Skip to main content

Growth by acquisition

When Oracle announced in late April that it would buy Sun Microsystems it shocked more than a few people. Tom In, Managing Director and Portfolio Manager at Alkeon Capital Management, obviously had his own thoughts on the matter. Paraphrased, he recalled to me over lunch the other notable acquisitions that Oracle had made: Primavera, PeopleSoft, and BEA to name a few.

During our discussion, we noted several possible combinations of acquired assets that could be used depending on what their corporate strategy is. Oracle is hardly the first company to take this approach either. BMC, HP, CA, Microsoft and several others have been known to base their growth on the purchasing of other companies rather than grow organically. Why do this? Generally, their mindset in situations like this is that it's quicker to buy than build; if you purchase companies that are best in their respective fields you can fill holes in your corporate strategy much more quickly.

On a personal level, we all have goals we have set for ourselves. But instead of learning from corporate America, I have frequently found that people rarely give any consideration as to how they intend to reach those goals. I'm sure you all know where you want to be, but do you have any idea how you will get there?

In the game of 8-ball (pool), the prevailing philosophy is that you start from the end of the game and work backwards, i.e. determine what shot you need to make so that you can make the winning shot; then determine what shot you need to make to make the previously mentioned shot; etc. If you know where you want to be in 5, 10, 20 years, doesn't it behoove you to figure out how to position yourself to be there at that time and then work backwards?

As a specific example, suppose you envision yourself as the CEO of a company but you are "only" in IT at the moment. What "shots" do you need to make, i.e. what types of skills do you need to acquire, to move yourself into a position to actually grab the brass ring?

After you've answered that, you need to determine how you plan to acquire those skills. Will you go back to school and get your MBA? Take different types of jobs to get Business Development, Sales, Marketing, etc. experience? The choices are yours to make, but until you not only make those decisions but also execute them successfully you won't go anywhere quickly.

Popular posts from this blog

"Ni jiang yi yang de hua ma?"

Last week, I wrote about the necessity of having a clear message . Because this topic is so important I decided to follow-up with another entry on this general subject. This week we will approach it from another angle. (For the curious, the title says " Do you speak the same language? " in pinyin, which is a transliterated Mandarin Chinese.) Recently, a good friend of mine (who is Chinese, ironically) and I were playing pool. He had to bank the 8-ball in the pocket to win the game, and since it was an informal game and bank shots are my area of expertise, he asked me for advice. I told him, "you just need to strike the cue ball with medium speed so that it hits the 8-ball right in the middle." He didn't believe me so we marked the positions of the balls, and then he took his shot only to watch the 8-ball sail past the pocket. "A-ha!" he exclaimed. "I told you it wasn't that easy." But when we reset the positions and I made an attemp

It's Easier to Fail at DevOps than it is to Succeed

Slippery when wet Since the term DevOps was coined in Belgium back in 2009, it is impossible to avoid the term whether in discussions with colleagues or in professional trade magazines.  And during the years while this movement has gained momentum, many things have been written to describe what elements of a DevOps strategy are required for it to be successful. Yet in spite of this, there is an interesting data point worth noting: not many organizations feel there is a need for DevOps.  In a Gartner report entitled DevOps Adoption Survey Results (published in September 2015),  40%  of respondents said they had no plans to implement DevOps and 31% of respondents said they hadn't implemented it but planned to start in the 12 months after the survey was conducted. That left only 29% who had implemented DevOps in a pilot project or in production systems, which isn't a lot. "Maybe it's because there truly isn't a need for DevOps," you say.  While that

Is No/Low-Code the Key to IT Nirvana?

 Unless you've had your head in the sand for the past year or so, you've seen the phrases low-code  and no-code  bandied about quite frequently everywhere you look.  You've probably wondered if this is something new that's here to stay or just a "flash in the pan."  Although the terms have been in the fore of the IT trade publications recently, Low Code Development Platforms (LCDP) (and the corresponding No Code Development Platforms) have been in existence since 2011.  Their roots can be traced to the 90's with 4th generation programming languages and GUI-assisted programming paradigms, e.g. IBM VisualAge for Basic, which was discontinued in 1998. For those of you who aren't familiar with either, the premise is that these platforms allow someone to quickly build applications using a WYSIWYG interface and a "click and configure" paradigm to Isn't this the source code to Roblox? rapidly build full applications with little or no coding requ