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Who spends $7b on a company that claims $870m anyway? ... That's way to high unless you knew that future business was on it's way. On the other hand, HP seems
by smoyer 13y ago
Who spends $7b on a company that claims $870m anyway? ... That's way to high unless you knew that future business was on it's way. On the other hand, HP seems to be really good at buying dying businesses, or buying businesses that have potential and killing them off.
- mattzito 13y ago10x revenue is not irrational in a high-margin software business. It's high, but there's a lot of acquisitions, especially by big companies like IBM, HP, etc. that are at that multiple.
- smoyer 13y agoTrue ... but they weren't really high margin as it was a "solution sale". In this case, 2X-3X would be more the norm since you have a much harder time scaling this type of company.
- mattzito 13y agoI'd disagree. Software that is heavy on consulting is still considered high margin as long as the consulting is revenue neutral (not a cost center). So if you write software that requires lots of consulting that the customer pays for, it still can be high margin. The other consideration is whether the customer considers the software critical to their business operations or a core differentiator for them vs. a commodity solution. I would argue that, truth notwithstanding, the message of autonomy was that they were a high value software - data consolidation and search.