Conversations with Thought Leaders from the M&A Community
Phil Leigh - Trends in Online Technology are Shifting Company Values
Posted on December 16, 2007
M&A doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Companies succeed and fail and fortunes are made and lost based on how well their leaders pick the waves. Choose right and you ride the pipeline all the way to the beach; choose wrong and they’re picking up the pieces off the rocks. Acquirers must be aware of the larger trends taking place in the industries in which they invest and elsewhere in the economy that can impact the fortunes of their portfolio companies and equally important the market’s perception of their value.
Phil Leigh is one of the most insightful observers of an industry that is radically transforming the ways we work and play. Phil’s initial training was in electrical engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology and he subsequently received an MBA from the Kellogg School. As a respected securities analyst with First Boston and Raymond James in the 1990’s, Phil was one of the first analysts to focus on the then emerging world of the Internet. He chronicled its growth from an obscure technology to one of the prime drivers of an increasingly globalized economy; he witnessed firsthand the Bubble and the rubble that followed.
In 1998 Phil began to conduct online interviews of industry leaders via the nascent medium of Internet Radio. Over time these efforts migrated into a full time endeavor called Inside Digital Media (www.insidedigitalmedia.com). Several times a week Phil interviews leading companies in and observers of the Digital Media Industry, covering all aspects of Internet based entertainment and communication and the technologies that support them.
The rise of Web 2.0 - the migration of applications, processing and data storage from the desktop and local network to the Internet - has led Phil to conclude that we are now in another period of major realignment within the technology industry. As with the transformations that occurred when computing moved from mainframes to desktop PC’s and when the rise of the Internet connected all of us to the worldwide digital communications web, there will be big winners and big losers this time as well.
Phil has developed a very compelling theory that the winners in this era will center on several emerging Web 2.0 platforms. He focuses on Facebook, SalesForce.com’s Force.com development platform and Webex’s Media Tone network, but is quick to say that the jury is still out - some of these may falter and other platforms will almost certainly be developed, with Google and Microsoft likely candidates to try. All of this is outlined in much more detail in Phil’s article, Gravitation Attraction in the Internet Cloud, which can be downloaded by clicking here.
Length: This interview is about 25 minutes.
