With two surprise acquisitions this week we have a lot of synergies to discuss on this week’s Software Defined Talk podcast. We cover Samsung picking up Joyent, and Microsoft buying LinkedIn. We then discuss a recent article trying to explain what’s going on with private equity buying tech companies. Then, we discuss the big news from Chef we’ve been waiting for: the announcement of Habitat.

Listen above, subscribe to the feed (or iTunes), or download the MP3 directly.

Show Notes:

Samsung Buys Joyent

• Joyent notes.
• Coverage from VentureBeat.

Microsoft Acquires LinkedIn

• Press Release from Microsoft.
• M&A Synergies Theoretical WTF’ing:
  • Slideshare extended to all Office formats.
  • Login with LinkedIn + AD = SSO won: “Massively scaling the reach and engagement of LinkedIn by using the network to power the social and identity layers of Microsoft’s ecosystem of over one billion customers. Think about things like LinkedIn’s graph interwoven throughout Outlook, Calendar, Active Directory, Office, Windows, Skype, Dynamics, Cortana, Bing and more.”
  • 433 million professionals on LinkedIn (from Microsoft internal memo).
  • …but it’s probably all the same people, though.
  • “Along with the new growth in our Office 365 commercial and Dynamics businesses, this deal is key to our bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business processes.” (Microsoft CEO, from Microsoft internal memo.)
    • Ads and dumb-AI context: “This combination will make it possible for new experiences such as a LinkedIn newsfeed that serve up articles based on the project you are working on and Office suggesting an expert to connect with via LinkedIn to help with a task you’re trying to complete. As these experiences get more intelligent and delightful, the LinkedIn and Office 365 engagement will grow. And in turn, new opportunities will be created for monetization through individual and organization subscriptions and targeted advertising.” (Microsoft CEO, from Microsoft internal memo)
  • LinkedIn growth since Dec 2008: “Our team has grown from 338 people to over 10,000, our membership from $32 million to over $433 million and our revenue from $78 million to over $3 billion.” (Microsoft internal memo).
  • Others from the memo: Lydia training inline in Microsoft apps; paid content in Microsoft apps (a la Spiceworks); HR and recruiting.
• Deal PR deck: pretty good. I can see how the social graph and all the “semantic web sit” in LinkedIn, crossed with MSFT assets works well.
• One take on ads, doesn’t like the Office angle, cause privacy, but oh wait: Google Apps and Gmail.
• “Microsoft could improve LinkedIn”: Microsoft designs for people who have to do boring things with computers to make money. It’s the 9–5 software vendor.
• Previous big acquisitions: Nokia for $7.2 billion, Skype for $8.5 billion, Xamarin for $400 million.
• From 451 M&A coverage:
• I-banker stuff: “Microsoft will pay $196 per share to acquire LinkedIn, a 50 percent bump up from where it was trading ahead of the deal announcement, although well behind the $250 each share was worth in November. The price tag values LinkedIn at 8.2x trailing revenue.”
• “The company [Microsoft] must find new ways to differentiate. Integrations with LinkedIn offer potential functionality that will be challenging to duplicate. When the two companies are joined, there will be multiple ways that LinkedIn’s member network, and the data from that, will go into improving Microsoft’s Office and Dynamics apps, besides the other benefits from running a combined company.”
• “LinkedIn’s tools for recruiters account for 58 percent of the $860 million in revenue it generated in the first quarter of the year [so, $3.440 billion run rate]. When combined with educational material from its Lynda.com acquisition, HCM tools make up 65 percent of sales. Tools for marketers and premium subscriptions (including its offering for sales teams) each makeup less than 20 percent of the business, and are the slowest growing parts of the business.”
• “Microsoft is the world’s largest software developer, with about $100 billion in sales and a $400 billion market cap.”
• I-Bankers rejoice!
• Tim Anderson inadvertently makes a good case of CRM/HCM.

Private Equity Buying Tech Companies

• Why private equity is buying up software companies.
• The theory seems to be: SaaS companies are undervalued, and PE firms are looking to buy cheap assets and grow them, and re-exit them. This vs. the usual cut costs and re-exit then. Of course, Qlik and Ping aren’t SaaS.
• Vista Acquires Ping Identity for $600 million.
• Symantec buys Bluecoat from Bain.

BigNews.Chef.io

• Habitat.
• Habitat centers application configuration, management, and behavior around the application itself, not the infrastructure that the app runs on.
• Habitat is comprised of plan and build system, a supervisor, an HTTP interface on that supervisor to report package status, a depot, a communication model for disseminating rumors through a supervisor ring, and many other components.
• Check out the code.
• Don’t look at the camera, and don’t smile.
• Adam throwing eggs at Nathan.

BONUS LINKS! Not Covered in the Show

What Enterprise Wants from Google’s Cloud

• Google, in short, needs to learn to be boring.
• …according to Gartner analyst Lydia Leong: “Azure almost always loses tech evals to AWS hands-down, but guess what? They still win deals. Business isn’t tech-only.” What a weird thread that is!
• “Greene is also tapping her VMware Rolodex, talking with big enterprise rivals like SAP SE, Microsoft and Oracle, to get more of their products into the Google cloud. That’s must-have for some large companies, which need prepackaged software from these providers to run their businesses. No Oracle or SAP products are available on Google’s cloud today. Microsoft and Oracle declined to comment, while SAP confirmed early talks.” From Jack Clark’s Bloomberg piece.

Docker, Kubernetes and Mesos as Interoperability Targets

• A piece from The New Stack

Meta Podcast Stuff

• Scripps by Stitcher.
• Future of Podcasting by Ben Thompson.

Apple Announcement

• WWDC 2016: Apple’s eight key enterprise stories.

Recommendations

• Brandon: Keepin’ it 1600. Radiolab Presents More Perfect.
• Matt: I miss Uber; Matt’s gets Mercutio’ed by Austin and Uber. Occupied.
• Coté: Nine-minute history of “old IBM”: Poison Ivy treatments: I gotcha covered, so to speak.

Docker and Joyent are sponsors of The New Stack.

Michael Coté studies how large organizations get better at building software to run better and grow their business. His books "Changing Mindsets," "Monolithic Transformation" and "The Business Bottleneck" cover these topics. He’s been an industry analyst at RedMonk and 451...

Read more from Michael Coté