I don’t get it. An employee performance software ( in a few words – SuccessFactors), being bought for 3.4 billion dollars. SAP should get their present act straight. How can the head honchos even come to a decision like this and a company falling for the cloud business game.
The icing on this is JP Morgan chase assisting SAP in procuring a 1 billion Euro loan for this buy, and guess what the SAP heads say they will repay this within a year because of the strong forecast they have for 2015 revenues. Guess what do you think the current head of SAP will exist then, he would have already walked off and left the bones of SuccessFactors to be buried by his successor.
Still don’t get it????? Did not think that the year end would have such ignorant moves. Well I guess we have more to come in the next 28 days…..wait and watch….
Mortgage rates have been the lowest from the time the first mortgage was recorded in 1971. It is at 4.01 now, this is 30 year fixed. The last up it saw on the curve was somewhere in August 2008 at about 6.33.
Lets work the numbers it took 37 years for the rates to go up from 4.01 to 6.33. Add this, the rates kept going up with the home prices going up too. Then we had a fall and we are at the start 4.01 today.
Say we put in, that in todays world with the advance in technology and the speed at which we get things accomplished have increased when compared to 1971. Here is where I am heading to, if it took 37 years for the home value to grow and the interest to grow, at today’s rate, at double the speed or triple the speed it will take at least 16 years(double the speed), or 8 years at triple the speed to come back to where we were in 2008 values and rates.
My two cents???? and a lot of unanswered questions……
Double Irish and Dutch sandwich, seem like very interesting cocktails at your neighborhood bar. I would love that, but surprise it is not. These are names or codes given to a technique for saving tax by moving funds in between higher tax paying countries to lower ones. In this case moving money from US to Ireland for the double irish high!!! oops low tax.
Now what is the Dutch sandwich the main course after the drink – Double Irish, nope, it is the middleman where you could move the money to a Dutch subsidiary and save more tax.
Do you think corporations are doing this? Surprise again? Mostly all the corporations who are in the technology field do this to save billions. This is not illegal, it is a loophole, which everyone knows but dont want to plug. Why? you tell me?
Now you might be thinking is there a Single Irish and a Dutch burger for individuals to do this? Don’t even think about it? Uncle Sam will hunt you down like a pig and will show you how to put money to good use.
Godaddy sold, Bj’s sold, Skypel sold, Nortel sold, Hulu looking for buyer. Private equities are trying to cash in during these hard economic times.
What happens with these good companies when they get bought for cheap and the revenue stream they have? First these companies survive for a while then they start losing revenue- BECAUSE the people who had bought them have no sense in what direction or what it would take to increase revenue for the buy in’s.
History has it how great companies got bought out and got gutted because of the false sense of confidence the investors had in taking the company ahead.
What am I blabbering about?
Here is the one liner – you are never too big to fail.
Nortel the king of communications at one time is the tamed cat or the tail wagging dog looking for attention (literal of money).
Nortel was a company which drove competition in communication ground up, holding so many patents to its name that 80% of devices and services for communication hold pay loyalties towards it. But today, Nortel has auctioned its 6000 plus more patents.
Are you surprised at who all came to the auctions it was all the big names in IT. Apple, RIM, Microsoft and Google to name the forerunners. The winning bid was three folds of what some analysts, all these big wigs were desperate to get the chunk of change Nortel makes out of these licenses, one of the patents was on the lines of 4G which is driving the cell phone data market right now.
Google backing out at 4 billion dollars took all buy surprise, probably that’s the weak spot of Larry Page the now CEO at google, not as aggressive as Sergie.
The consortium who one the bid consists of, few I know are Ericsson and RIM, the others are still not clear.
This would have good catch for Google, and would have filled a void for them. Well enough of this.
The point is, you don’t deliver for the new world and adapt your legacy strength, you lose or end up being on the block (auction or butchers).
Tags: nortel auction, nortel patents
Here is the layout of my home network. Level 1 of home has the main cable network coming in, this is where the network is forked into two different wireless routers one open to the public and one private. Here are the entertainment center or the man cove you can call it with a projector and class A sound system for your gaming and movie experience. Level 2 of house has the family media center and all goodies for the kids – apple tv, roku and ps3 connected to the private wireless network. Level 3 has the homework computer connected via powerline adapter and another laptop connected via wireless.
The operating system was just upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04. The fun part now starts. The home wireless network just collapses. Started troubleshooting the network thinking the internet from the provider has dropped dead. No, that was fine, home digital VOIP phone was up. All wired devices from both the routers were good on the network.
Rebooted the main internet router, the machines, the game consoles, the wireless routers, but no luck. The wireless SSID or manual search for both my networks would not show up. Fun part is this is when I realized there were 29 wireless networks my home was in range with and 16 of them were open. That a lots of packets travelling on the 802 frequency.
Digging deeper started running a packet analyzer at the external perimeter of my network, what I found was interesting, all 802 frequency packets were being discarded by my UBUNTU machine, it had taken over the network packets, inspecting the packets and completely handling the wireless network while jamming it.
Solution : taking the Ubuntu network out of the loop brought all connected machines to life. Lesson learnt, always trace your steps backwards to get to the problem and then the solution.
What a day, I have called it a day now..
Part I -
I will be addressing some open source questions and issues that I have faced at most of the startups I have delved into. One most pressing question asked is open source free, well it is free and all depends on how you are planning to use it.
As a startup you want/need to keep your operating costs at the bare minimum to avoid any fast burn rates. In the real world software licenses cost big bucks.
To offset these monies you need to make sure that you are not compromising your startup’s goal by using an open source software/hardware, just because everyone around you is talking about it and it is the cool fashion thing among the nerds.
Open source, the word seems pretty straight forward, but each open source tool/app has it own innards and workings. The best scenario would be to read the GPL, CCL or the different license names used.
In one of my previous stints, the investors wanted to keep the costs so low that it was as good as running the show at 0$’s. Well this would be a good choice or idea if the product which was being worked on would be an executable product using the forced upon open source platform. The back of forth of making decisions on what needs to be used, made the products FTM (first to market) at a low point percent and late as First Movers.
There are lessons learned in everyday life and every cup of coffee in the day helps remember those by the time you hit bed.
Tags: hardware, open source, software
It is always a question why do you need a lead investor (LI) when you have so many investors (read followers) who are waiting for a lead investor. Here is the catch, if you do not have a LI and your followers are waiting for a lead, take the cue, they are not fully committed to your idea or there is no real conviction about your business.
These followers are kind of sitting on the sidelines, they do not want to say no or say they are not interested, because if you do find an LI, the followers would always come back and stay with you, it is a safety net for them, they can back out anytime indicating that they had never committed to the deal, there is some phrase used for this kinda of negotiation, I am not sure what it is called, but it is defined in the negotiation classes.
An LI is the entity/person who would do all your investment stick. They would work with lawyers, haggle all the costs and terms in short they would be the ones to talk happening and make things happen for you.
They are the link between you and External ching ching world.
BATNA stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. As the words say, these agreements as used as a backdoor or a secondary alternative to an ongoing negotiation. Usually comes into effect when the actual negotiations fall through and a decision cannot be reached.
Why I am writing this here is a good point. I was helping out closing a term sheet, all the terms and conditions were met and the lawyers were working on the fine prints. While going through all this is when we thought about a backup solution if the negotiations fall through the cracks. This is when the BATNA scenario was created and it is actually helping leverage the term sheet closing.
BATNA also comes in pretty handy when there are multiple solutions to a given problem or issue.
Tags: BATNA, term sheet
