Three Ways Small Business CFOs Can Reduce IT Costs

As CFO (and perhaps CIO) of a small business, you’re likely experiencing the growing cost of buying and maintaining all the technology that keeps your business running and your workforce productive.  And as the IT environment becomes increasingly complex — with new software-as-a-service (SaaS) ap...

By Singu Srinivas • May 8, 2012

LinkedIn Builds a Facebook for Grown-Ups

LinkedIn CFO Steve Sordello announced yesterday that the company’s first-quarter revenue rose to  $188.5 million compared with 2011’s $93.9 million, an increase of 101% that beat analyst expectations and caused the stock to rise more than 8% this morning. The company’s profits also doubled as it ...

By David Rosenbaum • May 4, 2012

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Tax policy shifts: What CFOs need to know to stay ahead

Discover how evolving tax policies are creating new opportunities and challenges for CFOs.

By CFO.com staff

Is There a Payoff from Top-Team Diversity?

There are many reasons companies with more diverse executive teams should outperform their peers: fielding a team of top executives with varied cultural backgrounds and life experiences can broaden a company’s strategic perspective, for example. And relentless competition for the best people shou...

By Markus Kleiner and Thomas Barta • May 2, 2012

10 Things You Just Gotta Have in Your Cloud Contract

In “Four Barriers to Cloud Due Diligence,” I explored a few factors that contribute to the complexity of performing due diligence on a cloud vendor.When an enterprise moves to the cloud, it hands off its servers, networks, and even its data to its provider. All that it’s left with is a contract. ...

By Rob Livingstone • April 30, 2012

Economic Gloom Gathering, Credit Managers Suggest

Economists have said many times since the 2008 financial crisis that the recovery will be a long time coming and that it will be hard. So far, optimistic signs have predominated during the first half of a given year, followed by reasons for pessimism about the U.S. economy.The latest monthly baro...

By Sarah Johnson • April 30, 2012

Four Steps for Transforming Enterprise IT

With the growth in cloud-service offerings, and the increasing adoption of private, public, and hybrid cloud-computing strategies and practices within the enterprise, many people have begun discussing the future of the CIO and corporate IT. Will the IT department simply become a purchasing organi...

By Timothy Chou • April 27, 2012

Amazon Is All About Growth, Not Profits

Founded in 1994, taken public in 1997, Amazon.com recorded its first profit (to the surprise of many) in the fourth quarter of 2001. But Amazon has never been about profits. Indeed, Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak yesterday announced that the protean Internet retailer, cloud provider, digital content dist...

By David Rosenbaum • April 27, 2012

Midmarket Execs Forecast Slower Sales Growth

Middle-market companies expect revenue growth to moderate in the next 12 months, reflecting their lack of confidence in the U.S. and global economies and worries over higher health-care costs and new government regulations. All that is creating an uncertain financial picture for the firms, making...

By Vincent Ryan • April 27, 2012

Why Netflix Keeps Apologizing

“I messed up,” Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings wrote in a September 2011 blog, apologizing for the company’s July announcement that it would cleave its video-streaming business off from its DVD-by-mail service and charge customers separately for each, amounting to an abrupt, not to menti...

By David Rosenbaum • April 24, 2012

As Many Sellers as Buyers

Companies around the world are as much interested in divesting as they are in acquiring, with just 31% saying they expect to make an acquisition in the next 12 months and the same number expecting to divest, according to the latest M&A research from Ernst & Young.But the trend is going in...

By Andrew Sawers • April 23, 2012

How to Add M&A Value: Pay Cash, Go Hostile

For years, debate has raged as to whether mergers and acquisitions add value. Academic studies have tended to find that M&A is a sure-fire way to destroy value, and yet the corporate world keeps on going down the acquisitions route to take out rivals, grow market share, expand geographically,...

By Andrew Sawers • April 23, 2012

Microsoft Beats (and Surprises) the Street

Microsoft CFO Peter Klein said Thursday that sales of Windows — the operating system that dominates and powers the vast majority of the world’s desktop computers — rose 4% in the third quarter, even as worldwide PC shipments increased only 1.9% so far this year.Windows software sales contributed...

By David Rosenbaum • April 20, 2012

Emerging Risks Are Easier to Miss

Kevin Gordon, finance chief of Quintiles, which provides services to pharmaceutical and medical-device companies, has risk management on the brain. For CFOs, risk management “is on our minds from a financial perspective every minute of the day,” he says.Many CFOs like Gordon have seen their respo...

By Sarah Johnson • April 18, 2012

Have We Reached the End of the Tunnel?

Is the economy finally on firmer footing? Finance executives’ optimism levels have returned to normal after falling off dramatically during the recession, according to the latest Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey. “CFOs’ outlook for the future has finally emerged from th...

By Kate O'Sullivan • April 15, 2012

The Games Businesses Play

Go online to Samsung’s home page and you’ll find, right below the carousel advertising tablets, televisions, and phones, an invitation to join “Samsung Nation.” Beneath that is a leader board; in early March, Kenneth Brown, a Massachusetts business owner and a “Level 6 Legend,” was on top with 21...

By David Rosenbaum • April 15, 2012

The Beauty of Invisibility

What is a programmer doing when he spends his personal time improving open-source software? Or an enthusiast of the Bauhaus school when she modifies a Wikipedia entry on art history? Authors Christopher Meyer and Julia Kirby say each of those actions amounts to an “invisible handshake.” “Invisibl...

By CFO Editorial Staff • April 15, 2012

High Anxiety

It takes Hughes Communications and its partners four years to design, build, and launch a $400 million satellite. Failure, however, can happen very fast. “The rocket would explode on launch, immediately destroying both it and the satellite,” says Grant Barber, executive vice president and CFO of ...

By Josh Hyatt • April 15, 2012

No Résumés Required

In a recent survey, more than a quarter of the responding CFOs said they increased accounting staff in the past two years. Indeed, the biggest growth in jobs right now seems to be occurring in the professional- and business-services sector. But chances are the majority of those organizations are ...

By David Rosenbaum • April 15, 2012

Like It or Not, You’re in the Euro Zone

Sure, you’ve got worries: the fragility of an economic recovery still straining to create jobs, the impossible-to-predict outcome of the Federal Reserve’s expansive monetary policy, and forecasts of trillion-dollar-plus federal deficits stretching out for years, to name just three.Yet, as serious...

By Randy Myers • April 15, 2012

PE Managers Predict Two Years of Healthy Returns

Despite a challenging capital-raising environment and growing worries about new government regulations, private- equity firms are guardedly optimistic about fund returns and see strong investing opportunities in specific U.S. industries.Those were the views expressed in a new quarterly CFO benchm...

By Vincent Ryan • April 15, 2012

Google Sitting on Top of Cash Mountain

On Thursday, Google revealed that it will issue a third class of shares, Class C, which will be traded on Nasdaq. The new shares will be allocated to current Class A and Class B shareholders on a one-to-one basis — effectively a split that will, Google hopes, satisfy shareholders looking for cash...

By David Rosenbaum • April 13, 2012

Wine CFO Hedges Pinot to Manage Growth, Demand

“It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it’s neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its full...

By Marielle Segarra • April 9, 2012

Private Equity Firms Go for Bolt-Ons in Q1

In a soft market for mergers and acquisitions, financial sponsors spent less money on leveraged buyouts in the first quarter. In fact, the period saw the lowest level of private-equity-backed buyout activity in two years, with total value falling 20% from the fourth quarter of 2011.Private-equity...

By Vincent Ryan • April 5, 2012

Microsoft to Ax Service, Putting Small Cos. at Risk of Data Loss

Small businesses that use Microsoft to host their websites and e-mail accounts may be in for a harsh shock come May. At the end of April, Microsoft is replacing its free e-mail and website-hosting service, Microsoft Office Live Small Business (OLSB), with Office 365, a paid productivity service i...

By Marielle Segarra • April 3, 2012

When Big Data Gets Small, It Gets Useful

“Business executives have a gut sense that there’s money out there in data,” says Forrester principal analyst Brian Hopkins, and there’s more and more data flooding into enterprises all the time. According to Forrester, the data available to businesses — from Facebook “likes” to natural-language ...

By David Rosenbaum • March 27, 2012