The European IT landscape changed for good when Siemens, the last remaining major vendor, tossed its computer systems business into a joint venture with Fujitsu which will merge the two companies’ European operations. The 50%-50% owned Fujitsu Siemens Computers will be the third-largest European vendor by revenue and the second behind Compaq in terms of unit shipments. The two say the thrust of their venture, which has been secretly agreed since March, is to drive the two companies to third place in the global computer market. Combined, Fujitsu and Siemens’ sales currently place the joint venture fifth globally behind IBM, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Siemens Computer Systems division has annual revenues of $4.12 billion and roughly 8,000 employees. Sales outside Europe account for a lowly 8%, or $320 million, of overall revenue. Fujitsu Computers (Europe) has annual revenues of $2.06 billion and 1,600 employees. Revenues for the 2000 fiscal year are projected to top $7.85 billion, with unit shipments expected to include 4.8 million PCs, 180,000 Intel servers and 5,000 enterprise-level Unix servers. Redundancies and the consolidation of overlapping product lines won’t be addressed ahead of a formal statement of the company’s business plan, slated for October 1.
DoubleClick announced that it wanted to spend $1 billion for Abacus Direct, a firm that collects and analyzes data from retail and home shoppers. DoubleClick intends to data-mine Abacus resources to make its own online advertising more efficient. The company sells banner ads on a network of more than 1300 web sites, including AltaVista. Right now it knows only very general facts about its users, such as sites they have previously visited. With Abacus data in hand, DoubleClick could also find out whether a given internet user has shopped at Williams-Sonoma or Bloomingdales. Privacy activists may not be best pleased. If it goes ahead, the deal will see DoubleClick issue 1.05 shares of its common stock for each share of Abacus stock. Abacus shareholders will own 20.5% of the combined company, which will retain the DoubleClick name.
New Era of Networks spent $34 million to stake its claim on the Microsoft EAI enterprise application integration market with the acquisition of MicroScript. The company claims it has better than a two year lead over anyone else in this space, has 62 employees and did $8 million sales last year. It claims to support all underlying transaction layers. The market knocked more holes out of Neon’s share price on the news. The stock fell $4.37 or more than 10% at $38.87.
Web application server and development tools firm Allaire boosted its Java capabilities by announcing it has struck a deal to acquire Live Software for about $24 million in stock. San Francisco-based Live is billed as a pioneer in server-side Java development and deployment technology and is the developer of the Jrun engine, which claims about 80,000 developers worldwide. Allaire, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will hand over 550,000 shares of its common stock to cover the purchase, valuing the deal at $24.2 million, based on Monday’s closing price of $44.063. The transaction will be accounted for as a pooling of interests although no expected closing date was given.
