Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) will be acquiring DVN (Digital Video Networks) for $44.5 million. Of that $44.5 million, $17.5 million will be paid up front and the rest of the $27 million will be paid based on sales performance. The deal is expected to close by the first half of 2010. DVN has about 160 million subscribers and the company plans to grow by another 200 million customers in the next 3-5 years. DVN will be rolled into Cisco’s International Cable Unit division.
Earlier today Cisco announced that their first quarter profit dropped 19% because of a drop in sales. However Cisco CEO John Chambers said that there are “strong sequential growth trends” as the economy is recovering. The profit posted was $1.79 billion for the quarter. This is down from $2.2 billion the year before. Cisco has recently partnered with VMware and EMC to sell data center products. Cisco plans to repurchase $10 billion worth of stock.
Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC)’s top lawyer Bruce Sewell and SVP of Digital Enterprise both stepped down this week. The departures come off as a surprise to the company as Gelsinger was supposed to give a keynote speech at the Intel developer forum and Sewell lead the fight against the EU’s antitrust allegations.
Both Sewell and Gelsinger are joining other major corporation. EMC Corporation hired Gelsinger as the President and COO of information infrastructure products. Sewell is becoming the General Counsel and SVP of Apple Inc.
Since Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini is relatively new to the position, it was uncertain that Gelsinger would have a chance at becoming CEO of Intel. Gelsinger may have a better chance becoming CEO of EMC down the line. Suzan Miller, the Intel deputy general counsel will fill in for Sewell temporarily.
Daniel Cooperman, Apple’s General Counsel and SVP of Legal and Government Affairs is retiring at the end of September which opened up the position for Sewell. “We are thrilled to have Bruce join our executive team, and wish Dan a very happy retirement,” stated Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a press release. “With Bruce’s extensive experience in litigation, securities and intellectual property, we expect this to be a seamless transition.”
As everyone is aware, the cost of running back offices in India are cheaper to operate compared to America. And EMC does not plan to fall behind in the globalization craze. EMC said that they plan to invest $1.5 billion in India over the next 5 years to expand their research and development. This is the largest financial commitment that EMC has made for operations outside of the U.S.
The $1.5 billion investment made by Cisco is an addition to the $500 million that the company had already invested. This past January, EMC announced that they would be cutting 2,400 jobs to save about $350 million. This past Wednesday, EMC opened a facility that is about 495,000 square feet in Bangalore. EMC’s Bangalore facility will work closely with Cisco System’s R&D facility. EMC has about 2,000 employees in India.
“At Kazeon, we’re committed to providing customers with the most accurate, scalable and legally defensible eDiscovery solutions,” stated Kazeon Founder and CEO Sudhakar Muddu. “Customers across the globe are performing accurate and efficient eDiscovery, realizing dramatic cost savings and risk reduction by leveraging our broad range of solutions. Becoming part of EMC is the right strategic move for us – giving us the resources of a world-class leader in information management to effectively take our market vision to the next level. We are excited about this acquisition.”
EMC Corporation has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Kazeon Systems Inc. Kazeon designs eDiscovery software made for corporations, legal firms, government agencies, etc. The transaction is expected to close on Q3 2009 and the financial details were undisclosed. EMC plans to roll Kazeon’s products into their SourceOne services. Kazeon’s software can collect and process Electronically Stored Information across laptops, desktops, and other content management systems.
EMC Corporation has been on the acquisition binge. The company bought out FastScale and NetApp recently.
Richard Egan received an electrical engineering from Northeastern University in 1962. After that he helped develop Project Apollo memory systems for NASA. Before starting EMC Corporation, Egan had worked for Lockheed Martin, Intel, and Honeywell. He had also served as a helicopter pilot for the U.S. Marine Corps.
In 2005, Forbes ranked Egan the 258th richest American and his net worth was about $1.3 billion. George W. Bush appointed Egan as the U.S. ambassador to Ireland where he served in that position from August 2001 to December 2002. Egan retired from EMC on January 17, 2001. He started the company with Roger Marino in 1979.
On August 28, 2009, Egan committed suicide at his home in Boston. He was suffering from Stage IV terminal lung cancer. He also suffered from diabetes and emphysema. Egan lives on through his wife and five children.
EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) has acquired FastScale Technology. FastScale is a software vendor for data centers. This acqusition indicates that EMC wants to get into the private cloud business. The acquisition will enable EMC to move from data centers to virtualized data centers (private clouds).
The financial details of the acquisition were undisclosed. FastScale lowers the performance load on virtual machines. Companies can have data centers with about three times the number of virtual machines without take too much of a toll on performance.
EMC has also partnered with VMware to resell VMware vCenter AppSpeed products. This allows IT departments to measure performance of applications running on VMware vSphere 4.
Last week a winner emerged for the bidding war of Data Domain Inc. EMC agreed to buy Data Domain for $33.50 per share which ended a bidding war with NetApp. Data Domain paid a $57 million termination fee under the tems of agreement with NetApp after they cancelled a merger deal.
Through the acquisition, EMC will be challenging Hewlett-Packard. Hewlett-Packard may even make an offer to buy out NetApp, the loser of the bidding war. NetApp said that they gave up on Data Domain because they would not be able to justify the escalated bid to shareholders.
The total amount for EMC’s acquisition was $2.1 billion in cash. NetApp went as high as $1.9 billion.
Someone just buy Data Domain already! First EMC was looking to buy DataDomain and then NetApp quickly made a bid to buy the company first at a price of $1.5 billion. And then EMC offered $1.8 billion in cash. NetApp matched the $1.8 billion offer and DataDomain decided to go with that offer.
EMC has come up with another offer, $33.50 per share based on 62.9 million shares outstanding in cash amounting to $2.1 billion. EMC would also remove a breakup fee from its offer for Data Domain and was prepared to complete a deal within the next two weeks.
Last month EMC even created a full page ad in The San Jose Mercury Times in an attempt to persuade Data Domain employees that they would be better off under the EMC umbrella instead of NetApp.
NetApp and EMC Corporation both want Data Domain pretty badly. A couple of days ago, EMC outbid NetApp for Data Domain by a couple hundred million dollars. NetApp today announced that they have submitted another bid at $30 per share ($1.8 billion). NetApp’s previous offer was $25 per share ($1.5 billion total).
EMC’s offer is $30 per share as well. However EMC claims that their deal is better because it is not subject to the same limits and conditions as NetApp’s deal. EMC said that they want to buy Data Domain because of their strong management and sales teams to back up their own storage team.
NetApp’s offer is subject to closing in 60-110 days and EMC’s offer will expire on June 29, unless there is an extension. Regardless of who picks up the company, Data Domain is in a pretty good position as of right now.
EMC Corporation is one of the biggest server storage companies in the world with a market cap of about $25 billion. Data Domain offers similar services but at a much smaller scale. Last week NetApp made a bid to buy out Data Domain for $1.5 billion in cash and stock. EMC one upped NetApp by offering $1.8 billion in cash today.
Data Domain’s stock is trading at about $26.35, giving the company a market cap of $1.61 billion. EMC made a bid for Data Domain after the stock market closed. After the bid announcement, Data Domain’s stock price surged to above $30 during after hours trading.
“Strategically, this combination will further enhance our ability to broaden EMC’s best-in-class storage portfolio for the benefit of EMC and Data Domain customers and this, in turn, will accelerate EMC’s top- and bottom-line growth rates,” stated EMC CEO, Joe Tucci. “Our substantially superior proposal is a win-win for both companies.”
NetApp is a smaller company than EMC. NetApp’s market cap is about $6.84 billion.
EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), a server infrastructure company has revealed a new product to the market. The new product is called the Symmetrix Virtual Matrix (V-Max) and it replaces the former predecessor the DMX-4. V-Max is powered by Intel quad-core processors and can support around 8 engines and 128 ports.
The V-Max is built on solid-state Flash disk drives, SATA disks, and Fibre Channel. One EMC V-Max can hold about 2,400 disks and hold 2Pbytes of storage. Down the line, EMC plans to set-up a way for customers to string a bunch of V-Maxes together to make a highly scalable storage environment.
“Server virtualization has caught fire, and there is no turning back. To realize the ultimate benefit, however, the whole infrastructure stack has to be virtualized and integrated. EMC’s new Virtual Matrix Architecture provides all the missing ingredients required for the virtual data center at the high-end storage layer—infinite effective scale in all dimensions, a single system image to manage and dynamic self-optimization,” stated Steve Duplessie, Senior Analyst of The Enterprise Strategy Group at EMC.
