Hey Larry, Small Is Beautiful ...

October 10, 2005 (Computerworld) ... and probably better, too. That seems to be the lesson learned by Hewlett-Packard Co., which has recently eschewed megadeals for a series of smaller ones. For example, HP's agreement to nab RLX Technologies Inc., which was announced last week, practically
amounts to a rounding error for a company its size. HP didn't disclose the price it's paying for RLX. But Richard Evensen, an analyst at Technology Business Research Inc. in Hampton, N.H., estimates that HP will fork over $30 million, primarily to get the blade management software that Spring, Texas-based RLX sells. Evensen says the practice of acquiring small IT vendors to boost a company's competitive position in the market has been perfected by Cisco Systems Inc. And he argues that going forward, HP is also likely to focus on buying smaller companies with valuable intellectual property assets that it "can quickly and successfully integrate" with its existing products.

Josh Pickus, senior vice president and general manager of CA's Clarity division

Likewise, Computer Associates International Inc. has adopted a strategy of buying smaller and wiser, says Josh Pickus, who was CEO of Niku Corp. before CA bought the company in August. Now he is senior vice president and general manager of CA's Clarity division, which is named for Niku's IT governance software. CA "has retooled the way they do acquisitions," Pickus says. "It's not about squeezing profits from big, dying businesses. It's about getting growth from new opportunities." He says CA expects that the three companies it bought recently -- Niku, Netegrity Inc. and Concord Communications Inc. -- will bring half of its growth in the coming years.
Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison likes big takeovers, as shown by his acquisition of PeopleSoft Inc. and last month's deal to buy Siebel Systems Inc. (In a similar vein, Ellison cruises the globe in the world's biggest yacht, according to Vanity Fair magazine.) But even he appears to appreciate small deals. According to Evensen, of the 10 acquisitions made by Oracle this year, five have involved companies with less than 100 employees.

	Ash Nashed, CEO of Congoo LLC

Does the world really need yet another ...
... search engine? Maybe not one like Google or Ask Jeeves, but Ash Nashed, CEO of Congoo LLC in Branchburg, N.J., has something else in mind. Congoo's namesake software searches premium sites along with the rest of the Web, then lists the premium content at the top of the search results, Nashed says. His company is working on deals with providers of general and financial news so Congoo users will get limited access to the premium areas of their Web sites. Congoo, which will go live in mid-November, will also have tools to help end users share information with one another.

Doc Vaidhyanathan, vice president of product marketing at Arcot Systems Inc.

Spyware keyloggers are trying to ...
... steal your user authentication codes. Aladdin Knowledge Systems Ltd., a Tel Aviv-based security vendor, says it conducted a two-month study of 2,000 known spyware programs and found that 15% were keyloggers designed to steal user IDs, passwords, PINs and other log-in data. Doc Vaidhyanathan, vice president of product marketing at Arcot Systems Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., thinks his company has devised a clever way to beat the key loggers: putting a random and shuffled set of characters on an end user's display. That is, when someone wants to log into an application, the ArcotID software sends a mix of characters that the user chooses his password from. As characters get clicked, the software scrambles their order so even keyloggers that watch where a mouse goes can't determine which ones have been picked. Vaidhyanathan says that next year, Arcot will ship software that ties end-user access to specific systems. ArcotID supports both Windows PCs and Macintosh machines. Pricing varies by the number of users, but Vaidhyanathan says that a bank wanting its online customers to use the tool could pay as little as pennies per year for each client.

	Citrix's appliance juices server response.

Networking appliance boosts application ...... performance by offloading processing tasks from servers. Citrix Systems Inc. in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., this week will release the Citrix NetScaler Application Switch SE, a small, rack-mounted appliance with an awfully long name. According to Greg Smith, director of product marketing at Citrix's NetScaler division, the device is the first to come from that unit since Citrix completed its purchase of NetScaler Inc. in August. The appliance is designed to free servers from having to handle a variety of processing tasks, such as encryption, connection management and data compression. Pricing starts at $17,500.