Our latest installment in the Pink Slip 2.0 series this morning drew a lot of comments - both praising the three coaches we had paired up with Elise, Roopa and Kris, and blasting their advice as irrelevant tripe. Read the rest of this entry »
Disk drive manufacturer Seagate Technology cited favorable demand and pricing for its products Wednesday when it raised its guidance for its fiscal 2009 fourth quarter.
The company, which is headquartered in the Cayman Islands but operates out of Scotts Valley, now expects sales to Read the rest of this entry »
Two days after holding its annual meeting, Hansen Medical had one of its directors resign, the company reported in a filing today with the SEC.
Thomas McConnell was not up for re-election to Hansen’s board, whose members serve staggered terms, and his was not set to expire until Read the rest of this entry »
LeRoy Kopp and his Minnesota-based Kopp Investment Advisor funds disclosed holding 11.2 million shares, or about 6 percent, of Oclaro, the San Jose fiber-optics equipment company formed out of the April merger of Bookham and Avanex. The investment cost Read the rest of this entry »
Lloyd Miller, a current and former investor in several Silicon Valley companies, disclosed Tuesday being the owner of a 5.9 percent stake in yet another: Ditech Communications of Mountain View.
According to a filing with the SEC, Miller will use his recent purchases of Ditech stock to support Read the rest of this entry »
For anyone hoping to hear more details about Oracle’s plans for assimilating Sun Microsystems into its business, yesterday’s quarterly conference call with top Oracle executives may have disappointed.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his lieutenants said little about the impending $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun. But analyst Tim Beyers of the Motley Fool thinks Ellison offered a strong hint that may have been aimed at reassuring those who wonder if a company known for selling software is serious about taking over Sun’s hardware business: Ellison spent a fair amount of time boasting about the success of Exadata, the souped-up new data storage appliance that combines software and hardware from Oracle and Hewlett-Packard.
Exadata has outperformed competing products from Teradata and other companies, in trials by customers who chose to buy from Oracle, Ellison maintained. Oracle co-president Charles Phillips followed up moments later by telling analysts that Sun and Oracle customers are excited about the acquisition: “They know … that if Exadata is any indication of what happens when you optimize hardware and software together, they’re pretty excited.”
Co-president Safra Catz injected a bit of caution later in the call, after she explained that Oracle’s huge customer base helps boost company profits through recurring payments for software maintenance and upgrades. Selling hardware doesn’t usually bring the same kind of margins, she appeared to acknowledge, noting: “Obviously the Sun acquisition will change the margin story for a while, but it will improve over time.”
Analyst Peter Goldmacher of Cowen and Company sounded a similar tone in a note to investors this morning: While Oracle’s latest earnings were “impressive,” he said, “We continue to believe that Oracle’s standalone margin profile is unsustainable, and the pending acquisition/integration of Sun is going to be more challenging than the current valuation implies.”
Marvell Technology, the Santa Clara chip maker, raised its forecast for sales in its current quarter ending Aug. 1 from a range of $540-$580 million to at least $600 million, instead, with an upside of $630 million possible, according to a press release it filed with the SEC today.
The company attributed the increase in projected revenue to Read the rest of this entry »
The board of directors at Electronics for Imaging apparently batted 1.000 at the company’s annual meeting Friday when all the directors were reelected and all the proposals the board submitted to its shareholders for a vote passed.
But the perfect record obscured the fact that Read the rest of this entry »
Kana Software’s second largest investor cried foul Monday, alleging that its board of directors was acting unfairly “to hold an uncontested election in troubled times and in the face of stockholder dissatisfaction” in a complaint it filed seeking to postpone the Menlo Park company’s annual meeting.
KVO Capital Management, a New Hampshire investment firm that holds 3.35 million shares, or 8.1 percent, of Kana, said it was blind sided Read the rest of this entry »
The head analyst of commercial mortgages at Deutsche Bank Securities told Reuters today that commercial real estate markets in the U.S. cities could fall as much as 50 percent from their peak in 2007 and that they probably won’t recover until 2017.
“The froth is still working itself out,” said Read the rest of this entry »
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