Well, this thread turned contentious...not my intent! My ramblings on the topic follow; I expect to be beaten up for it, but hope we can have a meaningful discussion (speculation) instead.
Yes, it's hard to see how a new mainframe company can do much more than eke out an existence and then sell to one of the big dogs. OTOH ColeSoft has been a respected player for quite a while, and this is Izzy's first and thus (so far) only product, so there's no *particular* reason to expect big changes. And there are a few other small companies who soldier on against all odds. My concern would be greater with the more common acquisition by a big player, who "optimizes" things (cuts staff beyond the bone) and then wonders why $x+$y (where x = big player revenue and y = acquired company's revenue) adds up to something less than $(x+y). Of course they get away with it with their Board and stockholders, because the net is still more than $x, so look, we "successfully managed the acquisition and grew"! Never mind what you did to the employees, customers, and product, and how much opportunity you squandered in the process. A smaller acquirer is (presumably) more focused, plus they can't fall back on "We can get rid of all these people because we have other people, and software engineers can be bought by the pound anyway". So I'm cautiously optimistic. I echo Doug's concern that none of the named people have any known track record in the mainframe world. That doesn't have to be significant--being noisy/visible doesn't prove anything about competence. I was not impressed that the site had "z/Series" and "i/Series", 20 *YEARS* after the zSeries and iSeries names were killed, but they promptly and cheerfully fixed that when I pointed it out. My other concern is that BigBand's tagline is "We harmonize capital, culture and teams to buy and grow SaaS companies", plus they say "We buy B2B SaaS businesses that are growing and profitable, with ARR in the range of $1M to $10M". Aside from the missing serial comma (JOKE, let's not start THAT flamewar!), that SaaS mission seems orthogonal to ColeSoft, so there's some WTF there. They seem to have acquired Workzone and Inphonite previously, so it's not like they went totally off-piste in their first outing. But $1M to $10M are basically toy companies these days, so they're either destined to be small fish (like ColeSoft, who has awesome products but a fairly small and shrinking market of hardcore z/OS developers, mostly vendors--and now we're back to the "Big Three" problem again) or else BigBand thinks they have the magic formula to buy into the next Instagram when it's tiny. That's...pure gambling, sorry, and leaves me unconvinced by BigBand's model. Which still doesn't have to relate to ColeSoft/Izzy, since there IS apparently a sustainable revenue stream there. I'd also note that Workzone and Inphonite each have TWO job openings posted, so they aren't exactly showing a lot of investment/growth. (Yes, it's possible that they just hired a shedload of folks, but what are the odds?) I thus choose to see this acquisition as (mostly) good news. ColeSoft's customers are committed, because the products are so solid and unique, and so whatever happens, there will be a revenue stream that someone will want. Worst case, BigBand/Izzy implode and one of the Big Three picks up the ashes. That isn't ideal--best case would have been Dave Cole finding the Fountain of Youth and continuing forever--but it's better than Dave retiring and having the products die of pure neglect. Time will tell, eh? ...phsiii ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
