| By Amy Wohl, Contributing Analyst,
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2008 Promises to be a Lively Year in Software
M&A: Mergers and Acquistions
Already, it’s gotten off to a tumultuous start in the M&A area with Microsoft’s hostile offer to purchase Yahoo for $31 per share in cash and stock, originally worth about $44.6 billion (worth somewhat less now, in a falling stock market). Yahoo has been looking (unsuccessfully, we think) for a white knight. Most knights don’t have $50 Billion plus horses. So we suspect Microsoft will slightly sweeten the deal – financial analysts suggest to $35 per share – and take the prize. The question is what they’ll do with it.
Microsoft is not good at letting acquired companies run on their own,
nor have they been very successful in the Internet and advertising
sector. The Yahoo and Microsoft cultures are quite different. One
wonders what the outcome might be, particularly since many of the
skilled technical people Microsoft wants to retain may be newly minted
millionaires. M&A has been breaking out all over, with the big
guys (IBM, Oracle, and Sun) all playing significant roles. Expect more.
MS rolls out Windows 8 Server Software. Next month will mark the
launch of Microsoft’s next round of Windows Server 8/Visual Studio
8/SQL Server 8. They are promising lots of attractive upgrades and
expecting many customers to move up the feeding chain quickly.
Protecting their Windows servers is a very important activity for
Microsoft because lots of companies now routinely buy Linux for lots of
servers, deeming it cheap and reliable – Microsoft has to counter with
lots of features – and as customers move to SaaS – see below – they are
likely to be running on Linux servers without even knowing that. When
your environment is a web browser you don’t much care what operating
system your server is running – only that it works.
SaaS: Software as a Service
I think this is the breakout year. Customers of every size
have realized that some applications aren’t worth supporting in-house.
Some of them are commodity applications like email; others are
applications that don’t get used often enough by enough people to be
bothered having the in-house skills to implement and manage. In both
cases, a reliable SaaS vendor with the right software can be a good
alternative. He should only be slightly less expensive, but he should
free up skilled staff for other work – or let smaller companies avoid
needing skilled staff at all.
Open Everywhere
Everyone has been embracing open software and open standards, from IBM to Sun to even Microsoft. Microsoft had a field day recently, releasing 30,000+ pages of specifications and APIs for its volume products to its web sites to aid developers in creating interoperability to its products. It also promised to be much open in every way. You can read the article on my blog , noting that Microsoft seems to have placed quite a bit of information outside of the protection of trade secrets, but, of course, retains the IP protection for any patents on the code.
The Web 2.0 Evolution
We continue to see lots of people vie to be the
next YouTube or FaceBook, including some who bravely hope to be the
FaceBook for the enterprise. Many of these are wielding applications
in office productivity, collaboration, project management, and other
areas where current tools are deemed vulnerable. Microsoft Office
(with more than 400 million users) is not in danger of disappearing –
it will probably be around for at least 100 years – but it is beginning
to be nibbled around the edges by a dozen competitors, giving customers
the perception that there are other options. Some of them will take
it, especially the increasing variety of versions of Open Office.
And speaking of the Web 2.0 evolution.... more>
Read more from Amy on her blogs.
Amy Wohl’s Opinions at http://amywohl.weblogger.com/
Amy Wohl’s Opinions on SaaS at http://amys.typepad.com/amy_wohls_opinions_on_saa/
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Perspectives 
