SafeNet Raises Hand, Concedes “Likely” Improper Accounting of Stock Options

Information-security vendor SafeNet has completed at least part of its internal investigation into stock-option backdating at the company, disclosing that it will restate 2002 earnings because stock options assigned to directors, officers, and employees were "likely" improperly documented.

According to a Reuters report, the company says a special committee investigating the matter has retained independent counsel and forensic accountants to assist the probe.

There could be more fallout from this matter, and it has the potential to seriously affect SafeNet’s heretofore aggressive acquisition strategy.

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Washington Post Reviews Sad State of IM Interoperability

Perhaps a reminder of the wretched state of instant-messaging interoperability wasn’t necessary, but Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post does a good job providing an update in light of the move by Microsoft and Yahoo to allow their respective subscribers to talk to each other from their otherwise closed and propriety IM networks.

IM is the backward, toothless cousin of Internet services, held back by atavistic parental genes and bad governance. In that regard, Pegoraro notes the following:

With most other kinds of communication — phone calls, e-mail or cellphone text messages — the ability to contact somebody who uses a different provider than you isn’t considered a feature worth advertising.

But not instant messaging, which remains behind left behind, a victim — along with all its users — of companies that seek to lock their customers into proprietary straitjackets rather than competing on the basis of creativity and innovation. Even interoperability, or what passes for it between Yahoo and Microsoft, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, as Pegoraro explains.

It’s a good column — it first appeared online yesterday — and it’s well worth reading if you haven’t had an opportunity to get to it.

EMC Making Acquisition Bid for F5 Networks?

Rumors made the rounds a few weeks ago about Cisco and Microsoft having acquisitive interest in F5 Networks. I dismissed those rumors, primarily because I’d heard them many times before, but also because they seemed illogical from the buyer’s and seller’s perspective.

Today, though, a rumor has surfaced suggesting EMC might acquire F5 Networks. This one is harder to dismiss; it could even be true.

EMC, as witnessed by its growing array of acquisitions, including its recent $2.1-billion purchase of RSA Security, has strategic designs on becoming a major player in the management and secure storage of content.

With that in mind, perhaps it would also want to own a market-leading position in the secure delivery and optimization of content across networks, including those dedicated to data-center virtualization. That’s one of the areas where F5 could prove valuable, both in generating new revenue streams and in helping to differentiate EMC from its primary competitors.

In recent years, through acquisitions, EMC has bolstered its product arsenal with email archiving, content management, server virtualization, and network- and application-infrastructure management, as well as the encryption technology it just received via its acquisition of RSA.

A buy into the fast-growing application-delivery and -optimization market would be a defensible, an entirely logical move for EMC. It could reasonably be argued, in fact, that EMC should have acquired F5 Networks before it bought, or instead of buying, RSA.

A couple factors that might discourage such an acquisition are EMC’s relationship with Cisco Systems, which competes against F5, and the unresolved stock-option backdating questions at F5. Then again, the Cisco-EMC relationship has seen better days, and the stock-option backdating issue would be a smaller distraction in a company EMC’s size than it will be within an independent F5.

Meanwhile, EMC CEO Joseph Tucci still has to make good on his promise to grow five of EMC’s businesses — VMware, storage virtualization, content management, resource management, and security — into revenue-generating engines of $1-billion each during the next two to five years.

If you look at F5, whose revenue still is growing in the range of 40 percent on a year-to-year basis, it could help EMC and Tucci reach their objectives in a few of those categories.

Arrington Complains of Investigation Into TechCrunch

On his CrunchNotes site, TechCrunch impresario Michael Arrington is alleging that industry-gossip site Valleywag.com is looking into the nature of his relationships with the startup Web 2.0 companies he covers on his blog.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with such journalistic inquiries, undertaken by Valleywag or by anybody else. If Arrington has no investment stakes in the companies that he extols — or if he has provided full and proper disclosure regarding the relationships that do exist — he has no reason to worry. No matter how much investigation Valleywag does, it won’t find incriminating evidence of ethical or legal impropriety in Arrington’s business dealings.

What’s more, if it tries to publish something without factual foundation, something that is defamatory and slanderous, Arrington will have legal recourse to seek reparations.

On CrunchNotes, Arrington charges that Valleywag is engaging in “dirt digging.” Isn’t “dirt digging” just a dysphemism for “investigative journalism,” which is what all journalists should be doing?

If you ask me, the technology industry could use a lot more critical reporting and a lot less unquestioning cribbing from press releases.

Speculation Rife Regarding Cisco Shift to Software-Based Pricing

Nobody knows precisely how Cisco will implement a software-based pricing model across most of its product offerings during the next three to five years, but some of the scenarios mentioned in an InformationWeek feature article seem far-fetched.

Not many details have been forthcoming from Cisco, which probably still is getting its collective head around the concept, so it’s understandable that we’re seeing free-ranging conjecture and speculation on the subject. Still, InformationWeek seems to go into the weeds occasionally in exploring a potential and sweeping decoupling between hardware and software at Cisco.

I don’t see that happening. Why would Cisco do that? Where’s the value to Cisco — or to its channel partners, or even to its customers (if you really think about it) — in having Cisco routing and routing code sold purely as software and run by the buyer on any server it chooses for the task? For some Cisco products, the software and hardware are fused architecturally, with the hardware specially designed to accelerate the performance of sophisticated software functionality.

Besides, the pure-software sales model (selling only software and letting the customer fend for himself in finding the hardware on which to run it) is one from which even open-source router vendor Vyatta is having to migrate, moving instead to an appliance-based approach.

An appliance-based approach is where I believe most of Cisco’s product portfolio will ultimately transition. There will be some network-management offerings that will be sold exclusively as software, for the customer to choose whether he or she wants to install and run it on the hardware of his or her choice, but generally I foresee Cisco closely coupling hardware and software for architectural, business, and design reasons.

What will be different from the past, though, is that Cisco, wherever appropriate, will call attention to the value of its software in its pricing model by implementing subscription charges for updates to the code. These charges will be separate from existing maintenance and support charges. This model probably will span much of Cisco’s product line, encompassing routers, switching, security, and VoIP-related offerings such as its CallManager IP PBX.