Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash
It was a random week in tech: Larry Ellison is looking to make friends with President Trump (one of those the enemy of my enemy situations against Bezos perhaps?).
Xerox is still thirsty for HP Inc. and it looks like a hostile takeover is at least a possibility?
IBM is doubling down on communication platform Slack (thus shunning Microsoft) while Oracle and SAP are looking a little long in the tooth?
Acquisitions/Investments
- Google closes $2.6B Looker acquisition
While Kurian was happy to announce that Looker was officially part of the Google family, he made it clear in a blog post that the analytics arm would continue to support multiple cloud vendors beyond Google.
“Google Cloud and Looker share a common philosophy around delivering open solutions and supporting customers wherever they are—be it on Google Cloud, in other public clouds, or on premises. As more organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, Looker customers and partners can expect continued support of all cloud data management systems like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata,” Kurian wrote.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/13/google-closes-2-6b-looker-acquisition/
- Xerox Raises Its Bid to Acquire HP
Xerox Holdings Corp. XRX -1.13% raised its offer to buy HP Inc. HPQ +0.34% to $24 a share and said it would launch a public takeover bid early next month.
In November, Xerox made an initial stock-and-cash offer of $22 a share for the maker of computers and printers. It said Monday that the latest offer isn’t tied to financing or due-diligence conditions.
HP had rejected the initial bid as too low and questioned Xerox’s ability to finance a deal. In January, Xerox said it had secured up to $24 billion debt financing but HP again said the bid undervalued the company.
- Infosys is acquiring Simplus for $250M to grow its Salesforce consulting arm
The acquisition follows the purchase of Fluido, another Salesforce consulting shop, in 2018. The moves suggest that Infosys wants to build deeper expertise around Salesforce and make that a key piece of its consulting operations moving forward.
Brent Leary, a CRM industry veteran, who is owner at CRM Essentials, says that Simplus is well-positioned in the Salesforce ecosystem to capture lucrative cloud integration services, and it should help expand Infosys’s Salesforce consulting arm. “By acquiring Simplus, it allows Infosys to grab more market share, while extending Salesforce capabilities to offer existing clients,” Leary told TechCrunch.
Cloud
- Google to restructure Cloud business, with some roles eliminated
The restructuring is primarily meant to realign focus on international markets and affects fewer than 50 employees, according to a person close to the company. The company would not comment on how many employees are affected or which areas within the Cloud business would be affected, only saying it is working with internal “mobility teams” to find the employees new roles within the company.
Kurian this week outlined the company’s strategy, which included targeting five industries: retail, health care, financial services, media and entertainment, and manufacturing.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/14/google-to-restructure-cloud-business-with-some-roles-eliminated.html
- YouTube shines but Google ads continue to slow
YouTube’s ad sales in the last three months of 2019 rose 31% year-on-year to $4.7bn (£3.62bn), Alphabet said. Overall Alphabet revenue increased by 17% year-on-year to $46bn – the slowest rate in more than two years.
While YouTube is rapidly growing, Alphabet’s cloud business lags rivals.
For years the business did not publish revenue figures for its various divisions, to the concern of investors and regulators. When Sundar Pichai took over as Alphabet chief executive last year the policy changed, although it is still not releasing profit figures for individual units.
- Japan to hire Amazon to build government cloud
The government aims to put systems currently operated by different ministries and agencies on the cloud in four to eight years. It is expected to officially choose industry leader Amazon Web Services this spring to build 20 core government wide systems to kick-start the process, due to its pricing and quality of services.
Cloud-based systems are expected to cost a third of the current set up to maintain. It would also free up manpower, helping to boost productivity.
Noncore systems, such as those specific to the pension system or to a specific ministry, will be launched as they become ready and meet government standards. The government wants cloud service providers to have data centers in Japan due to security concerns, which means it cannot work with Chinese companies required to manage data at home.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-hire-Amazon-to-build-government-cloud
Software/SaaS
- IBM picks Slack over Microsoft Teams for its 350,000 employees
While this new rollout makes IBM Slack’s biggest customer to date, it has been the company’s biggest customer for years according to Slack. “IBM has been Slack’s largest customer for several years and has expanded its usage of Slack over that time,” reveals an SEC filing from Slack, which appears to downplay the news.
In a statement to The Verge, Slack says IBM has more than 300,000 users and “has scaled its Slack deployment so it can offer it to every employee at IBM.” This is a significant increase from the 165,000 IBM users that Slack last reported in 2019 after the launch of its Enterprise Grid service. It’s not clear whether IBM is using the paid version of Slack for all of its employees or a mix of the free and paid options, though.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/10/21132060/ibm-slack-chat-employee-rollout-microsoft-teams-competition
I am not sure if it is about “trust”… I am sure it helps that IBM already has AI integrations with Slack and they have been using the product for a few years… - Oracle and SAP – going soft in their old age?
Both, it seems, have woken up to the fact that firms like Salesforce, Workday, Coupa, Google and Amazon represent existential threats they are both hard put to push back against. In short, while neither are going away any time soon, both are long in the tooth and need to reinvent themselves if they are to stay relevant.
Reinvention is never easy, especially when you’ve enjoyed a long period of success. After all, who wants to rock the proverbial boat when the cash register is singing along? But in these companies’ case, change is a-coming and not just in the product lines where both have been slow to understand the impact of technology shifts.
https://diginomica.com/oracle-and-sap-going-soft-their-old-age
Other
- Target’s Delivery App Workers Describe a Culture of Retaliation and Fear
So it’s not enough to deliver the customer’s order from Target, now if you want to keep getting good ratings and more work you have to take out their trash and walk their dogs. Cool system! The article also details how Shipt workers worry about the company retaliating against them for posting negative comments or asking pointed questions on internal message boards and Facebook groups. One worker described being temporarily deactivated after criticizing the company’s new logo.
And then there’s the issue of pay: Shipt workers told Motherboard that the company recently switched from a straightforward per-order pay structure to a confusing algorithm that considers… some factors… to determine how they’re paid. You will be shocked to hear that the new algorithm does not favor the workers; some report their pay has dropped by 50 percent since Shipt made the switch.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dygxzw/target-shipt-delivery-app-workers-retaliation
- Larry Ellison Joins Peter Thiel In Trump’s Camp
Increasingly, Ellison’s company is competing with the cloud computing wing of Amazon.com Inc., and he does it with zeal. Oracle funded an anti-Amazon group called the “Free and Fair Markets Initiative” to attack Amazon. Oracle also worked desperately to derail Amazon’s bid for JEDI, a lucrative Defense Department cloud contract, going for far as to sue the federal government for illegally favoring Amazon.
Now, Ellison is making friends with his enemy’s enemy, who happens to be the President of the United States. On Wednesday, Ellison will host a fundraiser for President Donald Trump at his home in Rancho Mirage, California. Top contributors are expected to shell out $250,000 for a photo, a golf outing and a round-table discussion.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-14/larry-ellison-joins-peter-thiel-in-trump-s-camp
