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Black Friday is upon us and consumers are not the only ones out shopping. Several acquisitions were announced this month such as Google buying yet another cloud company and PayPal snapping up Honey.
But just like Thanksgiving, families come together to celebrate (SalesForce and AWS are forming a tighter partnership) and they also fight (Google vs. their own employees).
As we start to wrap up 2019 and start to look towards the future, will 2020 be a boom year or will we see cuts and decline (WeWork announced 2,400 job cuts)?
Acquisitions/Investments
- Google buys a small cloud partner to make it easier for customers to use VMware on its cloud
Google has bought yet another small business to build its cloud-computing unit: CloudSimple, whose software enables companies to run computing workloads that are based on VMware’s widely used server virtualization technology. Terms were not disclosed.
The deal follows the buys of data integration company Alooma, storage company Elastifile and cloud migration company Velostrata. Kurian’s biggest deal to date has been the $2.6 billion acquisition of privately held data analytics company Looker, which, like CloudSimple, had been a partner prior to the deal. The Looker deal hasn’t closed yet, however, and the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division moved to seek information from the two companies as part of a review, Bloomberg reported last month.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/18/google-buys-cloudsimple-which-helps-run-vmware-workloads.html
- PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B
PayPal announced today it has agreed to acquire Honey Science Corporation, the makers of a deal-finding browser add-on and mobile application, for $4 billion, mostly cash. The acquisition, which is PayPal’s largest to date, will give the payments giant a foothold earlier in the customer’s shopping journey. Instead of only competing on the checkout page against credit cards or Apple Pay, for example, PayPal will leap ahead to become a part of the deal discovery process, as well.
Currently, Honey’s 17 million monthly active users take advantage of its suite of money-saving tools to track prices, get alerts, make lists, browse offers and participate in an Ebates-like rewards program called Honey Gold. Its users tend to be younger, millennial shoppers, both male and female.
- HP Rejects Xerox Offer but Remains Open to a Deal
HP Inc. rejected a $33 billion takeover offer from Xerox Holdings Corp. as too low, but the PC and printer maker made clear it is interested in discussing a deal to combine with its smaller rival.
Xerox’s unsolicited offer of $22 a share significantly undervalues the company, HP’s board said in a public letter to Xerox Chief Executive John Visentin on Sunday. It also voiced concern about the debt a transaction would put on the combined company and said it needs more information about Xerox’s business, known as due diligence.
Still, HP said it recognizes the benefits of consolidation and is “open to exploring a potential combination with Xerox.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hp-rejects-xerox-offer-but-remains-open-to-a-deal-11574027722
- Celonis, a leader in big data process mining for enterprises, nabs $290M on a $2.5B valuation
Celonis was founded in 2011 in Munich — an industrial and economic center in Germany that you could say is a veritable Petri dish when it comes to large business in need of digital transformation — and has been cash-flow positive from the start. In fact, Celonis waited until it was nearly six years old to take its first outside funding (prior to this Series C it had picked up less than $80 million, see here and here).
The size and timing of this latest equity injection is due to seizing the moment, and tapping networks of people to do so. It has already been growing at a triple-digit rate, with customers like Siemens, Cisco, L’Oréal, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone among them.
- Report: Charles Schwab in talks to buy TD Ameritrade
Brokerage firm Charles Schwab is in talks to buy rival TD Ameritrade, reports CNBC. The organization cites a source who said the deal could be announced today. The two brokerage firms are the largest publicly traded houses, with Charles Schwab having a market cap of $57.5 billion and TD Ameritrade at $22.4 billion.
The retail brokerage industry has gone through upheaval in recent months as all of the major brokers have moved, or are moving, to commission-free trades in order to lure customers. CNBC says Charles Schwab was the first to do so, followed by TD Ameritrade.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90434433/report-charles-schwab-in-talks-to-buy-td-ameritrade
Cloud
- Salesforce and Amazon double down on cloud partnership following surprising Microsoft alliance
Amazon and Salesforce today strengthened their relationship with a new cloud partnership focused on technology for customer service centers. The announcement comes just days after Salesforce and Microsoft unveiled a cloud alliance of their own.
Under the new deal, Salesforce will use Amazon Connect, an Amazon Web Services offering for call centers, for its new Service Cloud Voice product. The new service from Salesforce will give call center workers a new set of tools to better do their jobs.
As part of the agreement, AWS content will become available on Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform, to train people in cloud technology.
- Google Scoops Up Chunk of Vodafone in Battle With Microsoft and Amazon
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-11-19/google-scoops-up-chunk-of-vodafone-in-battle-with-microsoft-and-amazon-video
Security/Privacy
- Facebook and Google’s pervasive surveillance poses an unprecedented danger to human rights
“The internet is vital for people to enjoy many of their rights, yet billions of people have no meaningful choice but to access this public space on terms dictated by Facebook and Google,” said Kumi Naidoo.
“To make it worse this isn’t the internet people signed up for when these platforms started out. Google and Facebook chipped away at our privacy over time. We are now trapped. Either we must submit to this pervasive surveillance machinery – where our data is easily weaponized to manipulate and influence us – or forego the benefits of the digital world. This can never be a legitimate choice. We must reclaim this essential public square, so we can participate without having our rights abused.”
This extraction and analysis of people’s personal data on such an unprecedented scale is incompatible with every element of the right to privacy, including the freedom from intrusion into our private lives, the right to control information about ourselves, and the right to a space in which we can freely express our identities.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/11/google-facebook-surveillance-privacy/
Infrastructure/Hardware
- HPE Dumps Recent Acquisitions Into Its Container Platform
The turnkey platform taps into HPE’s acquisition of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data software vendor BlueData last year and MapR in August.
BlueData makes a software platform that uses Docker containers to make it easier for companies to deploy large-scale machine learning and big data analytics environments. MapR, which HPE “rescued” from the brink of collapse, provides enterprise-grade file system and cloud-native storage services.
HPE’s Container Platform uses BlueData software as the control plane for container management and the MapR distributed file system and object store for persistent data with containers. It then uses Kubernetes for container orchestration. This package supports the containerization of cloud-native, microservices-architected applications and on-premises applications with persistent data.
Other
- Google Workers Protest Company’s ‘Brute Force Intimidation’
Roughly 200 workers gathered about 11 a.m. local time Friday outside a Google office overlooking San Francisco bay.
“Over the past two years, many of my coworkers have asked the company to take meaningful action to curtail sexual harassment and systemic racism, improve the working conditions of temps, vendors and contractors, and divest from harmful tech,” said Zora Tung, a Google software engineer. “Instead of listening to us, the company has chosen to silence us.”
The Google workers who protested also said the company had unjustly put Laurence Berland and Rebecca Rivers on indefinite administrative leave without warning. They demanded that Google bring the employees back to work immediately.
- WeWork lays off 2,400 employees
In a statement, a WeWork spokesperson said the cuts were being made as part of the company’s efforts to “create a more efficient organization” and refocus on the core office-sharing business. The job reductions represent 19% of WeWork’s total workforce, which amounted to 12,500 employees as of June 30, according to an SEC filing.
“The process began weeks ago in regions around the world and continued this week in the U.S.,” the spokesperson said. “This workforce reduction affects approximately 2,400 employees globally, who will receive severance, continued benefits, and other forms of assistance to aid in their career transition. These are incredibly talented professionals and we are grateful for the important roles they have played in building WeWork over the last decade.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/21/wework-lays-off-2400-employees.html
- When John Legere Leaves, Say Goodbye to the Old T-Mobile
Make no mistake, the CEO transition will usher in a new T-Mobile. That’s not because the visions of the two men are so different — they aren’t, and Legere has been grooming Sievert, 50, for quite some time. But T-Mobile is no longer the industry upstart, and Legere’s departure suggests that he feels his work there is almost done. The last step is to complete the acquisition of Sprint Corp., which is being held up by a group of state attorneys general rightly concerned about the potential harm the transaction may cause consumers.
Legere, 61, made clear that he isn’t retiring — nor is he turning his “Slow Cooker Sunday” Facebook Live series into a full-time gig. While he said the rumors of him joining WeWork aren’t true, he has fielded a “tremendous amount” of interest from companies seeking the expertise he’s demonstrated at turning around a troubled business and generating broad enthusiasm for a brand. “I’ve got 30 or 40 years and five or six good acts left in me,” Legere, the class clown of corporate events, said on Monday’s call.
- Amazon Is America’s CEO Factory
There’s one element some ex-Amazonians are leaving behind: the harsher parts of Amazon’s culture, such as hiring practices that favor skills over collegiality.
Amazon is known for disregarding social cohesion in interviewing candidates, former employees said, elevating other traits over an ability to work well with colleagues. Mr. Gordon of Latchel originally embraced that tenet.
“We approached hiring this way and it was a big, big mistake,” he said. He had to fire one employee he had hired who was capable but couldn’t get along with the team. “We need social cohesion and to like each other because we have to put in lots of additional hours and time because it’s a startup,” Mr. Gordon said.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/amazon-is-americas-ceo-factory/ar-BBX3hhE?li=BBnb7Kz