If you have a “well-developed, well-defined and established company” that wants to break through to a new phase of revenue growth, what do you do?

Barix founder Johannes G. Rietschel.has served as CEO of Barix since inception in 2001 but he will now focus on his visionary and technology development skills and relinquish the daily operations and business strategy to a new CEO, Ronni Guggenheim.

“Barix has achieved excellent growth for 12 years, but we have reached a size where we need different entrepreneurial skillsets,” says Rietschel. “I will remain involved in the overall company vision but am getting back to focusing on technology, and ensuring we have the best to offer for our customers. Ronni brings the experience we need to build stronger sales channels and strategic focus worldwide. And I will work with him to guarantee greater acceleration of Barix’s success.” Read more...

BlackBerry may soon find itself in what Bloomberg says is the lowest-costing buyout of a similar-sized N. American technology company yet, having reached a tentative $4.7 billion deal with major shareholder Fairfax Financial.

The deal has the Canadian insurance firm offering $9 per BlackBerry share, for an amount covering 90% of the company-- quite the plunge for a company once valued at $83 billion.

Fairfax owns the remaining 10% of BlackBerry.

Rubbing further salt in the wound is the fact that while the deal does not oblige Fairfax to actually buy up the smartphone maker, BlackBerry would have to pay a breakup fee worth over $150 million should it find an alternate buyer willing to pay a higher price by 4 November 2013.

Oracle fiscal Q1 2014 revenues grow by 2% Y-o-Y to $8.38 billion-- below the expectations of analysts hoping for revenues worth $8.48bn, making the quarter the third of consecutive failure to hit Wall Street expectations. 

Net income totals $2.19bn with 7.9% growth. 

Fiscal Q1 2014 has Oracle making 20% of revenues from new software licenses, 53% from license updates and product support, and 15% from hardware. 

The company sees growing revenues in new software licenses and cloud software subscriptions (up by 5% Y-o-Y to $1.7bn), as well as software license updates and product support (7% Y-o-Y growth to $4.43bn). Results remain less rosy when it comes to hardware-- the business unit reports Y-o-Y declines of -14.1% (or -21.2% Q-o-Q) on revenues worth $669 million, the worst performance for the unit since Q3 2010.  Read more...

After months of struggle culminating in the advance-- and eventual retreat-- of hardnosed mega-sholder Carl Icahn, Michael Dell manages achieve his ambition of taking Dell private, winning stockholder approval of the proposal.

"We are going back to our roots, to the entrepreneurial spirit that made Dell one of the fastest growing, most successful companies in history," the Dell head honcho writes in an open letter. "We’re unleashing the creativity and confidence that have always been the hallmarks of our culture. We plan to serve you, our customers, with a single-minded purpose and drive the innovations that will help power your dreams."

The Dell privatisation (technically a partnership with investment firm Silver Lake Partners) will be finalised on November 2013, and involves the company paying $13.88 per share for an approximate total of $24.9 billion-- the supposedly all-too-low price that kicked off Carl Icahn and company's war of attrition in the first place.