SourceCast: Episode 31: Collaboration Crisis
Supplier Report: 7/2/2016
This week the various arms of HP have caught my attention. They successfully defeated Oracle over their Itanium dispute and have been awarded $3B.
In the wake of that news, HPE CEO Meg Whitman announced a massive restructuring (again) as their long time CTO Martin Fink is on his way out along with their COO. Meanwhile, HP Inc announced the purchase of a 3D scanning company.
With the sell off of the Autonomy products, the divestiture of their consulting services to CSC, and now with this $3B win, both HP companies have some cash, and I want to know what their grand strategy is.
In other news, IBM is doubling down on block-chain technology with their Bluemix Garage initiative, Microsoft has 350 million windows 10 devices active, and Oracle is trying their hardest to kill Java.
IBM
- IBM and Cisco to combine collaboration tools
IBM’s Verse email platform and Connections collaboration suite are a good match for Cisco products like the Spark messaging app and WebEx conferencing service, so the two vendors have found ways to integrate them, company officials say. All this will happen in the cloud. They’ll demonstrate the first examples next month at the Cisco Live conference.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3090100/ibm-and-cisco-will-make-watson-into-a-virtual-workmate.html
IBM and Cisco team up on enterprise collaboration to stave off rivals like Slack and MicrosoftThe bigger picture in this latest IBM and Cisco deal is that both companies are feeling the heat of competition from a wide range of rivals, some big and some actually quite small.
They include standalone services from popular startups like Slack, Quip, Trello and Asana; as well as those offered by large companies like Microsoft and Citrix, which not only build their own solutions but have been aggressive acquirers of those startups that have built popular enterprise productivity tools.
It’s a mark of how far we’ve come in the tech world that some of these products from much smaller outfits can give huge IT businesses a run for their money.
- IBM storage has a new boss: The same one it had six years ago
At IBM Walsh has a disparate set of products to look after, including FlashSystem, SVC, Storwize, XIV and the DS8000 line. FlashSystem is popular, while the others could be characterised unkindly as fading stars – or, more sympathetically, as long-lived survivors facing the challenges of public cloud storage, software-defined storage, server SANs and hyper-converged systems.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/01/ibm_storage_new_boss_ed_walsh/
- IBM Launches NYC Bluemix Garage With Former Azure Exec
The design element is what made a difference for Murray. For example, one of the Bluemix Garage engagements Murray sat in on was a small startup out of San Francisco that had a complete idea and knew exactly what it wanted to build. IBM had the company come to the garage for a design thinking workshop to help it visualize what it was trying to solve and what experience it wanted its end users to have. And the design workshop, the startup abandoned the idea it initially had because it realized that what it was trying to build wasn’t really what it was trying to solve.
http://www.eweek.com/developer/ibm-launches-nyc-bluemix-garage-with-former-azure-exec.html
Can IBM Really Make a Business Out of Blockchain?According to Jerry Cuomo, vice president of blockchain and cloud at IBM, the plan will succeed because the company offers a full-suite of tools that allow developers to get up and running quickly while also benefiting from a mentoring environment at the Bluemix Garage. The garage moniker is supposed to exude a Silicon Valley-esque vibe, where people throw around ideas with markers on whiteboards and Post-It Notes.
- Why IBM Will Soar While Apple Stumbles
Unfortunately, these great strengths may have become toxic. Its culture has become highly secretive. Suppliers may only refer to Apple by a specially assigned code name. They win new contracts without knowing why and what Apple plans to do with their technology and then lose them again without knowing what they did wrong.
Microsoft
- Microsoft Says More Than 350 Million Devices Now Running Windows 10 Ahead Of August 2 Anniversary Update
Market research group Gartner predicts that half of enterprises is set to deploy the new software by January 2017. “For enterprises, we expect that implementation will be significantly more rapid than that seen with Windows 7,” explains Steve Kleynhans, Gartner’s research vice president.
- Salesforce Forces Microsoft To Pay $8B Extra For LinkedIn
They both entered into a bidding war for LinkedIn fairly early on in the discussions, jumping from a price of around US$160 per share to Salesforce’s final offer, US$85 in cash and a portion of Salesforce stock that worked out to just around $200 per share. Microsoft ended up winning with its bid of US$196 per share, straight cash.
http://www.channelnews.com.au/salesforce-forces-microsoft-to-pay-8b-extra-for-linkedin/
Oracle
- Oracle (ORCL) Loses Itanium Lawsuit Worth $3 Billion to HPE
Oracle and HPE have been embroiled in a legal tangle involving software for Itanium chip-based servers over the last five years. HP Enterprise had asked for $3 billion in compensation from Oracle for allegedly causing a decline in the demand for its Itanium based products.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-orcl-loses-itanium-lawsuit-141002455.html
Of course, Oracle vows to contest the ruling… - How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java
Oracle employees that worked on Java EE have told others in the community that they have been ordered to work on other things. There has also been open talk of some Java EE developers “forking” the Java platform, breaking off with their own implementation and abandoning compatibility with the 20-year-old software platform acquired by Oracle with the takeover of Sun Microsystems six years ago. Yet Oracle remains silent about its plans for Java EE even as members of the governing body overseeing the Java standard have demanded a statement from the company.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2016/07/oracle-killing-java-ee/
Storage ( EMC | Dell )
- Why states like Massachusetts are trying to curb noncompete pacts
Noncompete pacts were only one ingredient in the recipe that worked against Massachusetts and to the advantage of Silicon Valley, where employees can depart and start their own companies mostly without fear of a lawsuit. But they mattered. In California, companies are generally prohibited from enforcing noncompete agreements because of a worker-friendly statute from the 19th century.
- Dell Promises ‘Seamless’ Deal Registration For Partners On First Day After EMC Merger
In a letter to partners Tuesday, Marius Haas, Dell chief commercial officer and president of enterprise solutions, said the company is “driving to maintain the partner and customer experience you have come to expect today, and at the onset of day one, provide seamless deal registration and intact sales coverage plans.”
“I do not think it will be seamless,” said a top executive at one large Dell and EMC solution provider, who did not want to be named. “Nothing in life ever is.”
- Data Protection: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
The key findings of the survey of IT decision makers at 2,200 organizations included:
- incidents of traditional data loss and disruption are down since 2014, but new challenges mean 13% more businesses experienced loss overall;
- over half of businesses fail to protect data in the cloud despite more than 80% indicating they will rely on SaaS-based business applications;
- 36% have lost data in the last year as the result of a security breach;
- 73% are not very confident they can protect flash storage environments;
- the average cost of data loss is more than $914,000.
http://it-tna.com/2016/06/29/data-protection-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/
Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc
- Whitman lifts lid on big HPE reorganization
The CTO and COO are leaving as part of this reorg…Whitman also said that HPE would merge its Hewlett Packard Labs research arm into its enterprise group, which is focused on selling data center gear. The idea is to better align research projects with products and services that can eventually be sold, she explained. Antonio Neri, executive vice president and general manager of the HPE enterprise group, will lead Hewlett Packard Labs.
As for the restructurings, Whitman wrote that it would consolidate its sales teams into one big global sales unit under its enterprise group. HPE will do a similar reshuffling with its marketing departments and will consolidate staff from e-commerce, product marketing, and customer relations group into one big marketing unit.
http://fortune.com/2016/06/27/hewlett-packard-enterprise-martin-fink-meg-whitman/
- HP launches PC as a service, buys 3D scanning specialists
HP Inc said it has launched PCs as a service, simplifying PC lifecycle management. HP Device as a Service (DaaS) is designed to help take the stress out of acquiring, deploying and managing technology, with one single contract across devices and services, and no upfront investment. The programme is globally scalable, meaning customers can easily evolve their hardware infrastructure to adapt to changing workforces.
Separately, HP is buying German companies David Vision Systems and David 3D Solutions, which make 3-D scanning technology, the Wall Street Journal reported. No financial terms were disclosed.
http://www.telecompaper.com/news/hp-launches-pc-as-a-service-buys-3d-scanning-specialists–1151217
- HP, Apple top list of tech companies fighting forced labor risk
Forced laborers may be charged high recruitment fees to get jobs, be trapped in debt servitude, deprived of their passports or other documents, or made to work excessive hours for low pay, the report said.
HP, Apple, Intel Corp, Cisco Systems Inc and Microsoft scored highest on the list of 20 publicly traded ICT companies. At the bottom were Keyence, BOE Technology and Canon.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/hp-apple-top-list-tech-181308055.html
Other
- What sets Red Hat apart from the Valley
The Red Hat Summit marked 10 years since Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss, and today it remains a cornerstone of the company’s offerings. Last year, Red Hat purchased Ansible, the provisioning system that competes with Chef and Puppet. In both the case of Ansible and of 3scale, Red Hat seized a smaller firm that was doing quite well, yet hadn’t taken over the market mindshare the way their public and near-public competitors had.
Why is it that Red Hat seems to be more successful with technology acquisitions than, say, an HPE, which took on companies like Mercury, Autonomy and even Compaq? Red Hat CFO Frank Calderoni said that these successes come from disciplined acquisitions goals.
- Salesforce is way behind Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP in one important area of its business
Market-research firm Cowen Group pointed out in a note published on Thursday that Salesforce generates a substantially lower percentage of revenue from international regions compared to other software makers.
As seen in the chart below, Salesforce gets only 32% of its revenue from outside the US, lagging behind SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, which all generate over half of their sales from overseas.
Photo: Felix Russell-Saw
Supplier Report: 6/11/2016
IBM scored a 10 year, $300M deal with Emirate Airlines. While they may be celebrating, HPE is hot on big blue’s AI heels with their Hexis platform.
Oracle is still dealing with last week’s lawsuit news. Investors haven’t overreacted to the possibility of false cloud sales…yet. However, the government is said to be eager to process Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance issues.
IBM
- IBM Lands $300 Million Deal with Emirates Airline
Under the new, enhanced-IT managed-services arrangement, IBM will “provide IT Infrastructure delivered as a service, allowing the airline to improve efficiency on its passenger support systems and functions.” The deal calls for fully managed services utilizing IBM’s mainframe, data storage, and the capability to encrypt data in near real-time.
- IBM Shifts Spark Development to its Cloud
IBM said it is expanding access to the data analytics development tools available on its Bluemix cloud platform, giving data scientists working in the R programming language faster access to more data along with new contributions to SparkR, SparkSQL and Apache SparkML.
http://www.enterprisetech.com/2016/06/07/ibm-shifts-spark-development-cloud/
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- HPE Discover 2016: Meg Whitman keynote
- HPE’s Whitman Says Open to Cloud Deals With Amazon, Google
“We may do something over time with Google and Amazon,” Whitman said Tuesday during an interview at her company’s annual event, Discover 2016, in Las Vegas. “They are not enterprise companies for the most part. They may get there. I know that is their ambition.”
- HPE vs IBM Watson: Machine learning is ‘more than an opportunity for expensive consulting’ says software GM
HPE has maintained an aggressive stance on the company’s proposed future in machine learning and AI at this week’s Discover 2016 conference in Las Vegas. Today, HP Software general manager Robert Youngjohn took another glove off, slyly describing IBM’s Watson as “expensive consulting with a smaller technology platform”.
- HPE Leads Contracting Server Market As Cloud Popularity Grows
“The real driver of global growth continues to be the hyperscale data center segment. The enterprise and small or midsize business (SMB) segments remain relatively flat as end users in these segments accommodated their increased application requirements through virtualization and considered cloud alternatives.” Total sector revenues reached £13 billion during the first quarter of 2016, of which HPE secured $3.3 billion – a quarter of the whole market and an increase of 3.3 percent.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/cloud/gartner-server-market-cloud-growth-193198
Oracle
- Oracle’s New Legal Challenge: Of Companies And Culture
While companies are not people, companies can have cultures. What’s at stake in all of these matters, regardless of their ultimate disposition, is what impact they might have on Oracle’s culture and how changes in that culture could potentially lead to conduct that slows the company’s growth and leads to weaker than current valuation metrics. There’s little doubt that Oracle or at least its senior executives have one of the more macho and competitive cultures in corporate America. Larry Ellison, Chairman of the Board and CTO of the company, competes in just about every way he can and against everyone that he can. Mark Hurd, co-president of Oracle, enjoys or is credited with a similar macho personality. It is part of who they are.
Also:
The Fortune article about the “redemption” of Mark Hurd said that although Hurd didn’t always care for the niceties of making employees feel good, he always got results. A brief walk down memory lane or conversations with ex-HPE employees might challenge the accuracy of that statement. Talking of things about which I do have first-hand knowledge, Mark Hurd and his colleagues ruined HPE’s software business and destroyed a significant amount of shareholder value in the process.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3981044-oracles-new-legal-challenge-companies-culture
- Why Oracle’s Fiscal 4Q16 Results Will Likely Miss Expectations
Oracle’s Software segment reported revenues of $6.4 billion in fiscal 3Q16, which was flat on a constant currency basis. Oracle’s cloud revenues, which include SaaS (software-as-a-service), PaaS (platform-as-a-service), and IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service), grew to $735 million. The segment grew by 44% on a YoY constant currency basis.
Oracle’s Hardware and Services segments reported revenues of $1.1 billion and $793 million, respectively. Hardware revenues fell by 2% while services revenues grew a meager 1%
http://marketrealist.com/2016/06/why-oracles-fiscal-4q16-results-will-likely-miss-expectations/
Dell | EMC
- Dell to offload $3.25 billion in junk bonds to further fund EMC buyout
Denali Holding, the parent company of Dell, is offering $3.25bn of senior notes to finance, in part, the acquisition of EMC. Dell has already sold $20bn of investment-grade secured bonds and $5bn of institutional loans to fund the $67bn EMC takeover. Under the deal, EMC shareholders will receive $24.05 per share in cash in addition to tracking stock linked to a portion of EMC’s economic interest in the VMware business.
Other
- Google’s DeepMind Is Developing An AI Kill Switch To Prevent A Skynet Apocalypse
Fortunately, some of the major players are actually also working on systems and methods to help maintain control of super-intelligent AI agents. In fact, a team of researchers at Google-owned DeepMind (the team that built Alpha Go, the machine that beat Lee Sedol handily) , along with University of Oxford scientists, are developing a proverbial kill switch of sorts for AI. Google acquired artificial intelligence startup DeepMind back in 2014 for $580 million or so, and back in the day Google CEO Eric Schmidt called it “an important bet.” Together with U. Oxford, the team has released a paper entitled “Safely Interruptible Agents.”
The paper details the following in abstract: “Reinforcement learning agents interacting with a complex environment like the real world are unlikely to behave optimally all the time. If such an agent is operating in real-time under human supervision, now and then it may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions—harmful either for the agent or for the environment—and lead the agent into a safer situation.”
http://hothardware.com/news/google-ai-kill-switch-could-prevent-skynet-takeover
Photo: Torsten Dettlaff
SourceCast: Episode 29: Getting too huuuuuuge
Supplier Report: 6/4/2016
The tables have turned for Oracle. A month ago they were suing Google for $8.8B dollars and now they are being sued by HPE for failure to comply with a contractual support commitment AND for potentially cooking their books in the cloud space.
SalesForce and IBM both announced that they are purchasing companies this week. But are these companies taking on too much debt? SaleForce is already being called out for paying too much for DemandWare ($2.8B), but is cheap credit causing a bigger issue in the tech-world?
IBM
- IBM to Buy EZSource to Help Developers Modernize Mainframe Apps
Big Blue announced on June 1 its intent to acquire EZ Legacy (EZSource), an Israel-based application discovery company, to help developers easily understand and change mainframe code based on data displayed on a dashboard and other visualizations. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2016. Financial terms of the deal were not released.
http://www.eweek.com/developer/ibm-to-buy-ezsource-to-help-developers-modernize-mainframe-apps.html
- IBM’s Rometty: Watson financials don’t need to be broken out
“If it’s digital, it will be cognitive,” Rometty said. She said there’s no value in disclosing Watson financials while “I nurture and grow it.”
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/01/ibms-rometty-watson-financials-dont-need-to-be-broken-out.html
- IBM Watson invading Cisco routers for IoT takeover at the edge
Another example given was for remote workers to be able to better monitor and manage the health of equipment, like machinery. Even at the edge, the equipment can be monitored in real-time and users will know when maintenance will be needed.
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/ibm-watson-invading-cisco-routers-for-iot-takeover-at-the-edge/
Microsoft
- Microsoft and Facebook to build subsea cable across Atlantic
MAREA will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic – featuring eight fiber pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160Tbps. The new 6,600 km submarine cable system, to be operated and managed by Telxius, will also be the first to connect the United States to southern Europe: from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Bilbao, Spain and then beyond to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. This route is south of existing transatlantic cable systems that primarily land in the New York/New Jersey region. Being physically separate from these other cables helps ensure more resilient and reliable connections for our customers in the United States, Europe, and beyond.
- Microsoft faces blowback in China over unwanted Windows 10 upgrades
Posts critical of Microsoft on microblog site Weibo relating to the Windows 10 upgrade, which Microsoft users must switch to, have grown to over 1.2 million in number, it said. “The company has abused its dominant market position and broken the market order for fair play,” Xinhua quoted Zhao Zhanling, a legal adviser with the Internet Society of China, as saying. He said users or consumer protection organizations had the right to file lawsuits against the company as Microsoft had not respected users’ right to know and choose, and may eventually profit from the unwanted upgrades.
- Microsoft just BANNED all your terrible passwords (there were hundreds of articles about this)
The US technology firm has created a dynamically-updated list of terrible passwords, which it will not let you use when registering for an account online.
Rather than provide some loose guidelines about password length and complexity, the Redmond firm will not let you use any of the commonly used passwords.
The list of offenders will be continually updated based on new leaks, so when people start to shift to other easy-to-guess passwords – these will also be banned.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc
- What Will HPE Sell Next?
I’d say the smart money was on servers. When IBM sold off PCs, it couldn’t sustain its Intel-based server business and had to sell it to Lenovo — the firm that bought the PC business. So I guess HPE could try to sell servers to HP Inc., but HP Inc. is up to its eyeballs in debt already, thanks to being gifted with all of the company debt in the divestiture, so I doubt it has the resources to buy it.
Next in line would be Oracle, because Mark Hurd knows the business and it would strengthen Oracle’s offering. However, Hurd also knows what it is worth, and I’ll bet it is less than Whitman is willing to accept.
This is interesting:
Maybe this should be titled “Death by CEO.” If you don’t buy it, just take a look at HP Inc.’s executive team.
You’ll see two people who likely have the strongest inside knowledge of Meg Whitman’s plan: HP’s old CFO Cathie Lesjak, who is rather famous for either stopping or trying to stop some of HP’s biggest mistakes; and HP’s old head of HR, Tracy Keogh, who is out of Harvard and arguably the most qualified HR director in tech. Both of them left HPE, and probably not because they thought Whitman was a brilliant CEO. Just saying.
- Is There More Upside for Computer Sciences?
HP Enterprise (ticker: HPE) gets to unload its slowly shrinking business of managing computer networks and focus on its growing business of selling networking hardware and software, along with specialized services. Computer Sciences (CSC) gets something big to squeeze costs out of. It has plenty of recent experience. Barron’s recommended shares of Computer Sciences nearly three years ago based on new chief Mike Lawrie’s work letting go of money-losing contracts and consolidating scattered departments to bring down costs (“Jockeying for Position in the Cloud,” Sept. 14, 2013). Shares have more than doubled since then, factoring in the spinoff of a government-services unit last year and dividends, including a $10.50 a share special.
http://www.barrons.com/articles/is-there-more-upside-for-computer-sciences-1464409150
- HP Enterprise takes Oracle to court, demands $3B
In spite of the Itanium’s reputation, a 2010 settlement agreement between HP and Oracle obligated Oracle to offer its products on HP’s Itanium-based server platforms until HP discontinued them. Yet not long after that, Oracle announced it would no longer support the Itanium platform because HP was planning to shut it down eventually.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/hp-enterprise-takes-oracle-to-court-demands-3b/
- HPE hunkers down on data center hardware
What is interesting to us here at The Next Platform is that HPE is focusing down on the most core datacenter products it has, including servers, storage, switches, systems software (including operating systems and a smattering of management tools, databases, and other selected middleware), plus financing for the whole kit and caboodle for those customers who want to use other people’s money to fund their IT infrastructure. The resulting HPE after the spinout of Enterprise Services to CSC is going to be considerably smaller than the HPE that was just separated from the PC and printer business last year – about $33 billion in annual sales – but it is a good guess that this leaner HPE will be a lot more profitable. HPE will also not be going through round after round of restructurings in the services business, which it has endured since buying Compaq in 2001 and which accelerated in the wake of the acquisition of EDS in 2008.
http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/05/27/hpe-hunkers-datacenter-hardware/
Oracle
- Oracle Shares Fall After a Lawsuit Related to Cloud Computing Business
Svetlana Blackburn, in a suit filed Wednesday in federal court in the Northern District of California, alleges her finance job in Oracle’s cloud-computing business “came to an abrupt end because she resisted, refused to engage in and threatened to blow the whistle on accounting practices she reasonably believed to be unlawful.”
Also:
Later on Thursday, Oracle was hit with another suit, this time a class-action case that cites Ms. Blackburn’s litigation and says the stock drop caused “significant losses and damages” to class members.
An Oracle investor, Grover M. Klarfeld, sued on behalf of himself and “all others similarly situated.” His complaint accuses the company of violating federal securities laws by using “improper accounting practices to inflate the company’s cloud-computing revenues by millions of dollars.”
- Oracle Says It Will Sue Former Employee Who Sued It
Because… of course they will!The problem for Oracle, and other large enterprise technology companies, is that no one really believes their cloud sales figures. Reported numbers typically include lots of software and even hardware that most companies would not consider cloud at all, complicating comparisons between growth businesses and legacy businesses.
http://fortune.com/2016/06/02/oracle-employee-lawsuit-cloud-sales/
Other
- Google goes after Microsoft, Tableau, and others with a new free analytics tool
The company has launched Data Studio, a free version of the data visualization tool it introduced as part of an analytics suite it unveiled earlier this year. It includes a wide variety of data connectors to let customers visualize data from Google AdWords, Google Sheets, and other Google products.
It also integrates with BigQuery, and the company plans to launch a connector for SQL databases later this year.
- Apple is working on an AI system that wipes the floor with Google and everyone else
For example, imagine asking a computer to “Find a nearby Chinese restaurant with open parking and Wi-Fi that’s kid-friendly.” That’d trip up most assistants, but VocalIQ could handle it. The result? VocalIQ’s success rate was over 90%, while Google Now, Siri, and Cortana were only successful about 20% of the time, according to one source.
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-apples-vocaliq-ai-works-2016-5?&platform=bi-androidapp
- The Debt Problem Is Bigger Than You Think
There’s two problems here, though. First, debt has been growing faster than cash. For example, over the last year, cash balances rose 1.8% while debt due in the next five years expanded by 17%, according to Bloomberg. S&P pegged those numbers at 1% and 15% for its sample. But the direction is the same, more debt growth than cash growth. This discrepancy can only go on for so long before it becomes a notable problem – if it hasn’t already.
Second, all that new debt isn’t getting put to productive use. Indeed, capital spending has hardly been a bright spot in recent quarters, including the relatively weak first quarter of this year. True, a lot of the cash is being pushed toward stock buybacks, which makes sense in some situations. But certainly not in all situations. Dividend increases are another place some cash has been put to work, which makes a dividend investor like me happy. However for some companies, the cost of a dividend hike might not be worth the risk of the debt.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3978849-debt-problem-bigger-think
- Salesforce Acquires Demandware for $2.8 Billion
Demandware offers a variety of enterprise services through the cloud, including digital commerce, order management, predictive intelligence and point of sale. Prior to the acquisition, the company had counted several global brands among its clients, including Design Within Reach, Lands’ End, L’Oreal, and Marks & Spencer.
http://www.toptechnews.com/article/index.php?story_id=0010000LHSIA
Also:
Salesforce: Overpaying For DemandwareThe only reason for a firm to pay a premium over the market value for another firm is if the acquiring firm believes there are significant synergies attainable through acquisition. As the deal is constructed, Salesforce is paying a premium of $27.01/share (from 5/31/16 close price), or slightly over $1 billion above market price. Salesforce has yet to make any mention of the dollar value of synergies between the two companies.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3979432-salesforce-overpaying-demandware
Photo: Tony Webster