Dell is going public again after Founder Michael Dell took the company private 5 years ago. Keeping VMWare was a major driver in this decision as is managing the debt incurred from acquiring EMC two years ago.
IBM has lined up ANOTHER large IT contract, this time with the Australian government which is surprising considering several public failures on joint efforts over the last few years.
Acquisitions
- Dell will again become a publicly traded company in $22 billion buyout
Dell is returning to the public market in a $22 billion stock buyout that will still leave CEO / founder Michael Dell and investment firm Silver Lake firmly in charge, as reported by The Financial Times. The company went private in 2013 following a $25 billion buyout by Dell and Silver Lake. Since then, Dell has seen success both in the enterprise market and with its consumer-focused PCs.
By moving back to the public sphere, Dell and Silver Lake will retain control over VMWare — which Dell acquired back in 2015 when it purchased enterprise data company EMC to better appeal to business customers — and be placed in a better position to reduce its debts.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/2/17525450/dell-public-company-stock-buyout-market
- AT&T Jacks Up TV Prices Post Merger After Claiming That Wouldn’t Happen
AT&T last week informed its DirecTV Now streaming video customers they’ll be paying $5 more to use the service starting in August.
“To continue delivering the best possible streaming experience for both new and existing customers, we’re bringing the cost of this service in line with the market—which starts at a $40 price point,” AT&T said in a statement to Cord Cutter News, which first reported the hike.
The problem: AT&T repeatedly claimed that the company’s merger with Time Warner would lower rates, not raise them.
Artificial Intelligence
- Oracle recently offered an artificial intelligent expert as much as $6 million in total pay as Silicon Valley’s talent war heats up
Oracle offered at least one candidate a $6 million package made up of salary and equity incentives to convince them to join the company, a source told Business Insider.
That candidate had other job offers but went with Oracle because of the higher pay, the source said.
https://nordic.businessinsider.com/oracle-artificial-intelligence-expert-pay-2018-7/
Cloud
- Google Cloud’s COO has left after less than a year
Before joining Google in late November 2017, Bryant spent more than 25 years at Intel, most recently leading its data center group. She took what was supposed to be a temporary leave from that role in May due to “family matters,” but ended up joining Google instead, under Cloud CEO Diane Greene.
Bryant’s hire was a win for the search giant’s cloud business, which is widely seen as No. 3 in the public cloud market, behind Amazon and Microsoft. As the relative newcomer in the space, Google Cloud’s challenge has been to prove its capabilities to large businesses, though Greene has said that there are no more “deal blockers” in the way of new contracts.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/03/google-cloud-coo-diane-bryant-has-left-after-less-than-a-year.html
Security
- Australian National University ‘hit by Chinese hackers’
Networks at the Australian National University in Canberra, which is home to several defence-focused research units, were breached “months ago” by attackers whom authorities traced to China, said Channel Nine television and Fairfax Media websites, citing “multiple” unnamed security and intelligence sources.
Also
China has consistently and strongly denied being involved in any hacking attacks and its embassy in Australia, as well as the foreign ministry in Beijing, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The news comes as tension flares over new Australian laws that seek to curb foreign interference, measures the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has said were adopted to allay concerns over Chinese influence in politics and universities.
Software/SaaS
- Micro Focus sells Suse for $2.5B
Suse, one of the longest-running commercial Linux distributors and, these days, a major player in the open-source infrastructure and management space, has been through a few ownership changes in recent years. Micro Focus acquired Suse from The Attachmate Group back in 2014, which itself had acquired Novell, the then-owner of Suse, in 2010. Today, Micro Focus announced that Suse is changing owners yet again, as private equity firm and venture capital fund EQT is acquiring Suse.
While the exact terms of the deal where not disclosed, EQT says the deal valued Suse at $2.535 billion.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/02/micro-focus-sells-suse-for-2-5b/
Datacenter/Hardware
- IBM lands $740M contract to provide IT services to Australian government
The main idea is to “prioritize the introduction of new technologies to citizen services,” Australia’s government said.
One of the programs involves IBM setting up a research team in Melbourne that will be tasked with studying potential applications for AI, blockchain and quantum computing in government. Additional research units will be based in Canberra and on the Gold Coast, working on new cybersecurity tools for data protection. They’ll also be looking into how supercomputers can be used to enhance government services.
This is important…
IBM’s contract award comes despite a couple of recent calamities relating to past services it provided for Australia’s government. They include failing to provide basic protection against a distributed denial-of-service attack that led to an outage during Australia’s online census in 2016, and a botched payroll system IBM installed for Queensland’s Department of Health for which the client was later blamed.
https://siliconangle.com/blog/2018/07/05/ibm-lands-740m-contract-provide-services/
Other
- How Google and Facebook Are Monopolizing Ideas
But as the companies come under growing pressure to police their platforms and weed out “fake news,” a growing range of content gets banned, labeled or deleted for often opaque or arbitrary reasons. ProPublica and Reveal, both nonprofit news publications, have had content dealing with hate groups and immigrant children, respectively, deleted or rejected by Instagram or Facebook. Video artists complain of viewership and ads being restricted because their content violated YouTube’s community standards.
Unhappy users, advertisers and content providers wouldn’t have as much to complain about if Google (which bought YouTube in 2006) and Facebook (which acquired Instagram in 2012) had strong competitors to which they could switch.
Photo by Teddy Kelley on Unsplash