One big rumor is that Salesforce is being acquired. Google, Microsoft and even Oracle have all been mentioned. Although Oracle has said they will profit more if someone else buys Salesforce.
By the way, just the rumor made a lot of folks at Salesforce extra money as the stock bumped up 10% on the rumor.
It looks like ABRY Partners LLC and Berkshire Partners LLC are shopping TELX. Maybe ABRY, one of the investment firms that owns the data center company, wants to recoup its investment already. The asking price is $2B! ABRY has a big investment in data centers and telecom firms, including JAB (a wireless ISP roll-up); XAND (NY data center); Sidera/RCN; Airband (now UNSI); Home Town cable; Datapipe; and Grande Comm.
More Data Center M&A:
vXchnge, a carrier-neutral colocation services provider, has acquired 8 data centers from Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS).[pr]
Now that Comcast isn't buying TWC (Time Warner Cable), Charter's bid for Bright House Networks (a MSO in 13 markets including Tampa Bay) should be over as well, since it was contingent upon the Comcast-TWC deal. Who knows if there will be a new bid for TWC.
Maybe for now a few employees can take a breath.
Not so the folks at AT&T who are waiting on the approval to acquire DirecTV. And no way are the Verizon employees relaxed as they await the approval for Frontier to take over VZ territories in CA, TX and FL.
Fiber is still king, especially for Zayo and Crown Castle. Crown castle is a REIT that owns a bunch of wireless towers. CC is buying Access Fiber Group; it bought 24/7 MidAtlantic last year. Now it is buying Sunesys, a wholly owned subsidiary of Quanta, which owns about 10K miles of metro fiber.
John Chambers finally stepped down from Cisco. Chuck Robbins, senior VP of field operations, will take over in June as the new CEO. I feel sorry for Chuck as Cisco is in the midst of huge changes to its customers, products, markets -- and Chambers should have left a few years ago, in order for the new guy to put his own strategy in place. It's too late to change the strategy that Chambers has been working on the last coupe of years. Chuck will just have to do the best he can - and get a gold parachute in 3 years.
