Tech M&A deals of 2010

Here's some notable tech M&A activity happened till May, 2010.

In Security space,

• Oracle IdM adding identity analytics (OIA) to it's portfolio through the broader Sun acquisition
  
• Symantec enhancing encryption portfolio with PGP, GuardianEdge, and vulnerability assessment offering through Gideon Technologies
  
• EMC's RSA Security Division acquired Archer Technologies for GRC across physical+virtual infrastructures
• Trustwave acquired Intellitactics for SIEM to enhance PCI compliance offering, and BitArmor to enhance endpoint security offering
  

In Cloud computing space,

• VmWare seems to be building up Cloud PaaS platform acquiring Spring Source (in 2009) , and now Zimbra, and Rabbit Technologies
• CA acquired Nimsoft and 3Tera to manage cloud environments
• Cisco acquired Rohati Systems for cloud security in Cisco's Nexus switch line

In Mobile space,

• SAP planning to buy Sybase for it's mobile middleware
  
• Apple getting Siri, HP getting Palm, RIM getting Viigo

References:
Network World slideshow on Tech acquisitions of 2010
PWC report on Tech M&A insights for 2010

What's new in OWSM 11gR1 PS2 (11.1.1.3.0) ?

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR1 PS2 (Patchset 2) aka 11.1.1.3.0 is released and generally available now.

What's new in OWSM 11gR1 PS2 (11.1.1.3.0)?

• Agent for OSB 11gR1
• Enhanced integration for WLS JAX-WS web services (centralized policy mgt, policy attachment through EM, policy advertisement in WSDL, and policy monitoring)
• IBM DB2 certification of MDS backed policy store
• WS-Security + WS-AT combination support
• Enhanced Test-to-Production for policy attachments using deployment plans

Also see,

• Known Issues
  
• Product documentation - 11gR1 PS2 Library , OWSM documentation links
• What's new in OWSM 11gR1, and 11gR1 PS1 releases?
• OWSM page on OTN
  

Intel's cloud chip and physicalization

Per Intel's CTO Justin Rattner, Intel is working on a single chip cloud computer

• Parts of the chip will be powered down when not in use
• First iteration involves a 48 core processor that consumes 25 - 125 watts
• New term invented "physicalization" which means dedicating one or more cores to a specific application or portion of the application. This is completely opposite to "virtualization" which means running applications on whatever processor resources are available

For complete story, see this Forbes article

Oracle extends BTM and SOA Mgt through Amberpoint acquisition

Oracle's acquisition of Amberpoint extends it's capabilities around Business Transaction Monitoring (BTM), SOA Management and SOA Governance into it's SOA products offering.

Read the following resources for more info

• Benefits of the combination from Richard Sarwal, Sr VP, Product Development, Oracle
• General Presentation on Amberpoint
  
• FAQ
  

From the FAQ,
The AmberPoint solution will provide several critical capabilities requested by customers.
• Application Discovery – Automatically discovers components and interactions and ensures visibility of the entire heterogeneous SOA environment
• Application Performance Management – Tracks end-to-end performance and availability
• Business Transaction Management – Ensures reliability of individual business transactions and tracks the progress in real time to pinpoint any issues
• SOA Governance – Provides closed-loop governance by reporting run-time results to design-time governance solutions

OER 11g released

Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) 11g is released and generally available for download now. OER alongwith OSR (UDDI registry), OWSM and EM SOA Mgt Pack Plus comprise Oracle's SOA Governance offering. Of all the new features added in this release of OER, there's one feature around closed loop governance that I would like to discuss in this blog.

Closed loop governance allows architects to review at a high-level how the system and services they designed are behaving in production, and with this knowledge further enhance the services in their subsequent versions. It provides confidence and production assurance to business people that the investments they have put in SOA is actually being put to use.

In this release of OER 11g, high-level performance metrics from Enterprise Manager (EM) and 3rd party products such as Amberpoint are rolled up into OER.

Through the same pattern, do you see a need for rolling up policy attachment info from OWSM into OER?

See more of "What's New in OER 11g" here.

Oracle + Sun: Identity Management Strategy webcast

Watch Oracle + Sun identity management strategy webcast by Oracle executive Hasan Rizvi, Sr. VP
http://oracle.com.edgesuite.net/ivt/4000/8104/9236/12628/lobby_external_flash_clean_480x360/default.htm

Oracle + Sun Strategy Webcast

Oracle + Sun Strategy Webcast was done by Oracle/Sun executives today.
Hope you got a chance to attend it live. If you missed it, check back the link in couple of days when the recording would be available for on demand viewing.

Dynamic Data Center through Cisco-Netapp-VmWare collaboration

New Secure Multi-tenancy Meets Virtualization and Enterprise Cloud
Security Requirements

Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture is an end-to-end, validated design
architecture that isolates IT resources for enhanced security in shared
virtual and enterprise cloud environments. The design architecture helps
enterprise customers, systems integrators and service providers develop
internal and external cloud services that isolate clients, business units,
departments or security zones for enhanced security across the computing,
networking, storage and management layers of a unified infrastructure. The
Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture provides details about
implementing and configuring the architecture, as well as best practices
for building and managing best-in-class solutions from Cisco, NetApp and
VMware. This validated design architecture significantly increases business
agility by helping IT administrators to establish the appropriate quality
of service for each resource layer and to deliver consistent service
performance levels for the applications in each layer.

The Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture is based on Cisco Nexus® Series Switches and the Cisco® Unified Computing System, NetApp FAS storage with MultiStore®, and VMware vSphere and vShield™ Zones. The design reference architecture has been jointly tested and validated as a Cisco Validated Design so customers can quickly assess their needs and deploy integrated solutions from Cisco, NetApp and VMware that meet the stringent requirements of their dynamic data centers. The Cisco Validated Design Guide can be viewed at www.netapp.com/us/cisco-vmware/.

"Virtualization of the network, server and storage infrastructure is
radically reshaping today's data center," said Paul Maritz, president and
CEO, VMware. "The dynamic data center built on VMware® vSphere™, along
with Cisco and NetApp® technologies, will provide the foundation for both
private and public clouds and the ability to move data and applications
between these clouds. A shared virtual infrastructure requires that
resources for different tenants are isolated while delivering on promised
service levels. We have integrated our technology with Cisco and NetApp not
only to accelerate our customers' journey through their data center
transition, but also to deliver an outstanding customer experience."

See http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0580403.htm

Gartner acquires Burton group

Gartner, Inc. which acquired AMR Research recently for $64 million, announced that, on December 30, 2009, it acquired Burton Group, Inc. for approximately $56 million in cash.

Gene Hall, Gartner's chief executive officer, said, "Gartner has traditionally focused on providing strategic insight to CIOs and senior IT executives, while Burton Group has built a leading niche providing practical, how-to advice to front-line IT professionals. Thus, Burton Group is a great strategic fit for Gartner and should enable us to offer a more complete solution to every level and functional expert within an IT organization. By leveraging our scale and worldwide distribution capabilities, we expect to significantly grow Burton Group’s business over time."

Jamie Lewis, Burton Group’s chief executive officer, commented, “I am very excited about the opportunities for accelerated growth that Burton Group should have as part of Gartner. By combining our technical depth with Gartner’s global presence and distribution capabilities, we can reach a much broader set of clients with the most complete set of IT research and advisory services available.”

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1272013

Cloud Services Broker announcement from Vordel

Vordel announced "Cloud Service Broker" at their annual VordelWorld user conference last week, in an attempt to bring trust and reliability to Cloud Computing. One of the major concerns customers have in adopting cloud computing is security. Hope this will solve some of those concerns bridging the gap between internal SOA apps and Cloud services, leading to broader adoption of Cloud Computing.

See http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS130253+05-Nov-2009+BW20091105

News: Oracle agrees to acquire BEA for $19.375 per share in cash

Oracle agrees to acquire BEA for $19.375 per share in cash. The deal represents a 24% premium over BEA Systems' close on Tuesday at $15.58. See the official press release here.

News: Oracle SOA suite wins InfoWorld award for 2008

Oracle SOA Suite 10gR3 wins InfoWorld's 2008 Technology of the Year award in applications and middleware. Of special mention is this snippet

Topping the stack are the OWSM (Oracle Web Services Manager) -- locking down services with sturdy security and policy management -- and an easy-to-use rules facility, Oracle Business Rules Engine, for processing business logic and authoring customizable rule sets.

Read full story here.

News: Cisco buys Securent for $100 M in cash

Cisco® (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced an agreement to acquire Securent, Inc., a leading provider of entitlement management software for enterprises. Securent is privately held and based in Mountain View, Calif.
Complete story http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0322664.htm

This clearly validates the demand in the marketplace for content and context based authorization using standards such as XACML.

Origins of OWSM which was originally developed by Confluent Software can be linked to Sekhar Sarukkai who is CTO and co-founder of Securent.
Incidentally he was also the co-founder of Confluent Software which Oblix had purchased to add web services security to its portfolio of IdM products. Oracle acquired Oblix in 2005, and released this product as Oracle Web Services Manager (OWSM).

News: Oracle offers to buy BEA for $6.7 billion

This is a big news today.
Oracle proposes to acquire BEA for $17.00 per share in cash. The $17.00 per share offer is a 25% premium over yesterday's closing price of $13.62.
See http://www.oracle.com/bea/index.html for full details.