Question

Merge & Acquisition subject

You will investigate a recent merger or acquisition. You will prepare a written project (2500 words). Analyze a recent merger or acquisition that has been successful or unsuccessful. In order to identify the causes and effects of the particular acquisition movement. The acquisition deal may be closed, still pending, or canceled. This acquisition could be a success or a fail.

The objective is to select different acquisitions. It requires you to approach a real situation. You should identify some recent acquisition and conduct a research using some techniques learned in this course. Linking this case with the financial concepts learned in this course will carry the highest weight for this assignment.

Useful sources for the research will include quality newspapers (e.g., Financial Times, Economist, New York Times, etc.) in addition to relevant books/journal articles. ONLINE REFERENCE & RESEARCH TOOLS EXAMPLES: ● Wall Street Journal. (http://online.wsj.com) ● Financial Times. (www.ft.com) ● Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com) ● Investopedia (http://www.investopedia.com) ● Marketwatch (http://www.marketwatch.com) ● Google Finance (www.google.com/finance)

M&A periodicals (specific news)

● Buyouts: www.buyoutsnews.com ● The Deal: www.thedeal.com ● Deal Reporter: www.dealreporter.com ● Debt Wire: www.debtwire.com ● Dow Jones LBO Wire: www.dowjones.com/privatemarkets/lbo.asp ● Mergers & Acquisitions: www.themiddlemarket.com ● Merger Market: www.mergermarket.com ● Thompson Reuters: www.thomsonreuters.com ● The onlineinvestor: http://www.theonlineinvestor.com/mergers/

Answer 1

Cisco Buys MindMeld For $125M

Introduction

On May 11, 2017 Cisco announced that it is buying MindMeld for $125 million. Cisco made a bold move into a new market to boost the capabilities of its Cisco Spark unified communications product line and platform. The company said it would buy artificial intelligence startup MindMeld for $125 million. "The workplace of the future is one powered by AI," said Rowan Trollope, senior vice president of Cisco's IoT and Applications Group, in a statement.

"This is a significant step toward making that workplace a reality."          

The acquisition was completed on May 26, 2017.

About MindMeld

Founded in 2011, MindMeld helps businesses to build conversational interfaces with cloud-based services. MindMeld, originally called Expect Labs, was launched on the stage of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012. At that time the startup wanted to build an iPad app that could listen in on your conversations and provide relevant contextual information. Since then the company has expanded its offerings to include a suite of APIs for parsing, reasoning about and generating language. MindMeld had previously raised $15.4 million in venture capital financing from IDG Ventures, GV, Greylock Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Intel Capital, among others. Conversational AI continues to be a hot space for M&A activity. MindMeld lets someone deploy an AI-powered conversational interface from start to finish.

About Cisco

Cisco Systems, Inc. is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Today, networks are an essential part of business, education, government, and home communications. Cisco hardware, software, and service offerings are used to create the Internet solutions that make these networks possible, giving individuals, companies, and countries easy access to information anywhere, at any time. In addition, Cisco has pioneered the use of the Internet in its own business practice and offers consulting services based on its experience to help other organizations around the world.

Cisco was founded in 1984 by a small group of computer scientists from Stanford University. This year, the company celebrates 20 years of commitment to technology innovation, industry leadership, and corporate social responsibility. Since the company’s inception, Cisco engineers have led in the innovation of Internet Protocol (IP)-based networking technologies. This tradition of IP innovation continues with the development of industry-leading products in the core technologies of routing and switching, along with Advanced Technologies in areas such as home networking, IP telephony, optical networking, security, storage area networking, and wireless technology. In addition to its products, Cisco provides a broad range of service offerings, including technical support and advanced services. Cisco sells its products and services, both directly through its own sales force as well as through its channel partners, to large enterprises, commercial businesses, service providers, and consumers.

As a company, Cisco operates on core values of customer focus and corporate social responsibility. We express these values through global involvement in educational, community, and philanthropic efforts.

Cisco has been on an acquisition spree as of late. The company purchased AppDynamics earlier this year for an astounding $3.7 billion. The company has been working to define itself as a software company.

Transforming Collaboration through Artificial Intelligence with Cisco’s Acquisition of MindMeld

Artificial Intelligence represents a tremendous opportunity to expand the reach and enhance the capabilities of enterprise technology. Cisco has already been introducing AI into the solutions across security, orchestration, application performance and collaboration. Now, Cisco’s intent to acquire MindMeld Inc., a San Francisco-based company that has developed a conversational platform based on natural language understanding (NLU). This acquisition, Cisco’s third in two weeks, represents how the buy pillar of Cisco’s innovation strategy continues to impact our strategic shift to become more of a software company.

Since 2011, MindMeld has focused on building intelligent conversational interfaces for companies to interact with their customers across almost any device or application. They have become an industry leader in AI, providing natural language interfaces for such use cases as shopping online, ordering products or contacting customer support. At the core of MindMeld’s technology is a powerful machine learning platform that is able to ingest customer data and create a highly accurate and customized natural language model, tailored to each company’s industry and requirements. MindMeld also delivers a dialog manager that enables a computer to respond to user requests through chat and voice applications in a human-like fashion.

With MindMeld, Cisco will enhance their Collaboration suite, adding new conversational interfaces to Cisco’s collaboration products starting with Cisco Spark. Cisco is already excited for the potential represented by the MindMeld team and their technology, coupled with it’s market-leading collaboration portfolio, to enable a user have an experience that is unlike anything that exists in the market today. Together, both will work to create the next generation collaboration experience. The MindMeld team will form the Cognitive Collaboration team and report into the IoT and Applications group under Jens Meggers, senior vice president and general manager.

Need for this acquisition

The rise of messaging apps, and the conversational bots which have followed, have given a tremendous number of bots which are impressively bad at natural language conversation. They do OK with canned responses, but try to have a semi-unstructured conversation to get them to do something and the experience tends to be poor, frustrating and decidedly non-human.

Why is it that computers can think like us and program like us – but they can’t communicate like us?
Cisco have been at the forefront of the messaging revolution with Cisco Spark, and have been seeing a boom in conversational bots for all kinds of purposes. Cisco has also seen immense interest from their customer care customers, who see bots (rightly so) as the evolution of multiple choice interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Cisco realized that to really enable their customers to have more natural, conversational interactions in their enterprise collaboration tools, Cisco would have to do more for them, and do more of the heavy lifting.

So that’s why, Cisco acquired MindMeld. MindMeld realized this same problem and has been at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) research on creating lifelike, convincing conversational interfaces. Creating a high-quality conversational interface requires six distinct types of ML, including Natural Language Processing, Question Answering, Dialog Management and so on. MindMeld has written the book on these technologies and has built the world’s best conversational user interface platform.

Conclusion

If Cisco is serious about software, AI is an indispensable core competency that forms the foundation for any and all future products. Cisco says that the MindMeld team will form the company’s Cognitive Collaboration team, a move that immediately evokes the aesthetic of IBM Watson’s cognitive computing group.

MindMeld brings to Cisco a unique artificial intelligence platform for building conversational interfaces. MindMeld’s solutions go beyond understanding commands, and enable people to communicate naturally with their applications and devices. Through its proprietary machine learning technology, MindMeld delivers human-like accuracy to voice and chat assistants.

MindMeld possesses a deep expertise in Artificial Intelligence that will enable Cisco to deliver groundbreaking enterprise experiences throughout its portfolio, starting with Collaboration. Cisco Collaboration is transforming how people come together by creating experiences that deliver a sense of simplicity and joy at work. Cisco envision that AI will further these experiences by making them even more natural, intuitive, and intelligent.

In all, this acquisition has lot to bring in the world of technology.