Mentor Graphics: Target for SilverLake?

Mentor Graphics is No. 3 in the Electronics Design Automation (EDA) market, after Cadence and Synopsys. The EDA market itself is not that large, roughly $4 Billion, declining rapidly to $3.5 Bilion due to its tough price-wars. Such a market cannot support 3 major players, and Mentor ought to be a classic acquisition target for

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Indo-Chin talks: Implications

Wall Street Journal reports on the recent Indo-Chin talks: “Burgeoning economic ties are the drivers of much of the goodwill. Two-way trade reached $13.6 billion last year, up from $3 billion in 2000. To push that figure higher, they agreed a joint task force should consider a free-trade agreement between their nations. If created, it

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Microsoft’s two should-be M&A considerations

Microsoft has stagnated, much to the chagrin of its investors. The powerful vision of the eighties and nineties – of putting a PC on every desktop – no longer seems like a big, hairy, audacious goal. Instead, they are looking for greener pastures – mobile handhelds, digital homes, internet telephony – so forth and so

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Heritage Hotels: Roll-up opportunity for a Private Equity firm?

Spain developed the Paradors concept very effectively, by converting old forts, palaces, and monasteries into beautiful “experience hotels”. India has done only the beginnings of this, but has a very long way to go yet. Here is a business concept for KKR or Carlyle for India: The real estate market is booming. Old, beautiful architecture

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Tourism in India: Huge Opportunity

We were traveling in North India during the holidays last December. We focused mainly on Rajasthan and Varanasi, and our flight to Khajuraho was cancelled. Rajasthan is one of the most popular tourist destinations in India, perhaps second only to Agra and the Taj Mahal. It has enormous and spectacular forts like Amber in Jaipur,

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Indian Enterprise Market Sucks

So far, India’s IT industry has primarily catered to the US market, and secondarily to European and Asian markets. In other words, India builds technology largely in a back-office mode. Of course, as the market matures, investors get over their fear factor, and the pendulum swings to the other extreme with over enthusiastic investors flocking

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Saba, Aussi!

Meaning, Saba as well. The blue-print for Epiphany and that for Saba are quite similar. The space is different, and hence the nuances are different. Saba is about a $35M company, with a $75M market cap and a leader in the Corporate e-learning space. Enterprise Learning Management Software (LMS) is used to create e-learning solutions,

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E.piphany should change its Business Model to survive

What does an erstwhile star company, with a stock price now stagnating between $3-$6 and a ~$250M market cap do next? Revenues have fallen from $125M in 2001 to the $80M 2004 sales number. Maintenance and Professional Services account for more than two-third of the company’s sales. If you look around in the CRM space,

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