We hear constantly on the news " Company X bought Y for
billions of dollars". Sometime later we hear "Company X has made a big
loss acquiring Y, it was overvalued". The envisaged gain in company
mergers rarely happens. Actually, it quite often becomes a loss for the
acquiring company. Top managers resign and it takes years to repair the company
image and build shareholder value to the level it was.
Take for example press coverage on www.investopedia.com :
“Leading microchip maker Intel has announced it intends to buy Altera in a deal worth $16.7 billion. The deal will allow Intel to expand its product line to include Altera's unique range of products, including programmable logic devices (PLDs), highly integrated power devices, pre-defined design building blocks, and development software. PLDs consist of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which are microchips that the company's customers program to perform specific desired logic and processing functions in their electronic systems….”
How sure are they this will work? Well, they have surely analyzed their needs and how much the add on in their product range might economically benefit their operations, as well as calculated the potential integration cost, how many people they can lay-off etc. They have done a compatibility analysis using consultants. It has been serious work but the risk of error is always very high. Who doesn’t remember Hewlett Packard buying Autonomy?
What if each company was fingerprinted and analysis is carried out by merging these fingerprints? Currently we can do economic fingerprinting if companies use the same or similar accounting systems. What if this was taken one step further and production, sales, and HR are mapped into a structure that could be analyzed and processed creating hypothetical scenarios, analyzing pros and cons? Is this a dream or can it really be done?
If the companies
are working in different languages the multilingual knowledge system helps in
joining the information infrastructures. In this case multilingual processing support
by Machine Translation is necessary.
A good search based on those fingerprints diving into company documentation in multiple languages provides the basis for the analysis. The analytics of the two fingerprints combined with the results from the documents will tell you more than any number of human analysts ever can:
A good search based on those fingerprints diving into company documentation in multiple languages provides the basis for the analysis. The analytics of the two fingerprints combined with the results from the documents will tell you more than any number of human analysts ever can:
No more costly mistakes! Start your
acquisition from knowledge about the firm you want to acquire! Insist on having
knowledge structures at the basis of your information!
I am co-founder and Chief Strategist at Coreon
GmbH. Our tag line is ‘Knowledge meets Language’. The unleashed synergy between
these two fields is what highly motivates me. I believe that Multilingual
Knowledge Systems are the information infrastructure for today’s most
challenging IT fields: Interoperability, Globalization, and (Product) Search.
You will find more information at www.coreon.com