IBM has sent up its first research lab in Africa. That makes an even dozen labs worldwide. The new one’s in Nairobi in Kenya. It should host 50 researchers in five years.
IBM didn’t say how much it’s investing but the government of Kenya is putting in $2 million a year for five years for a share in the copyrights.
After buying Motorola Mobility and its 17,000 patents for $12.5 billion in May, Google is going to try to make the place profitable, something that has eluded it for 14 of the last 16 quarters.
Struggling Research In Motion is looking to sell NewBay Media, the white-label mobile content supplier that it bought last October for $100 million, according to the Wall Street Journal in a story Reuters picked up on.
Other non-core assets could also go. RIM has RBC Capital Markets and JPMorgan exploring strategic options. The company is trying to cut a billion dollars in costs ahead of bringing the new Blackberry 10 to market early next year.
Struggling Research In Motion is looking to sell NewBay Media, the white-label mobile content supplier that it bought last October for $100 million, according to the Wall Street Journal in a story Reuters picked up on.
Other non-core assets could also go. RIM has RBC Capital Markets and JPMorgan exploring strategic options. The company is trying to cut a billion dollars in costs ahead of bringing the new Blackberry 10 to market early next year.
Struggling Research In Motion is looking to sell NewBay Media, the white-label mobile content supplier that it bought last October for $100 million, according to the Wall Street Journal in a story Reuters picked up on.
Other non-core assets could also go. RIM has RBC Capital Markets and JPMorgan exploring strategic options. The company is trying to cut a billion dollars in costs ahead of bringing the new Blackberry 10 to market early next year.
Google CEO Larry Page seems to, for now, have made a surgical strike rather than haven taken the axe to Motorolo Mobility. Although 20% of its workforce slated for removal, the company says two-thirds of the erstwhile 4,000 jobs are in Asia. Furthermore, the company says the US cuts are mostly at the VP level.
So Larry Page hasn’t yet made the big, scary cuts we might have expected. Sitting as I currently do in Illinois, I can also say this is big news at the local level. Furthermore, Google says part of its core product development will remain in the Chicago area. The company also says that said product development will involve a few dozens of people, not hundreds or thousands.
Eureka!
This makes sense, as most of the great breakthroughs in the Information Age have been made by small teams, if not a single individual. You need some scale to build things up and out, but certainly not to have Eureka moments.
This insight reminds me of my time a few years ago at a Silicon Valley software company, when on many days it felt like we were a group of about 2,000 people glommed to the backs of a few brilliant developers. It could be that Larry Page and company feel the same way, which would not be surprising given Larry’s technical roots.
It It’s Not Broken…
Page seems to be happy with the current Android model, which helps brand the company name and could set the stage for future revenues if the company decides to reign it in or charge a licensing fee. He certainly is planning for Moto to regain brand recognition and market share as the smartphone market continues to develop, and thereby create significant new revenue for the company.
The tricky part will be to balance the equity of the respective Google and Motorola brands. Will anyone really buy hardware from a software company? Microsoft is about to find this out, and Google will benefit from observing this, no matter how many mitigating factors are associated with the Microsoft name.
Eternal Change
The smartphone market has already seen a lot of flux, with RIM dying, Nokia putting itself on life support, Microsoft not breathing well, and Taiwanese company HTC seemingly coming from nowhere to emerge as a major player. South Korea’s Samsung is one of two 800-pound gorillas in the market, and I believe it will emerge from its tussle with Apple with only its fur roughed up a bit. The other big Korean play, Lucky Goldstar (LG) can’t be counted out, but needs to step up its game.
And we always have to ask, where is Sony? Can the company ever regain the magic it had from the 70s through the 90s? Remember when people took trips to Tokyo just to go to Akihabara and see what Sony was up to?
For now, Page has not killed the Motorola name, and he has not made deep cuts at the company. Today’s announcement looks like Google is simply ridding itself of some offices it doesn’t need in countries in which it doesn’t do much business, and also cutting out a top management layer from the old company. The question will be whether a few dozen people will be able to save the acquisition. I think they can.
EQT VI has agreed to acquire UC4 Software Group from Carlyle Europe Technology Partners, the founder Franz Beranek and management for an enterprise value of EUR 220 million.
UC4 is the world’s largest independent IT Process Automation software vendor. UC4’s ONE Automation platform delivers IT Process Automation helping organizations to manage increasingly dynamic and heterogeneous IT landscapes, and to migrate to cloud computing as the next generation of IT service delivery. The Company has recently complemented its product portfolio by offering Application Release Automation on its existing ONE Automation platform.
The Company has a strong and loyal customer base with roughly 2,050 blue chip customers including more than 70 of the Global Fortune 500 companies. The Company roughly generated revenues of EUR 62 million in the past fiscal year ending in April 2012 and is headquartered in Wolfsgraben (close to Vienna), Austria and Bellevue, US.
“We consider UC4 a highly attractive growth company and are impressed by its customer base and strong automation offering. The new Supervisory Board, consisting of a mix of highly relevant and experienced EQT Industrial Advisors, looks forward to supporting UC4′s management team in driving further expansion into the rapidly growing Cloud Automation market”, says Per Franzén, Partner at EQT Partners in Germany, Investment Advisor to EQT VI.
“We are very pleased to welcome EQT VI as our new owner and look forward to working together with EQT VI and the new Supervisory Board to realizing the growth potential of UC4. EQT’s industrial focus with a very strong line-up of Industrial Advisors will be of great value to UC4 and to us as a management team when developing the Company over the next years”, says Jason Liu, CEO of UC4.
EQT VI has agreed to acquire UC4 Software Group from Carlyle Europe Technology Partners, the founder Franz Beranek and management for an enterprise value of EUR 220 million.
UC4 is the world’s largest independent IT Process Automation software vendor. UC4’s ONE Automation platform delivers IT Process Automation helping organizations to manage increasingly dynamic and heterogeneous IT landscapes, and to migrate to cloud computing as the next generation of IT service delivery. The Company has recently complemented its product portfolio by offering Application Release Automation on its existing ONE Automation platform.
The Company has a strong and loyal customer base with roughly 2,050 blue chip customers including more than 70 of the Global Fortune 500 companies. The Company roughly generated revenues of EUR 62 million in the past fiscal year ending in April 2012 and is headquartered in Wolfsgraben (close to Vienna), Austria and Bellevue, US.
“We consider UC4 a highly attractive growth company and are impressed by its customer base and strong automation offering. The new Supervisory Board, consisting of a mix of highly relevant and experienced EQT Industrial Advisors, looks forward to supporting UC4′s management team in driving further expansion into the rapidly growing Cloud Automation market”, says Per Franzén, Partner at EQT Partners in Germany, Investment Advisor to EQT VI.
“We are very pleased to welcome EQT VI as our new owner and look forward to working together with EQT VI and the new Supervisory Board to realizing the growth potential of UC4. EQT’s industrial focus with a very strong line-up of Industrial Advisors will be of great value to UC4 and to us as a management team when developing the Company over the next years”, says Jason Liu, CEO of UC4.
Quest Software today introduced Foglight for Windows Azure Applications, an application performance monitoring (APM) solution available via software-as-a-service (SaaS). Available immediately as a beta, the newest addition to the industry-leading Foglight APM portfolio enables IT administrators to monitor performance and understand what end users are experiencing with Windows Azure-based application.
Foglight for Windows Azure Applications enables enterprises to leverage cloud-based performance monitoring technology for applications built on the Windows Azure platform, and allows IT administrators to gain critical insight as to how end users interact with these applications.
Juniper Networks with the AT&T Foundry®, on Monday announced a university workshop and software development hackathon being offered through the AT&T Foundry® and Juniper’s OpenLab – The Junos® Center for Innovation. The week-long event will be hosted at the AT&T Foundry® in Texas, in conjunction with the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Dallas starting on August 13, 2012.