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The acquisition of Vaultus by Antenna is a natural step in an industry consolidation, not really surprising. I don’t know the companies’ distribution networks well enough to know whether there are significant gains to be had by integrating the two patches: are the two customer bases complementary, or was there significant overlap? If the latter, the gains will be realized only after one rationalizes the marketing and sales organizations of the two groups.
On the product side, the portfolios appear to be a little more complementary. Vaultus was seen as a leader in Sharepoint mobilization, an area that Antenna was not known for, so the Vaultus offering, which ostensibly will be run as a separate business division, will plug a hole there.
As in any acquisition, the true test of success is usually not product and market complementarity, but culture, management, and execution. The acquisition of Dexterra strengthened Antenna, no evidence to indicate that this next step won’t do the same. Pyxis and Sybase better take note.
Regarding Palm, Om Malik has a great article http://gigaom.com/2010/04/13/palm-time-to-die/
and in fact a great series of articles over the last year about Palm. I think he’s right; they’ve lost their edge as a serious threat, but there’s probably IP and/or technology and/or market sectors that are valuable to other companies (he suggests HTC is high on the list of potential purchasers).He may be right. All I know is that when I talk to companies about mobile strategy, the discussion turns quickly to iPhone/iPad vs Blackberry vs Android. Palm never seems to get mentioned.
As an application developer, I don’t even raise the topic of Palm as a meaningful platform anymore. If someone needs it, fine, but otherwise, I see them as someone who’s had their day and needs a homerun to get back in the game. If Palm Pre was supposed to be it, then I’d say they’ve struck out.
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The Ghosts of M&A Past, Present and Future in Enterprise Mobility
Then today, we hear new rumors that Palm has officially put itself on the selling block. This is obviously not official, but raises the fuel on the Palm speculation that has been simmering for recent weeks. This however, is not intended to be commentary on Palm (we had some great thoughts last week from Avian Securities’ Matthew Thornton).
Instead, let’s look at a couple of different events. Last year, Antenna Software purchased Vettro and Dexterra allowing it to both organizally and inorganically become one of the most important players in the mobile enterprise application space. It’s actually an interesting spot for Antenna to be in. While there are a large number of mobile enterprise application vendors in the market, few now have Antenna’s depth and breadth of offering…and in fact only a very short list of companies are bigger. Kudos to Antenna CEO Jim Hemmer for executing well on his strategy.
The interesting thing in my mind is that, while there has been some consolidation in the wireless expense management industry (with Rivermine acquiring companies at a fairly regular pace) there have been few acquisitions in the enterprise mobility space apart from what Antenna has been doing.
I’ve said on more than one occasion that I believe there is too much fragmentation in the enterprise mobility industry. This is to be expected, given how immature the market is. However, this industry is accelerating at an increasing rate which will require consolidation to create less buyer confusion and help improve revenues for the remaining companies. Yet somehow, there’s little activity in the world of mobility management vendors. There has been speculation that one vendor has been on the buying block for some time, but there haven’t seemed to be many interested parties.
So I open up the floor to you all and ask you what do you think? Are we going to see more acquisitions coming soon? Is Palm finally going to be bought by someone?
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