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CIO Executive Council

A Peer-Advisory Service and Professional Association for CIOs

Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives

Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.

Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices

Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.

Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices

This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.

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Feature

Biggest Technology M&A Deals of 2008

Among the top 15 include big names like HP, AT&T and Microsoft, which may all together have a huge impact on the future of IT.

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By Network World Staff

December 10, 2008 — Network World —

The top 15 mergers and acquisition deals in the network industry for 2008 were worth nearly $65 billion, and companies involved ran the gamut from those specializing in IT services to network routers to wireless and security. Carriers such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless and CenturyTel were among the biggest spenders. Given the practically nonexistent tech IPO market, buyouts proved to be a popular exit strategy for many this year.

We've consolidated 60-plus tech M&A deals (and counting) from this year in our ongoing slideshow. Note that in many deals, the vendors don't publicly say how much they're forking over for their prize acquisitions, but here, we'll recap the top 15 based on publicly disclosed transaction values:

1. Verizon Wireless-Alltel: $28.1 billion (includes $22.2 billion in debt)

Apparently tired of being the second-largest U.S. wireless carrier, Verizon Wireless is vaulting past AT&T via this buyout of the nation's fifth-largest wireless carrier. After adding Alltel's 13 million customers to its ranks, Verizon will have the most subscribers in the United States, with around 80 million. AT&T, which has mostly held the lead for total wireless subscribers since merging with Cingular in 2004, had an estimated 71 million subscribers at the time the deal was announced in June. As is frequently the case with big carrier deals, the Department of Justice requested that Verizon shed some assets in the name of fair competition. The Federal Trade Commission gave its blessing to the deal in December.

2. HP-EDS: $13.9 billion

HP boasted in May when it announced the deal that it would double the company's services revenue and put it into the No. 2 spot in the IT business services market behind IBM. More recently, HP detailed massive job cuts – 24,600 of them – and outlined its integration plans, including transferring HP services into EDS. Some worry that HP might keep its product and services businesses too close to one anther for customers' comfort. According to the company's latest financial announcement, "HP Services (HPS) revenue increased 99 percent to $8.6 billion, led by $3.9 billion revenue resulting from the EDS acquisition." Apart from that buy, HPS revenue grew by 10 percent in 2008 over the previous year.

3. Oracle-BEA: $8.5 billion

BEA stared down Oracle and got a better deal in January than the original $6.7 billion offer from a few months earlier. Some said at the outset that IBM might also be a winner from this deal by exploiting fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding the middleware vendor's integration into Oracle. In July, Oracle spelled out its BEA product strategy: All BEA products will continue under existing support timelines, with "no forced migration at all," Oracle CEO Charles Phillips said at the time.