A Tale of Two Acquisitions

In the last week there have been in the new two acquisitions in the Tech space which are pretty close to home for me. The first was 170 million acquisition of Mint by Intuit. My initial thoughts of starting a Personal Finance SaaS company for Asia was inspired  by looking at Mint and reading this article in WSJ. We are now taking MyMoneyManage into a much broader direction, focusing on not just consumers but on a broader SME market which seems more lucrative for Asia.

The other acquisition was smaller one by IBM of Redpill Solutions but probably more significant to me because I worked at Redpill for one and a half years when the Analytics business was starting off. They were crazy days of literally running around trying to convince clients of the value of tapping into the data that they have sitting around.

Congrats to the Redpill team on pulling this off!

Both acquisitions are on the face of it similar, established companies taking over smaller innovative companies which are focused on providing a different level of service to their customers,  both are also about doing more with the data of their customers. How will these two acquisitions pan out is something only future will make clear. But I would like to believe that Redpill will have a greater impact on the future with their customer focus. Mint will get absorbed into Quicken and become just a pretty front-end service while Redpill has the opportunity to really change the world with the reach and openings that IBM can give them.

Will be following with interest on how these acquisitions play out.

Oracle Buying Sun

Oracle seems to be buying Sun! WTF!!! Why is an apps player buying a Hardware vendor. It would be like Microsoft buying Acer. Is it for the MySQL piece or are they trying to compete with HP and IBM. Should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Rumors of IBM taking over Sun

The stock price of Sun Microsystems is up by more than 100%. Blomberg is reporting this is on rumors that IBM is looking to acquire Sun.

They add

The acquisition of Sun, which would be the biggest in IBM’s history, would help the company widen its lead over Hewlett- Packard Co. in the $53.1 billion market for servers, which run networks and Web sites.

But given that the server market is shrinking while the Cloud Computing looks like the next big thing and with IBM’s grid computing not going anywhere. This looks like more a New Technology play rather than to acquire server market share.

Update: Well the deal is off! I think this clears the way for Cisco to make a bid.