Big tech firms have chance to gobble up cash-poor cloud rivals

January 22, 2016 Off By David
Object Storage

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: Robert McMillan.

The recent market selloff is pummeling the business-technology sector, but it may come with a silver lining for its top players: an opportunity to buy cash-poor upstarts that have been eating away at their business. Enterprise-technology giants like International Business Machines Corp. IBM, +1.16% , Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO, +1.92% and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. HPE, +5.00% have all seen their market value shrink by at least 9% in the past month — underperforming the S&P 500 index, which fell 7% over the same period.

Some younger firms have fared much worse. Box Inc. BOX, +5.49% a seller of Internet-based data storage, has dropped by 26%. Workday Inc. WDAY, +2.38% which sells online access to accounting and human resources software, lost 13%. The market capitalization of Hortonworks HDP, +8.54% , which makes data-analytics software, has plummeted by half…

The business-technology industry’s biggest players have been struggling to adjust to broader changes like the shift from on-premises data centers to cloud computing delivered over the Internet…

Read more from the source @ http://www.marketwatch.com/story/big-tech-firms-have-chance-to-gobble-up-cash-poor-cloud-rivals-2016-01-21