The Reality Check: Why the $11B acquisition is less about synergy and more about value extraction, and how to protect your own estate. Let’s dispense with the pleasantries. IBM’s definitive agreement to acquire Confluent for roughly $11 billion is not a "strategic partnership" to accelerate hybrid cloud innovation. It is a textbook consolidation move by a legacy giant eyeing a critical data streaming asset to shore up its portfolio. At NET(net), we aren’t buying the "kumbaya" narrative of synergy. We are bracing our clients for impact. In the high-stakes arena of IT cost and value optimization, the old playbook of handshake deals is ancient ...
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Buckle up, enterprise tech buyers: DataStax just boarded IBM’s Death Star, and their CEO’s LinkedIn post is a glitter-dusted fantasy that deserves a cold, hard reality check. They’re hyping a future of “unlocking unstructured data” and “accelerating AI apps at scale” with Astra DB, watsonx, and Apache Cassandra’s open-source cred. It’s the kind of corporate fairy tale that seduces C-suite wallets—until you recall IBM’s knack for turning tech darlings into cosmic debris. As a grizzled critic of IBM’s acquisition slaughterhouse, I’m here to gut the hype and warn you: DataStax is strolling into a buzzsaw, and your tech supply chain could get ...
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In a monumental move, Cisco Systems, known for its networking equipment, has announced its intent to acquire Splunk for $28B USD ($157/share), the San Francisco-based company renowned for its software platform that monitors, searches, and analyzes big data along with a full suite of cyber security offerings. Both companies have significant histories in the tech industry, with Cisco having a footprint in network management and cybersecurity, while Splunk focuses on real-time data processing and analytics. The acquisition makes sense for Cisco as they have been reshaping their business from hardware-centric to higher margin software-centric. ...
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Oracle Corporation has agreed to acquire a large Electronic Health Records (EHR) company, Cerner Corporation, in a transaction worth $28.3 Billion. Oracle already has a significant presence in healthcare but adding Cerner, which essentially runs an ERP-style software system for healthcare delivery networks, gives Oracle a much larger wallet-share inside healthcare related customers. This would also enable greater account control as it adds more industry-specific applications to its already widely entrenched technology platform. If fully executed, this move will likely give Oracle a better market message around industry clouds, especially ...
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Kin Hubbard, a humorist and journalist who lived 100 years ago once said “the safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket”. Clearly views are different today. The value of mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. financial-services sector alone more than doubled to a whopping $196.5 billion in 2018 from $82.3 billion in 2017. According to a report by White & Case, Financial Institutions M&A Sector 2019 Trends, there are possibilities of mega deals in Europe and that Wall Street behemoths may start flexing their expansion muscles. And when that materializes, a Stock Purchase Agreement (SPA) is the ...
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