May 19th, 2014 — Data management
Hortonworks acquires XA Secure. And more
And that’s the data day, today.
February 28th, 2014 — Data management
451 Research Data Platforms and Analytics – 2014 Research Agenda. And more
And that’s the data day, today.
February 8th, 2013 — Data management
Teradata results. Funding for DataXu. The chemistry of data. And more.
And that’s the data day, today.
May 8th, 2012 — Data management
January 10th, 2012 — Data management
Oracle OEMs Cloudera. The future of Apache CouchDB. And more.
An occasional series of data-related news, views and links posts on Too Much Information. You can also follow the series @thedataday.
* Oracle announced the general availability of Big Data Appliance, and an OEM agreement with Cloudera for CDH and Cloudera Manager.
* The Future of Apache CouchDB Cloudant confirms intention to integrate the core capabilities of BigCouch into Apache CouchDB.
* Reinforcing Couchbase’s Commitment to Open Source and CouchDB Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold attempts to clear up any confusion.
* Hortonworks Appoints Shaun Connolly to Vice President of Corporate Strategy Former vice president of product strategy at VMware.
* Splunk even more data with 4.3 Introducing the latest Splunk release.
* Announcement of Percona XtraDB Cluster (alpha release) Based on Galera.
* Bringing Value of Big Data to Business: SAP’s Integrated Strategy Forbes interview with with Sanjay Poonen, President and corporate officer of SAP Global Solutions.
* New Release of Oracle Database Firewall Extends Support to MySQL and Enhances Reporting Capabilities Self-explanatory.
* Big data and the disruption curve “Many efforts are being funded by business units and not the IT department and money is increasingly being diverted from large enterprise vendors.”
* Get your SQL Server database ready for SQL Azure Microsoft “codename” SQL Azure Compatibility Assessment.
* An update on Apache Hadoop 1.0 Cloudera’s Charles Zedlewski helpfully explains Apache Hadoop branch numbering.
* Xeround and the CAP Theorem So where does Xeround fit in the CAP Theorem?
* Can Yahoo’s new CEO Thompson harness big data, analytics? Larry Dignan thinks Scott Thompson might just be the right guy for the job.
* US Companies Face Big Hurdles in ‘Big Data’ Use “21% of respondents were unsure how to best define Big Data”
* Schedule Your Agenda for 2012 NoSQL Events Alex Popescu updates his list of the year’s key NoSQL events.
* DataStax take Apache Cassandra Mainstream in 2011; Poised for Growth and Innovation in 2012 The usual momentum round-up from DataStax.
* Objectivity claimed significant growth in adoption of its graph database, InfiniteGraph and flagship object database, Objectivity/DB.
* Cloudera Connector for Teradata 1.0.0 Self-explanatory.
* For 451 Research clients
# SAS delivers in-memory analytics for Teradata and Greenplum Market Development report
# With $84m in funding, Opera sets out predictive-analytics plans Market Development report
* Google News Search outlier of the day: First Dagger Fencing Competition in the World Scheduled for January 14, 2012
And that’s the Data Day, today.
July 30th, 2009 — M&A, Search
Now that the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo is done, it got me thinking more about Yahoo and it’s position as a pioneer of the web. That it was one is not in doubt; its directory was indeed a first and useful. But how much else did it actually pioneer? Have a look at a list of Yahoo’s acquisitions.
- Search – surely the cornerstone of the business, yet its very first search engine was licensed from Open Text in 1995. Sure, it went on to build its own and do some great work, but now with the deal done with Microsoft, Yahoo has exited the search business.
- Webmail – I recall getting a great Yahoo email address when that came out in 1997; it was a pioneer, but it got there by purchasing Four11.com and its RocketMail service . Now my account is overrun with spam and unusable (yet the company has the temerity to regularly threaten to cut me off for having too much mail and not using it enough, all of which is spam that its own spam filters can’t control. Hmmm.)
- Personal publishing – it was an early major player in personal publishing now called blogging, but again it got there largely by purchasing GeoCities for an enormous amount of Yahoo stock.
- Advertising – it pioneered banner ads on the web but as we all know but caught out by keyword search innovation from Google (which it built, rather than bought). And it had to buy Overture from Idealab.
- Rich media – the Broadcast.com deal unleashed Mark Cuban on an unsuspecting world.
- Photos – to its credit and bought Flickr and then largely left it alone
- Social bookmarking – same goes for De.licio.us
But if the rest that can be said for it is that Yahoo knew when to leave its acquired companies alone, to give them space to grow and continue innovating then all that’s left is a dwindling brand and company with some choice assets left intact for others to pick up over time. As this article pointed out recently, many of these acquired assets have been closed down, some only after a few years.
There is still innovation happening within Yahoo, plenty of it and I wish the folks at Yahoo working in the labs on some great semantic technology, among other things the best of luck. But touting a new home page just last week doesn’t give me much hope that Yahoo really gets the distributed, read/write Web. Who cares about home pages?
And of course Yahoo isn’t going anywhere soon, it has plenty of cash in the bank and a new revenue stream courtesy of Microsoft. But I doubt it will last out the 10 years of this deal.
One of things all this demonstrates is that M&A is different in different parts of the tech industry. In enterprise software quite often a company is buying a customer base and its ongoing maintenance stream – this is how Oracle has grown. But on the web with people not paying you directly and with very low (to nil) switching costs to another search engine, serving up a different set of ads, things are very different and you have to focus on core competences, not run after each new fad just as it’s peaking and buy your way into it.
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