7 Results for acquisition

SourceForge Acquiring Open Source Dev Portal Ohloh

At the market close today, SourceFourge announced that it is acquiring Ohloh Corporation and Ohloh.net, a privately held development portal that aggregates open source projects, offers community features around them, and more. The financial terms were not disclosed, and the deal is expectd to close in June. Ohloh's database of open source projects includes journal entries for each project, reviews, news, related links and more. You can see an example Ohloh page, on Xen, here.?


Oracle's Plans for Solaris on SPARC: Good News for Linux?

Oracle has released a PDF transcript of an interview with CEO Larry Ellison regarding its plans following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While the interview doesn't delve into the many questions surrounding what Oracle will do with Sun's open source products and initiatives, it does make very clear that Oracle will retain and extend Sun's hardware business, focusing on designing hardware and software to work together. That's going to be a complicated proposition for Oracle, and, as one observer notes, it may be good news for Linux.


OpenText Buying Vignette and the Impact of Open Source Content Management

My first thought when I saw that OpenText is buying Vignette, one of the oldest providers of content and portal management software, for $310 million, was what a huge player Vignette was as the commercial web ramped up. It was founded in 1995, when all businesses were suddenly forced to build online presences, wrestle with HTML, online collaboration and other new concepts. The number of big businesses that run sites and intranets on Vignette is still long, including Disney, Wachovia, Martha Stewart, Fox NewsDigital, and more. Open source content management solutions have continuously taken business away from proprietary players like Vignette, though, especially as the free and low cost platforms have matured.?

OStatic runs on Drupal, for example, a completely free platform. It works fine for us, and we never need to pay for support or services. As we covered recently in our interview with Alfresco Software Chairman John Newton, Alfresco is doing extremely well with its open source enterprise content management platforms, so we asked the folks there about the meaning of the Vignette acquisition.



SpringSource Acquires Hyperic, Focuses On Moving Deeper Into Enterprise Software Stacks

Today, SpringSource, which makes the Spring Framework, the leading open source application framework for Java, announced that it has acquired Hyperic, which supplies enterprise application management and monitoring software. The move could lead to much deeper entrechment for SpringSource in enterprises, because Hyperic's flagship Hyperic HQ software troubleshoots and monitors hardware, networks, virtualization, cloud environments and massively scalable applications.

Hyperic's open source software is used for monitoring large enterprise MySQL deployments, among other things. Many retail, financial services, manufacturing and technology companies already use SpringSource to manage the lifecyles of Java applications. But With Hyperic under its wing, SpringSource can potentially start to manage many more critical aspects of enterprise networks, and? ambitious cloud applications.



As Rumors Swirl About Google and Twitter, Remember Twitter's Open Source Roots

In a post yesterday, I made the point that proprietary software applications are benefitting greatly from building on top of open source components. This is a beneficial trend that is largely missed by those who see open source as threatening to collapse proprietary software pricing models. In the blogosphere today, there is much hubbub over rumors that Google is about to buy Twitter. Without a doubt, Twitter has become a social phenomenon (many celebrities use it, in addition to nearly everyone else), and the company has already been offered hundreds of millions of dollars for an acquisition before. But did you know that Twitter is based largely on open source components?


A Red Hat Acquisition By Oracle? Unlikely

In a swimmingly good day for the stock market yesterday, shares in Red Hat rose a whopping 10 percent, on speculation that Oracle may buy the company. The flight of fancy began with comments from Jeffries & Co. analyst Katherine Egbert, covered by Barron's. Reuters picked up on the rumor, but Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is having none of it, and Matt Asay points out that this exact rumor is seasonal. I doubt if Oracle is after Red Hat, but I'm not as sure as Vaughan-Nichols that an acquisition wouldn't make sense for Oracle.


IBM Plus Sun: A Few Non-Obvious Software Implications

As news of a possible IBM acquisition of Sun Microsystems is settling in, it's interesting to see how many different perspectives are appearing. Yesterday, we provided our analysis here, and here. GigaOm also had an unusual and interesting piece of analysis, concluding that the best suitor for Sun would be Cisco, not IBM. The more I think about this possible deal, the more I'm convinced that it's all about software, with Java possibly representing a key brass ring for IBM.