Copacetic

Well its all happening in the mergers and acquisitions department. Hot on the heels of CapeClear’s exit comes news of the acquisition of LeCayla by OpSource.

This is another all share deal but I doubt LeCayla got the fisting that WorkDay dealt out to CapeClear (time will deal). Conor has done a great job at LeCayla, from getting a six figure investment sum out on Trinity Venture Capital on the back of a PowerPoint presentation (any chance we could see that presentation Conor?) all the way through to this successful exit.

Top Man!

(Press Release)

I love it when predictions come true.

Hot off the presses is the news that CapeClear’s major partner in US, WorkDay, has swallowed them whole in an all Stock deal. Details are not yet available (nor will they ever be) but my bet is an all stock deal where the Cape Clear stock gets reverse into WorkDay Stock at a penal conversion ratio (100 to 1 ?).

The exit of the Director of Engineering, John Maughan, doesn’t bode well for the rest of the engineering team in Dublin, but Seamus in Silicon Valley must be pleased.

Annrai has the annoucement on the Cape Clear Blog.

I should add, that an exit is an exit. So many Irish Software companies exit via liquidation, so hats off to Annrai and Co. for getting this one across the line.

This deal may also make a lot of sense for WorkDay in the long run.

1. The get a pre-baked engineering team based in a geography they want to sell to (Europe)
2. The get access to Irish tax breaks (12.5% corporation tax)
3. If they play their cards right they get to book all EU revenue through Ireland (just like Google, Oracle, EBay and Microsoft) which turns the whole thing into a giant tax-incentive scheme. This demands that they have a substantial engineering component in Ireland (which bodes well for the existing developers).

More news at:

• Cape Clear Press Release : Workday Selects Cape Clear for SOA Integration
• Workday Press Release : Workday Launches Integration On Demand
• Marketwire : Workday launches Integration on Demand
• ZDNet : Dana Gardner : Middleware field consolidates in servics direction as Workday acquires Cape Clear
• ENN : Cape Clear signs on with Workday
• Silicon Republic: PeopleSoft founder buys Cape Clear (real info on redundancies)

I did a talk today at NovaUCD, the UCD Innovation centre. It was an overview of the PutPlace journey with some of my personal tech history. I’ve worked for all the following companies.

• Generics Software Ireland (Startup based on Ada Language Technology)
• Digital Equipment Corporation (Ultrix Engineering)
• SilverPlatter (Electronic Publishing, reference Databases)
• Nomura Research Institute (Investment Banking, Middle Office Development)
• CR2 (Internet Banking)
• Cape Clear (Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture)
• LeCayla (many ideas, Conor ran with the best after I retired from the business)
• Oracle (OnDemand Engineering)
• PutPlace (Secure, Organise, Share etc.)

I then gave a short and sweet presentation on the highlights and lowlights of PutPlace to date including a flyby on the Paddy’s Valley Experience.

I’ve uploaded the slides to SlideShare. Happy to answer questions.

Price of 44.6billion USD or $31 dollars a share.

Interesting clash of cultures both at the technological and organisational level. These mega-mergers rarely work with the final entity being less than the sum of the parts. Expect to see both stocks plummet and Google’s share price to rise.

Google must be shouting Yahoo! right now.