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A Little History of March in previous years… Five years ago, in March 2009 Google was in the news for creating a $100 Million venture fund. Bell Canada bought “the Source” and the break-up of BearingPoint, post Chapter 11, benefited Deloitte and PwC amongst others around the world.March 2010 saw a continuation of the economic recovery. It was a quiet month for M&A activity with CA buying both 3Tera for about $90 million and Nimsoft for $350 million. Chordiant was bought by Pegasytems for a little over $160 million, and the other notable deal was Avnet’s $340 million purchase of Bell Microproducts.Three years ago, in March 2011 world events included Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear woes. The big technology event of the month was AT&T’s announcement of a $39 Billion deal to buy T-Mobile… which later failed, costing AT&T a reputed $4 billion. While there were no other mega-deals of this nature it was a fairly busy month in the M&A world. Montreal’s Radian6 was snapped up by Salesforce.com for about $276 million; Facebook made a couple of acquisitions in the mobile space Snaptu and Beluga; YouTube paid about $50 million for Next New Networks; McAfee bought database security firm Sentrigo; Cisco bought portal company newScale; Teradata bought data analytics startup Aster data… a continuation of the consolidation in the red hot data space; and OpenText bought a mobile app development tool vendor WeComm.In March 2012 there was some activity with a couple of (then) young companies receiving significant capital Appirio ($60 million) and Hootsuite ($20 million). Cisco made a couple of acquisitions, paying a wopping $5 billion for video software and content company NDS Group in addition to a smaller network management buy, ClearAccess. NEC paid $450 million for the information management business of Convergys and Avaya paid $230 million for an Israeli videoconferenceing and telepresence company Radvision. Other companies on the acquisition trail were DELL, EMC, SafeNet, Avnet and The Utility Company. Finally, SAIC agreed to pay close to a half billion dollars to the City of New York related to charges it overbilled and paid kickbacks!Last year, in March 2013 some of the “usual characters” were making acquisitions, but there were no billion dollar deals announced. Oracle continued its move into the telco space with the purchase of Tekelec; Google bought a small Toronto University based company DNNresearch in the machine learning vertical; Microsoft sold Atlas Advertiser Suite to Facebook; and Yahoo bought Summly. Microsoft ran into some difficulties in the EU, having to pay a $732 million antitrust fine related to Internet Explorer and Evernote suffered a security breach affecting 50 million users.Which brings us back to the present… March 2014 was not a banner month for acquisitions but there was one big deal with Facebook making a, somewhat surprising, $2 Billion acquisition of virtual reality company Oculus VR. Intel also expanded its horizons with the $150 million acquisition of smart watch maker, Basis Science. Some other interesting moves saw a fair bit of investment in “big data” company Cloudera with both Google (as part of an investment consortium) and Intel involved. SAP added to its purchasing software suite with the acquisition of Fieldglass and Telus made a couple of buys, Enode a management consulting company out of Quebec and Med Access an addition, in British Columbia, to their healthcare division. There were a few other smaller deals plus Embarcadero bought the ERwinDate Modelling software from CA.Other than M&A activity there were a number of companies making news, and not all for good stuff! IBM’s server sale to Lenovo has generated some significant labor troubles in China, Google was ordered to pay $85 million to SimpleAir for patent infringement and NetApp announced it was laying off almost 5% of its workforce representing 600 jobs. A couple of Bitcoin exchanges ran into serious trouble with Mt.Gox “losing” $500 million in bitcoins and Vicurex freezing all of its accounts after a serious hack. Notable “people events” in March saw Target’s CIO Beth Jacob resign in response to the recent major data breach and Symantec fired their CEO Steve Bennett.Economic news was at best “tepid” in Canada, with the unemployment rate unchanged and indicators generally “blah” (that is one of my best economic terms). Indicators in the US however were generally positive with growth in GDP, several confidence indices showing promise and an outlook of increased hiring.That is it for my look at what was happening in the technology space over the last month, compared to the same month in previous years. I’ll be back at the end of April, until then… walk fast and smile!

Is now a good time to upgrade your business education? Are you working in the military and you wish to move up in rank, if so then you’ll need a degree. If you work in logistics services or you manage a military unit’s financial affairs then it would sure help to have a business degree. In many companies and corporations if you have a business degree you have upward mobility, and if you already have the job, it makes sense to get the degree so that you stay with the company, and someone else the one that gets laid off, while you receive the promotion. This is where ongoing education comes in, and this might be a very good time to get a business degree. Let me explain.It appears that there are seats available in some of the top business schools in the country right now, and they need to fill those seats, and therefore they may be offering deals. Does it matter where you get your business degree? It does, it matters on your resume, and not all business schools are the same. Some of the most popular ones may not be the best, so you’d still have to do some shopping around.On September 17, 2012 there was an article in the Wall Street Journal titled; “B-School Applicants Decline for Fourth Year,” by Melissa Korn. The article showed as much as a 20% drop in the last 2-years in some very well-known business schools. Even Yale’s School of Management was nearly a 10% decline in the last two-years.Now then, that might be a very good article for you to read, as you consider some of what I’m saying here. You see, if you are just entering college and thinking about getting a business degree you may not wish to spend the hundred thousand dollars in student loans obligating yourself for a decade or more of payments without guaranteed employment. But if you are already employed, all of a sudden it’s a totally different ballgame, your education isn’t your first degree rather, it is continuing education, up in beyond whatever you have already.Companies, corporations, and government agencies must run their business units efficiently, with a Six Sigma style strategy. It’s imperative. In the future there will be significant budget cuts in government, and they will have to have the best people possible to maintain efficiency, provide maximum services, and do it as inexpensively as possible. Obviously you can understand that reality is coming forth very quickly. My question to you is are you ready for it? If not you might consider some continuing business education for your future. Please think on it.