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NEW YORK: German business software giant SAP AG has agreed to buy SuccessFactors Inc in an all-cash deal worth $ 3.4 billion.

SAP will pay $ 40 a share for acquiring all common stock of US-based SuccessFactors. This represents a premium of 52 per cent over the closing price of SuccessFactors' shares on December 2, the Germany-based firm said yesterday in a statement.

SuccessFactors, a provider of employee management software, has more than 3,500 customers and over 15 million subscribers in 168 countries. SAP is the one of the world's largest business software companies, with more than 54,000 employees in over 50 countries worldwide, including India.

"SAP AG and SuccessFactors, Inc, announced that SAP's subsidiary, SAP America, Inc, has entered into a definitive merger agreement with SuccessFactors... pursuant to which a subsidiary of SAP would offer to acquire all outstanding shares of common stock of SuccessFactors for $ 40 per share in cash, representing an enterprise value of about $ 3.4 billion," it added.

The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2012.
The acquisition will add to SAP's capabilities as a provider of cloud applications, platforms and infrastructure. The combination of SAP and SuccessFactors will establish an advanced end-to-end offering of cloud and on-premise solutions for managing all relevant business processes.

"The cloud is a core of SAP's future growth and the combination of SuccessFactors' leadership team and technology with SAP will create a cloud powerhouse. The acquisition will help us address the top priority for CEOs globally -- managing people and talent," SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott said.

"Together, SAP and SuccessFactors will create tremendous business value for customers, with potent synergies to accelerate our growth in the cloud," he added.

SuccessFactors Founder and CEO Lars Dalgaard said, "This is a revolutionary combination of proven capabilities that will allow SuccessFactors to accelerate our roadmap by 10 years and bring the world's leading application knowledge and intellectual property to our customers through the cloud and the largest applications customer base instantly."

 

Source : Economic Times

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BANGALORE: India's top IT companies have given completely conflicting remarks on the global IT demand in the near future. While, Infosys was cautious; Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Cognizant and Wipro were very optimistic on demand for IT products.

Infosys had warned of dipping of demand due to project delays in deteriorating environment. "Economic uncertainties are slowing down decisions," SD Shibulal, also a co-founder of Infosys, said at the Reuters India Investment Summit in Bangalore. "We're clearly seeing it. The slowness has increased in the last month or month and a half," he said. Infosys had forecast quarter-on-quarter revenue growth of 3.2-4.5 percent for the October-December period. The company has backed its full-year dollar revenue growth view of 17.1-19.1 percent.

Cognizant on the other hand is very positive about demand for IT services and products. Last month, Cognizant inked a multi-year agreement with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to deliver comprehensive biostatistics and medical reporting services for generating clinical study reports.

IT companies have devised strategic plans to grow newly acquired businesses and verticals and also to enhance existing relationships.

S Mahalingam, CFO, TCS said, "There is a cause for concern at this moment of time, but in case of a specific slowdown, we have not seen any trendsetting as of yet."

As the Rupee depreciated, CFOs across Indian IT companies huddled inside their boardrooms, to assess the impact. The $70-billion India's IT-BPO industry, for the first time, is not so exuberant about small gains in operating margins due to a Rupee fall. TCS, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro and HCL Tech - have together hedged close to $5 billion in hedges, mostly around Rs45-49 to a dollar, which prevents them from expecting a windfall gain.

Infosys and TCS have long maintained operating margins in the high twenties. But stiff competition from global players such as IBM and Accenture has put margins under pressure.

TCS which launched an integrated information technology solution for Small and Medium Business (SMB) segment recently said it was targeting to reach over 1000 customers in the segment nationally this year.
Margins for IT companies could gain from a steep decline in the Indian rupee, which makes exports more competitive.

 

Source : Economic Times

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The latest numbers from Nielsen paint a gloomy picture for Microsoft and its Windows Phone/Windows Mobile platforms.

In the third quarter of the year, both Windows Mobile and Windows Phone combined held 6.1% of the U.S. smartphone market. That's down 33% from the 9% of the U.S. market Windows Mobile/Windows Phone held in the previous quarter.

Breaking down who owns what of the (sliver-esque) Windows Phone 7 market, HTC leads with Samsung, "other", and Motorola trailing.

HTC's WP7/Windows Mobile devices account for 77%--or the vast lion's share--of all U.S. Windows Mobile/Windows Phone devices. Samsung has the next largest share with 9.8% of the Windows Phone devices in the U.S. The "other" category holds 6.6%, and Motorola has 3.3%.

Keep in mind, these figures include Windows Phone 7 plus the legacy Windows Mobile 5.x/6.x devices that are still out there (probably in the form of enterprise handhelds).

You can probably guess what the rest of the U.S. smartphone market looks like.

Android has the largest percentage of U.S. smartphones, growing from 39% to 42.8% from the second quarter to the third quarter. HTC's Android phones alone own 15% of the U.S. smartphone market, Samsung has 10.7%, Motorola owns 10.4%, and "other" (probably including LG, Dell, Huawei, Pantech, Casio, and others) rounds out the Android presence with 7.2% of the U.S. smartphone market.

Apple's share grew a fraction from 28% to 28.3% quarter-over-quarter.

Research In Motion, meanwhile dropped from 20% to 17.8% quarter-over-quarter. Palm and HP's webOS holds a pitiful 2.2% of the U.S. smartphone market, while Nokia's Symbian brings up the rear with 1.7%.

"In the U.S., 71% of those with smartphones own either an Android device or an iPhone," explained Nielsen. "But when it comes to smartphone apps, iPhones and Android smartphones are even more dominant: 83% of app downloaders, that is, those who downloaded an app in the past 30 days, use iPhone or Android smartphones."

The good news for Microsoft and its Windows Phone platform is that the Mango update just began rolling out in late September and early October. In fact, Mango-based phones didn't really hit their stride until mid-October. With HTC's Titan and Nokia's Lumia 800 on the road to being hits, it is possible Microsoft's presence in the U.S. market can reverse itself.

 

Source : InformationWeek

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IT automation software maker Puppet Labs announced Tuesday that it has raised $8.5 million in a Series C round of funding led by Cisco, Google Ventures, and VMware.   Puppet Labs previously raised funds from Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures, and Radar Partners, bringing the company’s total raised to $15.75 million.

Founded in 2005, the Portland, Ore.-based company has made a name for itself with its flagship IT automation product Puppet Project, which was released that same year.  Since then, Puppet has branched out and in January, the company released its first commercial version of Puppet, Puppet Enterprise, which—just as the name implies—allows systems administrators at the enterprise level to manage IT infrastructure on premise and in the cloud.

In September, Puppet Labs unveiled Puppet Enterprise 2.0, which allows systems administrators to configure and manage virtualized and cloud infrastructure.

The company currently boasts more than 250 customers, including such high-profile names as Zynga, Twitter, NYSE, Disney, Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Constant Contact, Match.com, Shopzilla, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Stanford University.

"Global companies need efficient solutions to manage their on-premise and cloud infrastructures," said Google Ventures partner Karim Faris, in a statement. "The Puppet Labs team has demonstrated the market traction and leadership to capitalize on this tremendous opportunity, and we're looking forward to working with them to grow the business."

The company currently numbers 60 employees and was recently named an AlwaysOn “OnDemand Top 100” winner.  This year, the company has also seen its community expand beyond North America and Europe into China, India, and Japan.

Puppet Labs plans to use the new funds to accelerate growth.

"The participation of these new investors in this latest round reinforces our lead in providing powerful IT automation tools for system administrators, whether deploying applications on-premise or in the cloud," said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs, in a statement.

 

Source : Vator News

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Skorpios Technologies Inc, a composite photonics communications technology company, announced the close of its Series B funding on Tuesday with an additional $2 million -- bringing the funding round to $21 million.

The $2 million addition came in from T-Venture -- which is Deutsche Telekom's venture capital company. Deutsche Telekom is best known as the parent company of the global T-Mobile and T-System's brand. This deeper investment in mobile communication technology could create an even greater boost to the T-Mobile brand and its efforts to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving mobile world.

This funding announcement also comes on the heels of the Thanksgiving that AT&T withdrew its application to acquire T-Mobile -- a blow to T-Mobile which could get squeezed out as the fourth major mobile carrier.

The two-year-old company, based in Albuquerque, N Mex., uses its communication technology to optimize transceivers and other elements of communication to deliver even higher speed products.

"We are delighted to welcome Deutsche Telekom to the investment syndicate," Stephen Krasulick, president and CEO of Skorpios Technologies said in a statement. "The support of global carriers, such as Deutsche Telekom, in addition to major equipment companies and systems integrators, validates the market need for Skorpios' differentiating component technology. Our platform is a key enabler to reducing costs and improving performance in next-generation optical communications equipment."

The total $21 million raised in Series B will be used to expand Skorpios Technologies' infrastructure and complete the commercialization of its core technology. This roughly brings the total funding for the tech company to $23 million.

The company is currently in a mode of rapid expansion and is looking to hire innovative scientists and engineers in the coming months.
"The integration of today's separated building blocks into a single chip provides various important effects for our network, such as capex and opex savings at the aggregation layer and core, but also the economic enabling of new technologies that are essential to our strategy," said Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, Director of Technology, Telekom Deutschland GmbH. About T-Venture

T-Venture, founded in 1997 as a total subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG that invests in young companies that demonstrate economic and technological complimentary abilities with the business ideas of Deutsche Telekom.

 

Source : Vator.tv

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ARM Development Studio 5 Community Edition: native software up to 4 times faster than Java code

This week sees the arrival of the ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5) Community Edition (CE), a free-to-use edition of its reference software development toolkit. The new edition has been "dedicated" to the Android application developer community; as such, it has been engineered to help create native software that can run up to four times faster than Java code.

DS-5 CE joins ARM's standard SDK and NDK Android development kits by guiding developers towards the "performance and energy-efficiency advantages" made possible when ARM native code is used in Android applications. The new toolkit permits development of Java and C/C++ code in the same Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE).

ARM says that the DS-5 Community Edition includes limited (but essential) functionality from the premium DS-5 toolkit to help solve common Android application developer pain points. It achieves this by providing an integrated graphical debugger for NDK-generated code and visibility of advanced processor information, including ARM NEON Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) registers.

This new release also features a tailored version of the ARM Streamline Performance Analyzer for use with compatible Android development platforms. Streamline (a branded product name) is designed to capture system-wide performance statistics from a variety of sources, which helps developers to locate hotspots in their code and isolate potential causes. Platform builders can add support for Streamline by integrating an open source driver available from the Linaro website.

"With over half a million apps on the Android market today, developers need to deliver an outstanding user experience to succeed commercially," said John Cornish, executive vice president and general manager, system design division, ARM. "ARM DS-5 Community Edition offers developers an easy to use environment for debugging and optimizing C/C++ code. This allows them to take full advantage of ARM processor technology using native code to deliver the performance and functionality that consumers demand."

 

Source : drdobbs

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Android again was the dominant mobile operating system among U.S. mobile subscribers in the third quarter, while Apple was still the largest smartphone maker, Nielsen reported Tuesday.

All told, Android had 42.8% of the smartphone market. Android phones from HTC accounted for 15% of the overall smartphone market, Samsung Android phones had market share of 10.1% and Motorola Android phones had 10.4%. Android phones from other companies accounted for 7.2% of the market.

Apple, with its iOS-based iPhone, was well ahead of any single Android maker, with 28.3% of the market. Research In Motion, with its BlackBerry operating system, had the second largest share, at 17.8%. Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 platforms accounted for 6.1% of the market. Neilsen based its findings on surveys of 22,200 U.S. mobile subscribers.

Android and iPhone users combined to make up 71% of the market. Nielsen found that the two groups downloaded 83% of all mobile apps downloaded in the prior 30 days.

Forty-four percent of all U.S. mobile phone users now have smartphones, Nielsen said. For the period of roughly the second quarter, Nielsen said 40% of mobile users owned smartphones and that 40% of those users had Android devices. That figure is about three percentage points below the third-quarter result. In the second-quarter time frame, the iPhone had 28% of the market and BlackBerry devices had 19%.

 

Source : ComputerWorld

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