With a flurry of merger and acquisitions activity over the past few weeks, this new episode of the Software Defined Talk podcast discuss some of the more popular ones: AppDynamics, Trello, and Apiary. These kind of buys are all about what the acquirer plans to do with the new “asset” and the financial health of the company being acquired. We discuss these recent acquisitions, including who the “losers” are. Also, the low-down on Costco in Australia!

This episode features Brandon Whichard, Matt Ray, and Coté.

Show Notes:

AppDynamics files for IPO… Cisco says Not So Fast

• IPO filing…
• “Our revenues for the fiscal years ended January 31, 2014, 2015 and 2016 were $23.6 million, $81.9 million and $150.6 million, respectively.”
• Cisco…
• $3.7 billion, about a 14–17X multiplier.

Atlassian Buys Trello for $425 Million

• Wired coverage.
• 451 report, paywall.
• Public blog from 451.

Oracle Buys Apiary

• “API Integration Cloud.”
• Coté’s coverage, with plenty more links: Small asset working on a $660 million API management market.

BONUS LINKS! Not covered in show

HP and Google Buys Stuff too

• HPE: Cloud Cruiser for management/chargeback, $650 million.
• HPE: SimpliVity for converged systems, $650 million.
• Google buys Fabric from Twitter.

You Know What DevOps Needs? An IEEE Standard

• They’re working on it.

Do We Talk about President Trump?

• OpenStack Summit is leaving the U.S.
• Red Hat, Microsoft, others are coming out against the Muslim ban.
• Coté says: These people are proven idiots. Don’t work with them.
• Apparently, Trump watches Fox and parrots their lines, so maybe someone at Fox is making a killing with “insider trading”?

RethinkDB: Why We Failed

• Good read for how hard it is to crack the database and open source software markets.
• “In hindsight, two things went wrong — we picked a terrible market and optimized the product for the wrong metrics of goodness.”
• Coté follow-up: Be careful with TAM (Total addressable market) picking.

Yahoo is Altaba

• … wut?
• Dreams $45bn.

Google’s AI Awakening

• “How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself.”
• Extensive article on Google’s AI push from back in December.

Alexa

• Amazon’s OS.
• Also, there’s an estimated 24.5 million of these voice things around.

ClusterHQ Shutting Down

• Docker storage startup shuts down.

Facebook’s 2016 Open Source Contributions

• Open source continues to be great for recruiting (and probably code.)

Bruce Sterling/Jon Lebkowsky “State of the World”

• Always a good read.

Recommendations

• Brandon:
  • RTIC 30oz Tumbler.
• Matt:
  • Donate to the ACLU.
  • RTJ3 is out, and free!
  • My 2016 year in the air.
  • Tennis ball making video.
• Coté:
  • Big jar of green hatch! Get a 40!
  • How to feed three people with one bean.

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...

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