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Posts Tagged ‘investment banking’

Cisco Acquires Cloud Management Company Cloupia For $125 Million

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Economy, Entrepreneurship, internet, Market research, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from Techcrunch.

Cisco has announced it plans to acquire Cloupia for $125 million. The software company helps customers automate their data centers.

Cisco sees Cloupia’s infrastructure management software enhancing its Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus switching portfolio. Cisco expects Cloupia will help better manage the automation of compute, network and storage as well as virtual machine and operating system resources.

Cisco UCS is a converged infrastructure play. Cisco has made a big bet on providing converged infrastructures that consolidates compute, storage and networking into one box. IT wants to decrease its data center dependency. Vendors like Cisco, EMC and IBM see converged infrastructures as a way to sell their hardware into the enterprise.

Investing in these systems has its costs for IT. The systems are pricey and create a lock-in with one vendor.

Cisco wrote a blog post about the acquisition today. Here’s a snippet:

Cisco’s acquisition of Cloupia benefits Cisco’s Data Center strategy by providing single “pane-of-glass” management across Cisco and partner solutions including FlexPod, VSPEX, and Vblock. Cloupia’s products will integrate into the Cisco data center portfolio through UCS Manager, UCS Central, and Nexus 1000V, strengthening Cisco’s overall ecosystem strategy by providing open APIs for integration with a broad community of developers and partners.

The post is a window into Cisco’s data center strategy. Like other big enterprise software companies, Cisco partners with companies such as NetApp and VMware to sell its solutions through its extensive sales channels.

Read more here.

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Khosla’s Clean Tech VC Fund Beats the Odds, Raises $1bn

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, Investments, Market research, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 24, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a possitive article from Green Energy Reporter.

“A widely used catch phrase – or some variation of it – appearing in the media since the official start of the crisis this fall,  goes something like this: “the global economic crisis, has left the [add required sector, in our case clean tech] reeling, unable to tap crucial funding…. ” This generic phrase and its variations have been used over and over to describe a harsh reality, specifically  how the credit crunch has left industries across the board at a standstill, unable tap financing to support their growth.

Then there is Khosla Ventures, the Sand Hill Road clean tech-focused venture fund, which will be announcing sometime this week the closing of two funds totalling $1 billion, all dedicated to supporting early clean tech investments. This is impressive, considering that most don’t expect this sort of capital raising to happen until well into 2010.

But it seems that Khosla Ventures, founded by Silicon Valley veteran Vinod Khosla, can afford shortcuts.  For one,  Khosla is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a former partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, two leading Silicon Valley pioneers. Also, back in 2004, when clean tech was an afterthought and social media  à la MySpace was all the rage,  he launched Khosla Ventures, one of the sector’s first clean-tech focused VC fund.

Forbes.com reports Khosla is on the verge of announcing two new funds: a $250 million vehicle for seed-stage investments and a $750 million fund for larger deals dubbed “KVIII.” One fund has closed already, and the other could close soon, Forbes reports, citing people with knowledge of the funds. Khosla himself is expected to invest $150 million of his own money in the new funds. Other reported investors include CalPERS, the pension giant with $179.2 billion in assets.”

Read the full article here.

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Interview with Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 9, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a good excerpt for Mercury News.

“One of the world’s pre-eminent venture capitalists, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, has picked winners like Flextronics, Cisco Systems, Yahoo, PayPal and Google by focusing on small teams or individuals that on first glance might appear to be unfundable. In a rare interview, Moritz spoke with the Mercury News about one of his latest long-shots, a call-center company founded in India, how he picks companies to back, and the silver lining in the financial meltdown. Following is an edited transcript.

Q How has the financial crisis reshaped the economy and affected the way you pick winners?

A I think tougher circumstances just serve to shine a brighter light on everything. The manner in which we pursue the business hasn’t changed.

Q Has it affected the way you view your portfolio companies?

A I think the managements of companies all across America understand that the sooner they don’t have to rely on the kindness of strangers to support their operations, the better off they are going to be. Again, I don’t think that is a startling new insight. It’s just when money is harder to get and credit is tight and investors are less giddy, I think companies and managements become much more disciplined. It means the people who start companies in times like these are people who are genuinely interested in starting companies. You have to be very determined to venture out into atmospheric circumstances like the ones that we’ve been through in the past nine months. Which means that the pretenders and posers and people who are really much more interested, if they are honest about it, in becoming rich than starting a company — those sorts of people will stay on the sidelines and wait for the weather to improve.”

Read the full interview by Elise Ackerman at at SiliconValley.com here.

Others covering this story: Reddit, Trading markets, MATR.

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