As a result, the industry saw a double-digit decline in physical software sales at retail, according to NPD, which tracks the industry.

It said last year new launches represented 13 percent of videogame sales in January, but that last month, the performance of new launches dropped by 99 percent, said NPD analyst Liam Callahan.

Videogame sales for console and handheld game units from retail totaled $356 million in January, falling 38 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. Overall sales, including hardware, accessories and software, dropped 34 percent.

But the drop can’t be blamed entirely on the lack of new launches. Sales of titles launched in the fourth quarter also performed poorly, falling 31 percent in units compared to the year-ago period.

“As shoppers were not drawn to stores due to new launch activity, this potentially impacted additional software purchases made on impulse,” Callahan said in a release.

NPD also estimated sales from used games, downloadable content and social and mobile games. It says those channels accounted for an additional $350 million to $400 million in sales.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 continues to be the best-selling console, and Activision’s first-person shooter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 continues to be the top-selling game title. Sony is banking on a spike in sales from the launch of the PlayStation Vita portable unit, which is expected to hit the market Feb. 22, along with 25 new titles.

Earlier today, Salesforce’s stock price was up by more than 3 percent, though it has now settled a bit, and is up a more modest 1.3 percent, to $127.24 as of 11:30 am ET.

In a note to clients today, Mark Murphy of Piper Jaffray said that Salesforce closed on a deal worth $140 million with a customer in the financial services and insurance industry. Additionally, social network giant Facebook has made what is being described as a “material commitment” to Salesforce recently. “We simply do not observe any Cloud competitors closing $140M transactions, drawing in 10,000 attendees at regional conferences, and winning as much crucial platform business with internet leaders,” Murphy wrote.

Analyst Brendan Barnicle of Pacific Crest Securities, writing in a research note issued to clients today, said he saw similar trends. “Salesforce.com had a very strong finish to its fiscal year,” he writes, adding that it “closed several very large deals with major corporate accounts, including its largest deals ever in the U.S. and Europe. In some cases, these large deals were only Sales Cloud deals, and we see further opportunity for upsell. More importantly, the strength of the corporate business refutes the bear claim that Salesforce has penetrated its opportunity.”

One point of weakness, Barnicle says, were the small and medium businesses, who pushed back against a Salesforce move to transition them to an annual billing cycle. “It sounds like Salesforce was somewhat flexible on billings terms after stating its initial goal of putting most SMB customers on annual billing,” he wrote. “However, the drive to annual billings certainly made it more difficult to close and renew SMB deals.”

And while the strong finish to the quarter is great to have now, it’s going to set up a tough compare with the quarter ending in April, Barnicle writes. In the April quarter last year, billings — a heavily watched Salesforce metric that’s tied to future revenue — grew 57 percent. This year, Barnicle expects only 19 percent growth. “We are a bit concerned that the deceleration in billings will be negative for Salesforce,” he writes. “However, the comparisons get easier in Q2 (July) and Q3 (October), and we are concerned that if investors wait to move past the difficult FQ1 comparison, they may miss the opportunity to buy CRM at current levels.”

Barnicle also raised his revenue forecast on Salesforce to $625 million, and his EPS estimate to 42 cents a share, and reiterated a target price of $157. Salesforce reports earnings on Feb. 23.

The deal can’t help but be seen as a response to SAP’s acquisition last year of SuccessFactors, a Taleo rival. Indeed, Taleo’s shares have appreciated significantly in recent months — from $29 to $42 a share over the course of two weeks in December — on speculation that it would be the next cloud company to fall to the recent burst of acquisitions in the cloud software space. And so it has.

If Taleo is a new name to you, perhaps you should go back and read this interview I did with its CEO Mike Gregoire (pictured), about a week after the SuccessFactors deal. The company had been on track to do $325 million in revenue, and has been growing at a 20 percent annual clip.

What’s strange is that Gregoire seemed uninterested in being acquired by Oracle at the time, mainly because he had lived through Oracle’s hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, and had been with that company “until the bitter end.” Apparently, Gregoire and his board have seen past any reticence about Oracle this time around.

The press release is below:

Oracle Buys Taleo

Adds Leading Talent Management Cloud Offering to the Oracle Public Cloud

DUBLIN, CA–(Marketwire -02/09/12)- Oracle today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Taleo Corporation (NASDAQ: TLEO – News), a leading provider of cloud-based talent management for $46.00 per share or approximately $1.9 billion, net of Taleo’s cash and debt. Taleo’s Talent Management Cloud helps organizations attract, develop, motivate and retain human capital to improve performance and drive growth.

Together, Oracle and Taleo expect to create a comprehensive cloud offering for organizations to manage their Human Resource operations and employee careers. The combination is expected to empower employees and managers to effectively manage careers throughout their entire employment, enable organizations to retain talent and optimize costs, and improve the employee experience through faster on boarding and better collaboration with team members via social media.

The Board of Directors of Taleo has unanimously approved the transaction. The transaction is expected to close mid-year 2012, subject to Taleo stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

“Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organizations,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development. “Taleo’s industry leading talent management cloud is an important addition to the Oracle Public Cloud.”

“Taleo’s integrated cloud-based talent management solutions optimize how organizations hire, manage, develop and reward their employees and gives companies the intelligence needed to capitalize on their most critical asset — their people,” said Michael Gregoire, Chairman and CEO, Taleo. “Joining forces with Oracle gives us the opportunity to better serve our customers.”

Last year, the judge offered Oracle a choice: Accept a judgment of $272 million in damages, reduced from $1.3 billion awarded at trial, or seek a new trial. Oracle says in court filings that it wants a new trial.

The key passage of the two-page court filing reads as follows (the word “remittitur” refers to the judge’s previous order reducing the award):

Oracle has no choice but to elect a new trial, as accepting the remittitur would force Oracle to risk waiving its right to appeal the Court’s decision on the motions for judgment as a matter of law and for a new trial. Oracle’s objective is to obtain clarification of the law and, if it is right about what the law is and what the evidence supports in this case, to vindicate the verdict of the jury and Oracle’s intellectual property rights as a copyright owner. Accepting the remittitur would be contrary to this objective.

And that means that the whole thing starts over again.

Calling the $1.3 billion award “grossly excessive,” U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton in February granted an SAP request to throw out the award. Hamilton said that Oracle never proved that it lost enough business to justify so large a judgment.

Oracle had won the award in November, after accusing SAP’s now-shuttered TomorrowNow unit of copying its software without paying appropriate licensing fees. It had been the largest judgment ever in a copyright infringement case.

At trial, Oracle accused SAP’s now-shuttered TomorrowNow business unit of illegally downloading Oracle software and then making several thousand copies of it, in order to avoid paying the relevant license fees that are Oracle’s financial bread and butter. Oracle ultimately won the claim, but then the fight turned to damages.

Lawyers for Oracle had argued that the company’s damages should be tied to the value of a hypothetical license that TomorrowNow would have had to pay for the software, had it been properly licensed. For its part, SAP had argued that, as competitors, damages should have been calculated based on profits lost by Oracle and gained by SAP as a result of the infringement, and as such is in a much lower range than what Oracle argued for.

The case has caused a lot of personal enmity between Oracle and SAP, as well as with Hewlett-Packard, especially during the 11-month period when former SAP co-CEO Léo Apotheker was CEO of HP. Apotheker’s first days on the job at HP were marred by his apparent absence from HP headquarters, in what couldn’t help but look like an attempt to avoid being served with a subpoena. Maybe Oracle will try again.

He’d also been heavily recruited. Sources familiar with the situation told me that Swainson had been in line for a very senior and nearly identical job at Hewlett-Packard. Swainson didn’t return my call seeking comment, and spokesmen for HP and Dell declined to comment, as well.

Dell is launching the Software Group, it said in a statement, to build out its muscle on the software side as a complement to its overall mission of selling IT services.

And there’s probably no one better to do it than Swainson. Since 2009 he’s been an adviser at private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. But from 2004 to 2009 he ran CA with one single goal in mind: Rebuilding its reputation following an accounting scandal that ended when its prior CEO, Sanjay Kumar, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. The company paid $225 million to settle federal charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice.

But before CA, Swainson had spent 26 years at IBM. Among the things he did at Big Blue was spend seven years as general manager of its Application Integration Middleware division, which was a business he created. It was during those years that IBM launched its WebSphere family of products.

So that leaves just one question: Who’s going to run the HP software division that it had wanted Swainson to run?

But Apple is still a consumer-focused personal computer company, and one trend I like to revisit is how Apple continues to grow its presence in business and professional settings.

Here’s a pretty good indicator: If you’re in the business of designing things like machines or buildings, there’s a chance you’re using software from Autodesk. Its latest mechanical design software, called Inventor Fusion, is used by mechanical engineers to design cars and planes and factory assembly lines. It’s heavy-duty software that’s currently available on Windows. A new trial version for the Mac has just recently come out is coming out soon.

While engineering software like this tended to be run on beefed-up Windows workstations during the last decade, the Mac has started to make serious inroads among engineers and designers, especially the younger ones, says Autodesk product manager Kevin Schneider. “The younger generation of engineers has grown up with computing expectations that are completely different,” he says. They used Macs at school, probably learned to edit photos and video in Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, so when they start using CAD and other software, naturally, they want it running on a Mac, too.

Autodesk makes four applications available on Apple’s App Store, and the results are pretty stunning. Those applications — Autocad LT, Autocad WS, Motion FX and Sketchbook Pro — have clocked up 2.2 million downloads via the App Store. That’s a lot for any software, and it’s a heck of a lot when you consider that these applications don’t come for free. Sketchbook Pro goes for $59.99; Autocad LT costs $899.99.

The number is even more impressive when you consider that Autodesk apps account for about 2 percent of total downloads on the App Store. Late last year, Apple announced that its store had broken the 100-million-download mark, generating 100,000 downloads a day, and making it the biggest software download site in the world.

It’s just another indication that the Mac is still making inroads against Windows in the workplace. A new Forrester Research survey of 3,350 IT decision makers finds that 46 percent of all firms in North America and Europe issued Macs to their employees in 2011; that figure was up by more than half since 2009.

The spot depicts a batch of assembly-line robots busily building cars, as an instrumental version of the 1979 Gary Numan hit “Cars” plays happily. All is well until one of the robots experiences trouble and complains to the others, “I’m broken.” No problem, one of the others says, fixes his stricken comrade, and all is again well. Cue the voice-over, saying something about assembly lines that repair themselves. Then cue the corporate logo, aaaand … out.

The spot — which has exactly 100 percent less Ellen Page than the last series of Cisco TV ads — is part of a significant new advertising offensive that Cisco is launching today on television, in print and online. The TV spots will appear during the NCAA basketball games, the National Hockey League’s All-Star Skills Competition, and on CNBC and other business-oriented programming. However, it notably won’t appear during the Super Bowl.

Those robots will be seen again, disassembling and reassembling sections of certain Web sites as part of a series of “site takeovers,” including CNBC and The Street, among others.

The print portion is a six-page “manifesto” that explains ways that Cisco’s “Human Network” plays important and unexpected roles at banking companies and companies that sell chutney, and helps the National Basketball Association push its video around the world. The manifesto will appear in The Wall Street Journal (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.), the Economist and the New York Times.

There will also be a social campaign via LinkedIn that goes after 140,000 C-level executives registered on that network. It will be the first time that embedded video will be used in a LinkedIn campaign. More TV ads will come later this year, as will localized versions of the campaign for international markets.

Last week, I talked with Blair Christie, Cisco’s chief marketing officer, who said that the manifesto in particular is about using the voice of its customers to show how Cisco’s technology can help companies do things they couldn’t do before. Of course, the point they’re supposed to get is that a Cisco intelligent network is what’s enabling them to do that.

Christie says it’s all part of Cisco’s effort to simplify how it communicates about itself. There’s no more muddling of the message. There’s no more consumer division to eat into the perception that Cisco is anything but an enterprise- and service-provider-focused networking company, so no more need for cute ads that overdo awkward jokes about teleconferencing, or showing a giggly twentysomething woman in a virtual fitting room. Cisco is now about transforming how companies do what they do, either by doing it better, or seeing new opportunities. It’s a big message, and a tricky one to get across in 30 seconds during a football game.

I asked Christie about the state of Cisco’s brand before this campaign, and whether or not there were any perceived weaknesses, given its recent troubles, that this ad effort is meant to shore up. “There was actually a lot that was right with our brand,” she told me. “The opportunity we had was clear and simple. Our customer voice is our talent, and that’s what we’re showing, and it’s consistent with our strategy. We use our customers as a test bed, so why not use them as a reflection of our brand? It wasn’t rocket science. But it was the customer voice that was missing.”

Simplifying and streamlining are themes that Cisco is certainly acquainted with of late. It has been doing a lot of those, and indeed, even shrinking itself as part of a broad-based restructuring. The results of that effort are starting to show up in Cisco’s results.

Time will tell if this new advertising campaign will help Cisco effectively reintroduce itself to its core customers; fight off strong competitive thrusts from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, whose networking division marketed itself aggressively against Cisco in 2010; and perhaps press a perceived advantage against Juniper Networks, which has been having its own problems.

What I find notable, or maybe missing from the campaign, are recognizable names of customers doing innovative things. Yes, there’s the NBA, but in the print manifesto, who’s the bank that’s using Cisco’s video TelePresence to interact with customers? Who’s the small chutney company that turned “browsers into buyers”? And who’s the car company with such smart assembly-line robots? It’s a good message that, to my mind, could be made a lot more effective with more specific examples.

And while I grant it’s often difficult to get customers to agree to be named in ads like this — you could almost hear CEO John Chambers’s frustration about not being allowed to name a certain banking customer, about which he was obviously proud, on a recent conference call — the biggest networking company in the world shouldn’t have such a problem. It should be able to brag that this or that household-name bank is an enthusiastic Cisco customer, and that Cisco networks powered the manufacturing of that popular car everyone is talking about right now. That would add some real oomph, and really serve to remind potential customers that Cisco is still, despite its recent missteps, the networking world’s alpha dog.

Anyhow, my critique aside, here’s the robots spot. Enjoy:

Cisco Robots from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore expects some difficulties for Big Blue stemming mainly from the company’s exposure to the troubled economies of the euro zone and related currency weaknesses there. He expects the company to report sales of $29.8 billion and per-share earnings of $4.62, with his sales forecast slightly more optimistic than that of the consensus of Wall Street analysts.

Even so, he expects the strength of the U.S. dollar relative to the euro in recent months will create a headwind effect worth about 2 percentage points compared to IBM’s prior forecast in October. “Although the stronger dollar is likely to impact reported revenue, IBM remains one of the most defensive names in our universe due to its high exposure to recurring profit streams, past backlog growth and wide geographic and business diversification,” he wrote in a note to clients yesterday.

Hardware sales should be in line with forecasts as IBM has continued to gain market share away from Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. Services should continue to be a sign of IBM’s strength as its backlog of prior contracts should continue to deliver a stable stream of revenue.

One problem may come from service bookings. Whitmore thinks the consensus estimates on this closely watched number are, at $21.5 billion, a little high and thus could disappoint. IBM announced only five deals in the fourth quarter compared to seven in the same quarter of 2010. And though information about the size of the deals was limited generally, two of them combined to amount to about $740 million. “IBM’s services bookings figure is always a wildcard and the lack of many announced deals clouds visibility,” Whitmore wrote. He rates IBM a buy with a price target of $210.

The earnings report will also be the first with Ginni Rometty as IBM’s new CEO. Having already had a busy first few days on the job, it will be interesting to see if she uses the occasion of an earnings conference call to announce anything new, though that’s unlikely.

Zynga was up 42 cents, or almost 5 percent today, to close at $8.87 a share.

That’s a huge reversal from earlier this week when the stock nosedived to an all-time low. Meanwhile, none of the traditional game makers were having such a good day.

Electronic Arts closed down $1.47, or 7.5 percent, to $18.04 a share; THQ fell 7 percent to 66 cents a share; Take-Two Interactive fell .5 percent to $14.50 a share; and industry-leading Activision Blizzard slipped 2.5 percent $12.24 a share. GameStop also traded lower, finishing off the day down 2.8 percent to $23.51 a share.

The game makers were universally feeling the impact of an NPD Group report that revealed yesterday that videogame software sales fell 8 percent in December compared to the same month in 2010. When including hardware and accessories, like game cards, the entire industry contracted by 21 percent year over year.

Potentially, investors were betting that if the traditional game-makers weren’t fairing well, then Zynga was a good bet. The leading Facebook game-maker operates purely online and on mobile, so it potentially would be more isolated from the retail and packaged goods sectors.

The old guard vs. new guard battle also played out on the front lines yesterday.

EA was dealt an additional blow when Zynga announced it had hired away Barry Cottle, head of Electronic Arts’ Interactive division. Cottle, who was in charge of the company’s digital strategy, including social and mobile games, was EA’s biggest weapon in fighting Zynga’s dominance on Facebook and had led EA’s rise on mobile.

But EA’s loss was Zynga’s gain.

The social games leader appointed Cottle to the position of EVP of business and corporate development in charge of new global partnerships, acquisitions and other development roles.

The Irvine, Calif., company, which ranks as one of the top sellers of televisions in the U.S., plans to show a line of thin laptop computers and all-in-one desktop PCs running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

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The new forecast calls for companies and governments to spend a combined $3.8 trillion on information technology, which would amount to growth of 3.7 percent from 2011. The previous forecast had called for growth of 4.6 percent.

For perspective, the difference on a dollar basis is about $100 billion, which is certainly real money, but when you consider the various puts and takes affecting the projected spend, it makes a certain amount of sense.

Gartner says that all four of the major technology sectors it tracks — computing hardware, enterprise software, IT services, and telecom equipment and services — will see their growth rates slow this year.

You can probably guess why: The uncertain global economy, the euro zone sovereign debt crisis and the disruptions on the hardware supply chain from last year’s flooding in Thailand on hard-drive production have all teamed up to perform a triple whammy on the tech sector. The Thailand problem will probably last until well into 2013, Gartner’s Richard Gordon says in a statement, echoing what Seagate CEO Steve Luczo told AllThingsD in an interview in November.

Telecom equipment spending will probably suffer the least, Gartner says. Sales in that sector will grow by nearly 7 percent to $475 billion, followed by the enterprise software market, which will grow by 6.4 percent to $285 billion. The chart at the right, which I screengrabbed from Gartner’s handout, breaks down the revised outlook by each sector versus what the previous growth outlook had been.

Gartner also trimmed its average annual growth projection for IT spending through 2015. It now expects spending to grow by about 5 percent on average, down only slightly from 5.4 percent, but in the wider scope of a few trillion dollars, a fractional change still amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars.

According to sources close to the situation, Apple is planning an important — but not large-scale — event to be held in New York at the end of this month that will focus on a media-related announcement.

Per the usual caveat, the tech giant is well known for moving around their public show-and-tells, so this could certainly change at any moment.

But, for sure, several sources underscored that the event is not related to an upcoming version of the iPad 3, the next iteration of the popular tablet device that many expect to be available in 2012.

Also unlikely, the rollout of Apple’s large-scale rethinking of the interactive television initiative that it has been working on. While the company is expected to launch a new Apple TV product later in 2012, such an event would almost certainly be held in the heart of the industry in Hollywood or at least in Silicon Valley.

That leaves some kind of advertising or even publishing announcement, which might be the case, since Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue is reportedly involved.

Cue is in charge of a large swath of Apple’s media units, including the iTunes Store, App Store, iBookstore, as well as iAd and its iCloud services.

It’s well known in the ad industry that Apple has been searching for a new head of its mobile advertising unit, since Andy Miller left last summer.

But such an appointment has not been made as yet, said sources.

The last time Cue was in New York for an event, by the way, was nearly a year ago, when Apple helped launch News Corp.’s online magazine, The Daily.

And Apple also recently opened a splashy new retail store in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, and has been refurbishing its flagship glass cube on Fifth Avenue, too.

The holiday-having Apple PR team declined comment, but wished me a “happy, happy new year.”

Mobile-software developers have long complained about Apple’s limits on them. Chief among their gripes is Apple’s rule that developers registered through its standard developer program cap testing of their app to 100 devices before the software is sold in the app store. Developers say the rule curtails the amount of feedback they receive to improve their apps.

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When you consider the fact that Lexmark is a printer company — and not even an especially large one by comparison to others in the business — you might intuitively conclude that it’s a company on the defensive.

“People don’t print anymore,” goes the refrain of conventional wisdom, “not even at the office.” It’s easier and more efficient now, when you need to refer to a digital document and have it close at hand, to send it to a tablet like an iPad, or even to a smartphone.

And yet, Lexmark is anything but on the defensive. It has been expanding in recent years, primarily by acquisition. In October, it spent $50 million to acquire Pallas Athena, a Dutch software firm specializing in managing and automating business processes — the flow of information through a company. Lexmark combined Pallas Athena with its previous acquisition, Perceptive Software, for which it paid $280 million in 2010; Kansas-based Perceptive specializes in managing unstructured data. Lexmark CEO Paul Rooke says that the two companies combined give Lexmark a position that is unique among companies in the printer business: The ability to help a customer manage and access information in whatever format makes the most sense.

While Lexmark is significantly smaller by revenue than its biggest rival — Hewlett-Packard’s printing division booked $26 billion in fiscal 2011, while Lexmark is on track to report about $4.2 billion in revenue, according to the consensus view of analysts — it is still able to win business away from its larger rivals, and keep those customers. I asked Rooke about this in a recent conversation:

AllThingsD: Paul, the conventional wisdom has held for a long time that printing was a dying business, and that paper was going to go away because everything would be digital. I think that’s been the general criticism of Lexmark since it first spun out of IBM 20 years ago. What do you think of that?

Paul Rooke: We’ve always seen ourselves not so much as a hardware company. When we started, back in 1991, we were evolving from printers to multifunction printers to fleet management. You can see that in our actions. We also want customers for life. We create industry-specific solutions in a responsible way. It’s not just the blocking and tackling of managing a company’s fleet of printers, but it’s about getting intimate with their business processes and managing the paper and ink and so on. And as we’ve evolved, we’ve become more of a solutions company. We like to say “print less, save more.” When we say that, we’re all about helping with smart devices and managing that fleet. But it also refers to capturing, managing and accessing content within the context of a business process.

Well, let’s talk about that a little. When you say “capturing and managing content and information,” what does that mean?

As we found ourselves managing these multifunction devices that have scanners built into them, we found ourselves capturing content off of paper and into digital infrastructure, and we’re looking to do more of that than we have been. You’ll see us do more interpretation of content and automatically routing documents according to what’s on them. But it doesn’t stop there. We found ourselves scanning documents and putting them somewhere and managing them. Our acquisition of Perceptive Software last year has really strengthened that as a value-add for us. A lot of the content that comes in is this messy unstructured content, and with Perceptive, we’re able to help customers manage this unstructured content and finally access it in the context of their business process. And that’s where our Pallas Athena acquisition comes in. When you put it all together, it puts us in a unique position in the industry. We’re not just a printer maker, but we link into the business processes and provide added value for our customers.

“Unstructured data” is a phrase I hear a lot. What does it mean, specifically, to Lexmark?

It’s anything that doesn’t fit in massive databases that are arranged in traditional rows and columns, like financial information and shipping information. In contrast, you might take something like an admission system at a university. It might have some core intake information that’s structured, like a name and birthdate, but then there’s a lot of other information around it, like transcripts and reference letters, that goes into making a decision. Another example is in hospitals, where you have a doctor or nurse looking into a patient file. All hospitals have information systems that keep track of the basic information on a patient. But then there’s other information — like blood tests and X-rays — that’s unstructured, which the doctor will want to look at in order to make a better-informed decision. As you go around in all industries, there are a lot of examples of this sort of data. It really appears in all business environments.

And yet, the core business is still printers and printing. And for myself, I find myself printing a lot less, sending things I need to refer to to my iPhone or iPad and skipping the printer. Do people like me represent a long-term danger to you, or is that really just an issue of perception?

When you look at information generally, the amount of information and content that’s being generated just continues to grow. The ability to access it in an organized fashion is a key challenge for customers, whether they print it or not. But with that growth in information, even if a smaller percentage is printed, there’s still an opportunity for growth in absolute terms. But having said that, as our strategy has evolved, if a customer chooses to print it or store it, we’re going to be there for them. We’re trying to put the tools and technology in place for whichever way the customer goes. There’s a number of industries — government is one, social services is another — where there are customer-facing industries, where you need to fill out a form or a document that requires a signature; many still prefer paper, because it’s inexpensive and easy. Some choose to do that digitally, some choose paper. And when we talk to customers, they’re asking for help in bridging those two worlds. That’s where we jump in and help.

What is the most important thing that customers are saying to you, in terms of their needs? Is it all cost control, which is top of mind so often these days? Or is it something more?

Cost control is certainly there, as is lower-cost devices. These are certainly propositions that play well with customers who want to reduce the cost of their imaging infrastructure. When we engage customers in the managed-service relationship, they often don’t even know how many printers, copiers, fax machines and scanners they have, until we help them assess it and optimize it and hook their devices into a system that helps them control it all. And our managed print services are helping them keep those costs under control. The other thing we’re hearing about is process improvement. With Perceptive, and now Pallas Athena, we help them understand better what their processes are. We have a lot of technologies that map these processes out — not what you think they are, but what they really are. So many times, when you do process improvement, you spend months in a conference room, drawing out what you think the process is on a white board. We can eliminate that step by plugging in the tools and doing a quick digital assessment of what the process actually is, and map it for you digitally. So if you think your process is made up of steps A, B and C, we can come and show you that there’s also D, E, F and G that you didn’t think of. We’ll show you why they’re there, and where the bottlenecks are, with factual data you can work with. Which is a lot better than speculation.

Where do you think your competitors — and name whomever you want — are vulnerable? Where are you winning business away from competitors?

We turned 20 years old this year. Many thought we wouldn’t survive. I think, while the technologies have certainly evolved, the thing that has differentiated us from our competitors is our depth. We go deep with our customers, and get very intimate with them in their industry and their environment and their processes. That’s why customers buy Lexmark. When we’re up against people like HP or Xerox or others, we’re able to get closer to the customer than they are, and do things in a more customized fashion. I think we’ll be doing more of that as we fill out our technology set.

So what kinds of things should we expect from Lexmark in 2012? Are you done doing acquisitions?

You’ll see us enhance our capabilities. Some people think we’re moving away from printing, and that’s not it at all. But we’re adding to it. In addition to that, we’ll continue to integrate Perceptive and Pallas Athena into a more integrated suite of solutions. That will put us in a unique position. The acquisitions are part of the strategy. When we identify gaps or holes in our offerings, we look to fill them either organically or inorganically with acquisitions. We’ll continue to look at those as part of the strategy. We’re not looking for a big one. The ones we have done have been smaller, but of companies with technologies that have high potential for synergies. But we’re still looking.

An expected software update on a slow day at the end of December is hardly big breaking news. But for start-up company Boxee, it signals a shift away from its software for PC browsers and a focus on Internet-connected TVs: The company says version 1.5 of the software will be its last Boxee update for PCs, Ubuntu and Mac computers.

It will be launched along with a Live TV dongle for the Boxee Box later in January.

Version 1.5 of the downloadable software on the Web will include better file support, a new onscreen display, search functionality, HTML5 WebKit-based browser, and will support multiple languages. It will run on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 (32 bit and 64 bit), Mac OS X 10.6 and higher, Linux Ubuntu 11.10, and will be available on Boxee.tv through the end of January.

And for those who would rather develop their own software for Boxee: The company is also releasing an open source version of its software.

The update won’t, however, offer PC users access to the same apps that are available on the Box, such as Netflix, Pandora and VUDU.

Boxee first launched in January 2010 as a Web application for watching Internet video online. In November 2010, it launched its awaited Boxee Box device, which came with a nifty Qwerty-style remote and offered a variety of apps — but it launched amid a growing market of Internet-connected TV boxes, including Apple TV, Google TV, Microsoft’s Xbox and the competitively-priced Roku box. At the time of the Boxee’s hardware launch, about 1.5 million people were using the Boxee software.

Boxee explained its shift away from Web software by saying it believes the future of TV will be driven by Internet-connected boxes, connected TVs and second screen devices like tablets. “While there are still many users who have computers connected to their TVs, we believe this use case is likely to decline as users find better alternatives,” Boxee wrote.

The company also said that the lack of premium apps on the downloadable version of Boxee was due to extensive DRM and certification requirements.

Earlier this week, Google and Mozilla said they had struck a deal to renew their search royalty agreement for another three years.

What the pair declined to add: The search giant will pay just under $300 million per year to be the default choice in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a huge jump from its previous arrangement, due to competing interest from both Yahoo and Microsoft.

Sources said this total amount — just under $1 billion — was the minimum revenue guarantee for delivering search queries garnered from consumers using Firefox.

Google’s main rival in the bid, sources said, was Microsoft’s Bing search service, which was aggressively trying to hip-check it from the main search spot on the browser.

That’s because the software giant has been spending a lot of money in efforts to grow Bing’s market share in the search market.

Microsoft, of course, also owns the still-dominant Internet Explorer browser, but Google’s Chrome has recently been making major gains over both IE and Mozilla’s Firefox.

Still, Mozilla’s recent negotiations with both companies was about search market share.

Yahoo was also in the mix, even though Microsoft powers its search technology, because a hookup with Firefox was considered a plus in holding on to its declining search market share.

But the deal, which was being pushed hard by Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving and its search head Shashi Seth, was determined to be too costly for Yahoo.

Costly indeed, since the new price is much higher than Google had previously ponied up to Mozilla. In 2010, Google contributed 84 percent of Mozilla’s $123 million in revenue.

A previous version of the partnership had expired at the end of November, and the new talks were done against a backdrop of simmering tension between Google and Mozilla over Chrome.

As Liz Gannes wrote earlier this week:

Since the first search royalty deal was signed in 2008, Google’s own Chrome browser has become a significant competitor. Just last month, Chrome overtook Firefox in global usage for the first time, according to StatCounter. Both browsers — software which is used to navigate the Internet — have about 25 percent market share.

Even with the new default deal with Google, Mozilla still also has partnerships with other search providers, including Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon and eBay.

Of course, everybody declined to comment on my queries to hand over all the financial deets stat.

But Google’s SVP of Search, Alan Eustace, said in a statement: “Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come.”

Great, perhaps, but also much more expensive — so presumably Firefox is worth it.

Mozilla is set to announce that it has signed a new three-year agreement for Google to be the default search option in its Firefox browser.

It’s a critical renewal for the Silicon Valley software maker, since its earlier deal with the search giant has been a major source of revenue to date.

The companies said the specific terms of the commercial agreement are not being released. But, in 2010, Google contributed 84 percent of Mozilla’s $123 million in revenue.

A previous version of the arrangement had expired at the end of November. Mozilla said at the time that it was in “active negotiations” with Google.

The relationship has not been without some tension of late. Since the first search royalty deal was signed in 2008, Google’s own Chrome browser has become a significant competitor. Just last month, Chrome overtook Firefox in global usage for the first time, according to StatCounter. Both browsers — software which is used to navigate the Internet — have about 25 percent market share.

Mozilla also has partnerships with other search providers, including Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon and eBay.

Here’s the full announcement Mozilla will soon put out:

Mozilla and Google Sign New Agreement for Default Search in Firefox

We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.

“Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,” said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla.

“Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come,” said Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President of Search, Google.

The specific terms of the commercial agreement are confidential and are not being released.

Despite a wobbly economy, especially in Europe, IT spending seems to be holding steady. Brian Schwartz, an analyst with ThinkEquity, checked in with 16 IT industry contacts and asked about their spending plans for the coming year. The answers, he says, point to positive results in Oracle’s report today. “Contacts surveyed, on average, finished 1 percent above their plans in Q2 and estimate their customers’ overall IT budgets will grow about 3 percent in 2012,” Schwartz wrote in a note to clients on Dec. 15.

Also in Oracle’s favor: The priority in IT spending is shifting away from things that generate revenue and toward things that help control costs. “This transition could provide a nice tailwind for Oracle’s many cost-savings products around data-center consolidation,” Schwartz writes.

Of the 16 people surveyed, Schwartz says, seven were positive, five were neutral and four were negative. Those in the positive column said they expect their IT budgets to grow incrementally in 2012, and they seemed bullish on Oracle’s database and middleware offerings, which help reduce the overall footprint of their data centers. Those in the negative column cited uncertainty about Europe and the financial services sector. Some financial customers are cutting their spending on things like outside consultants, and sales cycles for certain products are growing longer.

The consensus view of Wall Street analysts calls for Oracle to report sales of $9.23 billion and a per-share profit of 57 cents. Schwartz rates Oracle a Buy with a $36 price target, which would amount to a 26 percent improvement over Monday’s closing price of $28.61. Oracle shares have fallen by a little less than 9 percent since the end of 2010.

Emptoris is based in Burlington, Mass., and its customers include American Express, ADP, Kraft Foods and Samsung America.

IBM is describing the deal as the latest move to fill out its “smarter commerce” initiative. And if you follow IBM, you know that making something “smarter” — whether it’s commerce or a city or the entire planet — generally means throwing some computing power and analytics up against a classic, complicated problem, which frankly, supply chains always are.

When you start looking at the patterns of what companies buy in the normal course of doing business — how often and how much not having some critical component or material can disrupt production — you start to see inefficiencies that cost time and money. Eliminate those inefficiencies, the thinking goes, and you start shaving down those costs, and start running the business in a more efficient manner. Usually, the saved costs go straight to the bottom line. That’s something that any CEO or CFO can get behind, and IBM says that doing this sort of thing is a $20 billion global market opportunity on software purchases alone.

IBM’s press release quotes Craig Hayman (pictured above), its general manager of industry solutions, who talked to AllThingsD in July about how IBM is helping companies manage their marketing. Hayman says that corporate procurement departments are increasingly being asked to show how they deliver value to a company. Emptoris will fit alongside IBM’s 2010 acquisition of Sterling Commerce.

Financial terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, which means it’s a relatively small deal for Big Blue. But it’s also the second deal it has done this month in the smarter-commerce area. Last week, IBM spent $440 million to grab DemandTec, a software outfit that specializes in analyzing buyer behavior.

By 11:15 am ET, IBM shares fell on the news by 99 cents, or less than 1 percent, to $187.73. The shares have been on a steady climb all year, and as of yesterday’s close were up nearly 29 percent since the start of 2011.

At that price, the business-software company has a market value of roughly $688 million.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Last month, the company estimated it will sell 11.7 million shares in a price range of $8 to $10. Lead underwriters on the deal are Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs with Citigroup, UBS, BMO Capital Markets and Wells Fargo also participating. At $10 a share, Jive would be valued at $573 million.

The company’s executives have been on a road show in recent weeks. You can see CEO Tony Zingale give a 32-minute talk complete with slides on the company on the Web site Retail Roadshow.

The IPO will mark a nice exit for venture capital investors Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins who have backed Jive to the tune of $57 million in three rounds, the largest of which came in August of 2010.

The deal also takes place against the backdrop of a sudden surge in interest in enterprise software companies, particularly those that run in the cloud. SAP snapped up the cloud-based HR software player SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion earlier this month, while in October Oracle acquired RightNow for $1.4 billion.

Along with Taleo, Jive will quickly become part of the conversation concerning cloud-based acquisition targets.

While initially Jive’s software was delivered as an on-premise, behind-the-firewall product, it has in recent months been boosting its cloud-based business. In its original S1 filing, it said that as of the six months ended in June, it derived 59 percent of its sales from cloud-based software.

It turns out there were some subtle signals that the company was on the block. Theo Francis of Footnoted, the Morningstar-owned blog that follows the nitty-gritty details of SEC filings, notes a classic sign of a pending deal — increases in executive compensation and an apparent preoccupation with change-of-control provisions.

Senior executives often work these provisions into their compensation deals to ensure they don’t leave any money on the table or lose their equity in case a company is sold, merged or acquired. Often any unvested equity or options vest fully.

Francis notes that in July 2010, SucccessFactors added change-of-control provisions to its compensation plans without ever having given a thought to the subject before. Also, severance provisions were revised. For example: CEO Lars Dalgaard’s contract grants him double his annual salary and a target bonus should he lose his job after an acquisition. This comes on top of a $90,000 boost in his annual base salary to $540,000, plus an annual bonus that maxes out at twice that and a pot of restricted stock awards, worth about $6 million, all of which vest in the event of a deal.

All told, Dalgaard could walk away with almost $17 million when the deal closes. You can read more about all this in the original April 22 filing here.