Industry News News & Articles

Russia's leading search company -- and the world's seventh-biggest search engine -- has recently completed its initial public offering, opening at higher-than-expected US$ 25 per share and raising US$ 1.3 billion in the process.

VMWare is big in a backroom service kind of way, while SlideRocket (news, site) helps those pesky end users do slick-and-groovy presentations, so why would the two get together?

Over the weekend, AOL (news, site) picked up Huffington Post for US$ 315 million, bringing some firepower to its web strategy.

Drupal enterprise pushers Acquia (news, site) make a big hire in Europe to spearhead the expansion of the company's footprint on the continent.

In the lofty environs of the executive suite at HP (news, site) a new name is being engraved on the top door!

Some seem to hope that it's an early April Fool's Joke, but the truth came out on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt today: AOL is acquiring TechCrunch.

Don't believe everything you read on the Internet. Fortunately, when I write a story, I'm a bit anal about going to read the source materials. So when I came across a Slashdot post by Sara Chan claiming that "scientists at universities, which are all public in the UK, can now not claim data from publicly-funded research as their private property," I hunted down the ruling in question and gave it a read.

Fighting for visibility in the increasingly crowded social buzz/influencer/reputation analysis market, Networked Insights gets some further investment to be bigger and bolder.

Microsoft  (news, site) and Yahoo! (news, site) have been given the final approval by the EU to go ahead with a partnership that was agreed to last July. That partnership will see Yahoo’s search results being powered by Microsoft Bing for a cut of the ad revenues.

The deal has also been agreed to by US regulators without any conditions seeing the two take control of 30% of the search market -- the other 70% of which is controlled by Google.

A joint statement by the companies said: "While Microsoft will provide the underlying platform, both companies will continue to create different, compelling and evolving experiences, competing for audience, engagement and clicks."

By combining the two, Yahoo! will take over the search advertising work of Microsoft saving them the cost of running huge spidering centers, while Bing will provide all the links for every Yahoo search.

Like all such deals at the moment, the original agreement announced last summer is designed to cut costs for both companies and increase revenue share, which should see some improvement as the combined networks should be considerably more attractive to advertisers than they would be operating on their own.

Microsoft and Yahoo will begin the transition of algorithmic search and have set a goal of completing that effort in at least the United States by the end of 2010.

The companies also said they hope to make significant progress transitioning U.S. advertisers and publishers prior to the 2010 holiday season, but may wait until 2011 if they determine that the transition will be more effective after the holiday season.

All global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.
 

December was a busy month for industry research giant Gartner. They started the month announcing the acquisition of AMR Research and they ended the month with the acquisition of the Burton Group.

Big news in the analyst world today as Gartner announces it has entered into an agreement to acquire AMR Research.

"AMR Research is an excellent strategic fit for Gartner.  The firm is the market leader for research related to supply chain management, which is inextricably linked to IT and has become a central and growing issue for many organizations."

The acquisition offer which has been in the works for weeks, will cost Gartner US$ 64 million in cash. AMR is expected to bring in US$ 40 million in revenue for 2009.

A good deal for AMR as Gartner is 32 times the size of the smaller research firm. To Gartners 650 analysts and 1000 sales reps, AMR adds 40 analysts and 45 sales reps.

AMR's Chief Research Officer, Bruce Richardson, said in a post that he looks forward to becoming part of the Gartner family. He notes benefits such as access to a wide range of research, global reach, a wider audience and more verticals.

He also notes it will be business as usual for AMR -- for now at least.

If keeping ahead of the posse in the web content management industry means responding quicker and more accurately than the rest to market moves, then DotNetNuke Corp (news, site) looks like it could be leading the charge for a while to come.

The open source Web CMS provider has just appointed a board of very experienced advisors that will try and peer into their crystal balls and see what product development and other technology issues are likely to be coming down the line future.

A kind of Macbeth’s witches of the tech industry with four witches instead of three, the new board consists of:

• Frank Artale, Vice President of Business Development at Citrix Systems. Citrix provides virtualization, networking and software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies.
• Brice Snow, Founder and CEO of Snowcovered, the creator and architect of the largest and best known portal for buying and selling DotNetNuke extensions.
• Andrew Aitkin, Founder and Managing Partner at Olliance Group, an open source business and strategy consulting firm.
• Glen Winokur, Managing Director of Emerson Street Partners, who act as an advisory services and seed stage investment firm.

DotNetNuke does appear to have a knack of knowing what’s going to work. Remember that DotNetNuke won PacktPub 2008 award for the Overall Best Open Source CMS.

And with ongoing launches including the recent launch of DotNetNuke Elite and DotNetNuke Premier this month, it would probably take a witches coven to know where next to go.
 

Document management provider Cabinet NG's (news, site) CNG-SAFE is easy to use and economical as well, according to the latest list of Top 20 SMB Products from the CRN Test Centre.

While a lot of companies brag a lot about these two particular aspects of their products, in this case the claims have to be taken at face value as even the testers in their report said they started the testing skeptical, and came of out it impressed.

Infrastructure giant EMC (news, site) expands its activities in India with a tripling of its investment in the next five years.

For many of the regularly caffeinated it was the closing of 600 Starbucks locations; for a large portion of the medical community, the announcement of the sinking crocs ship. As for the tech geeks, it was surely Microsoft’s first-ever drop in annual Windows sales that made them realize: Oh my, the economy really is messed up!

In this case, however, the economy is not the only culprit. Microsoft’s Q4 report to the U.S. SEC includes a rundown of their risk and competition factors, and on that list are both Linux and open source solutions.