of CRM at Salesforce.com. The business should be hidden from this kind of detail. Abstraction plays heavily here. So, we don’t need transparency as much as we need subtraction. What is an important concept that provides abstraction? You guessed it, Service Level Management. The GreenPages view is that processes need to improve before enterprises start to fully embrace cloud computing. See my earlier post, “What Should I Do about Cloud?” that goes in to much more detail on this topic.

I count about the same number of tweets in response to question 3 as I do question 2. Question 3 was a little more open-ended, so a critical mass of ideas never really took shape. The GreenPages’ view is that cloud computing will evolve to look like modern supply chains that can be seen in other industries, such as manufacturing. Enterprises may purchase IT Services from a SaaS provider, Salesforce.com for example. Salesforce.com may purchase its platform from another PaaS provider. That PaaS provider may purchase its basic infrastructure from an IaaS provider. Some value is added at each level, as the IaaS provider becomes more experienced in providing only infrastructure. The PaaS provider has an extremely robust platform for providing only a platform. The SaaS provider may ultimately become an expert at assembling and marketing these components into a service that provides value for the enterprise that ultimately consumes it. Compare this to the supply chain that auto manufacturers leverage to assemble a vehicle. In the early days of manufacturing, some companies produced every part of a vehicle, and assembled it into a finished product. I can think of one prominent example where the work to assemble a finished automobile took place in a single factory around the River Rouge in Detroit. Fast forward to present day, and you’ll be hard pressed to find an auto manufacturer who produces their own windshield glass. Or brake pads. Or smelts their own aluminum. The supply chain has specialized. Auto manufacturers design, assemble, and market finished vehicles. That’s about it. Cloud computing could bring the same specialization to IT.

Most tweets in response to question 4 were clearly around Service Level Management and SLAs, mitigating unknowns in security, and avoiding vendor lock-in. We agree, and think that a standard will emerge to define IT services in a single, consistent format. Kind of like OVF, the Open Virtual Machine Format, for virtualization. I can see an extension to OVF that defines a service’s uptime requirements, maximum ping time to a database server, etc. Such a standard would promote portability of IT Services.

Question 5 really went back to the topics discussed in question 3. When will enterprises embrace cloud? When will cloud computing become ubiquitous?

Right now, Corporate IT and The Business are two individuals living in a virtual “company town.” What I mean is that customers, (the business) are forced to purchase their services from the company store (corporate IT). GreenPages’ view is that there is a market for IT services and that emergence of cloud computing will serve to broaden this market. We recommend that organizations understand the value and costs of providing their own IT services in order to participate in the market – just like the business does. Overall, another insightful chat with some intelligent people!

Uncategorized

Scary App Games. SSL Without Benefit

Remember the Maginot line and how powerful and defensive it was going to be… And then the Germans just bypassed it? Remember the West Wall, where the Allies were going to throw themselves against in the waning days of World War II… And then it was not just pierced but effectively eliminated as a protective barrier in five days of fighting?
That’s what happens when you know you need a defense, and you place all of your eggs in one basket. At least in the IT world a little caution can save you a lot. Here’s a cautionary tale. We trust SSL explicitly, but from a “download random app X” perspective, that’s a mistake.

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Uncategorized

Google-Backed CliQr Moves Legacy Apps to Cloud

CliQr Technologies, a cloud management start-up modestly seeded by Google Ventures and Foundation Capital and now part of Google’s new IaaS Compute Engine initiative, says it can put complicated legacy business apps in the cloud fast and painlessly.
It was started by an ex-VMware guy Gaurav Manglik, its CEO.
It’s got widgetry called Cloud Center that’s supposed to let mission-critical x86 Windows- and Linux-based apps get to the cloud and hop from one cloud to another without modification, thumbing their nose at service provider lock-in and the chance of downtime and maybe figuring out where it runs best.

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6 things you should know before your move to the Cloud

Strategies that suggest running company servers from data centres (Cloud Computing) are not a new concept to businesses. But as time has gone on, this strategy has now become a viable alternative to SMEs, providing a number of attractive benefits. As a result, many companies are actively turning to cloud-based strategies rather than merely refreshing server hardware.

But frustratingly – and perhaps inexcusably considering the huge volumes of ink dedicated to the serious considerations of pursuing a cloud strategy – too many companies are making costly mistakes, forcing Marcie Terman, Business Development Director at DataFort, to vent and highlight – once and for all – the six most important areas of risk to consider when making such a major step.

1)    Risks around service continuity:

 Commodity services – those ‘off the shelf’, cheap solutions – will often neglect to make any mention of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) concerning service continuity. But you must understand the risk …