Cisco's Cybersecurity Shopping Spree (Part 2)

Note: This article is Part 2 of a brief series on Cisco's cybersecurity strategy. You can read Part 1 here. It's not required reading for this article.

People thought the best land purchase of all time was the worst land purchase of all time for more than 20 years.

The United States, led by Secretary of State William Seward, bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million in 1867. Adjusted for inflation, the acquisition price was about $725 million in today's dollars. That's a steal. Nobody cared in 1867.

Both the media and the public mocked the acquisition. The New York Herald called Alaska a "sucked orange," meaning Russia had sucked the value from the land and sold the U.S. a frozen wasteland. The deal was nicknamed "Seward's Folly," a personal criticism against William Seward for leading what everyone thought was a foolish purchase.

William Seward passed away in 1872. Seward's Folly followed him to the grave. He never knew about the gold discovered at Juneau in 1880. He never knew about the oil discovered at Prudhoe Bay in 1968. He certainly didn't know his now legendary foresight was vindicated by economic benefits of a trillion dollars and counting.

What can the Alaska Purchase teach us about the strategy and upside for Cisco's acquisition of Splunk? A lot more than you'd think.

Let me tell you how Russia sold a literal gold mine.¹

Motives for selling: fur trading and SIEM are unprofitable businesses

Russia wanted to get rid of Alaska because the land was a pain to maintain and defend from the expanding British Empire. They were also broke and needed the money.

The fur trade was paying the bills. It was an okay business, but it cost them tons of money and military resources to operate. Alaska seemed like a giant, frozen, bottomless drain of cash.

The near-term pain of making their Alaska problem go away motivated Russia to sell. The deal with the United States checked too many strategic boxes to refuse. Decent cash infusion? Check. Stop fending off the British Empire? Check. Sell off a marginally profitable fur business? Check.

Is this story starting to sound familiar? It should.

Back in 2016, SIEM looked like a good market for Splunk. Here's the Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM from 2016:

Cisco's Cybersecurity Shopping Spree (Part 2)

Splunk's position in the "Leaders" quadrant was a cozy spot on the couch in front of the fireplace at a mansion in Vail. Splunk and LogRhythm were the up-and-comers, just out there chilling in the house enterprise tech players built. IBM, HPE, and Intel owned the mansion, but there was plenty of room for everyone.

Then, things got crowded. Microsoft entered the picture. Seven other startups raised $2.4 billion in capital.² Splunk and LogRhythm weren't the only up-and-comers anymore.

The three most accurate Gartner Magic Quadrants for SIEM look a whole lot different than 2016:

Competition arrived, and the SIEM market became a pain to maintain and defend. Financially, the Splunk of the 2020s was a wildly unprofitable business. This chart compares Splunk's revenue and profitability (net income) over its entire time as a public company:

It tells you everything you need to know. Splunk has never (yep, never) had a profitable quarter. In January 2022, they spent $4 billion to earn $2.67 billion. Put differently, they had to spend $1.50 to earn $1. You don't need an MBA to know that spells trouble, capital T.

Cisco kicked off the beginning of the end with a failed $20 billion plus acquisition offer in February 2022.

Private equity entered the room shortly after. Silver Lake invested $1 billion in June 2022, "…eager to work with [Splunk CEO Doug Merritt] and his team to support Splunk’s next phase of growth."

Doug Merritt resigned five months later.

Pile on even more competition and the makings of a paradigm shift from SIEM towards security data lakes, and Splunk's situation starts looking a lot like the frozen wasteland of Alaska in 1867.

Could Splunk have waited things out and kept competing? Sure. This wasn't a fire sale. But, like Russia³ and Alaska, the deal with Cisco checked too many strategic boxes to refuse. Decent return for shareholders? Check. Stop fending off well-capitalized competitors? Check. Sell off a marginally profitable SIEM business? Check.

Alleviating near-term pain often motivates action more than the drudgery of waiting things out for long-term benefits that may never come. This is true in territorial expansion, in cybersecurity, and in your own life.

Russia was happy to sell 665,384 frozen square miles of land and an unprofitable fur trading business for $7.2 million. Splunk was happy to sell $4.1 billion of ARR and an unprofitable SIEM business for $28 billion. They both just needed to make the pain go away.

Next, let me tell you how a directionally correct strategy and an insatiable hunger for expansion led the United States to make the purchase.

Motives for buying: American expansionism and predictable revenue growth

The United States didn't know it was buying a literal gold mine, either. William Seward had a directionally correct hunch about resources (hand-wavey gesture… somewhere). More importantly, he had an obsession with the idea of American expansionism.

By 1867, the United States was already a prolific dealmaker. The Alaska Purchase was the country's seventh major territorial expansion. Back then, America valued expansionism like many of today's investors value growth — more is always better.

If you look at expansionism as the main strategic driver, the Alaska Purchase had very little downside risk for the United States. More land, same continent, decent price, and maybe some resources other than fur. A true "All Weather" strategy. Ray Dalio sure would be proud.

The acquisition of Splunk by Cisco and CEO Chuck Robbins is a similar story. The news was initially met with shock about the price tag, questions about Cisco's ability to execute, and mixed reviews about its potential.

Cisco has been widely criticized for years about low growth and declining innovation. The accusation of "The destructive and illogical ideology that…a company should be run to 'maximize shareholder value' continues to cripple the United States…" is an uppercut to the jaw of Cisco's leadership team.

Splunk was a solid acquisition for Cisco based on financial metrics alone. The $28 billion acquisition price was a relatively pedestrian 7x multiple on Splunk's projected revenue. Buy-side investment bankers everywhere smiled with joy.

Leaders from both companies projected the deal to be cash-flow positive in the first year. They wasted no time making good on that promise Splunk laid off 7% of its workforce a month after the acquisition was announced.

Most importantly for Cisco, Splunk adds $4 billion of smooth, buttery, and predictable ARR to its security business. When you're a 38-year-old company with $57 billion of revenue, boring ol' predictable growth is a central part of your strategy. Nobody is calling this "Robbins' Folly."

But wait. Predictable revenue growth surely isn't what the life of a big company is all about, right?

Here's how new technology can turn an average investment into an iconic one.

Sometimes, you get lucky: gold, oil, and artificial intelligence

The potential upside of a deal isn't always obvious right away. This story has repeated itself throughout the history of tech.

Microsoft and Forethought had no clue its Project Odyssey would turn into Excel, the app that never dies.

Google and YouTube had no clue that traditional media was on the brink of The Great Unbundling.

Sequoia and WhatsApp had no clue the app was going to become the de facto SMS protocol for billions of international users.

Likewise, Russia and the United States had no clue about the gold and oil buried beneath the frozen tundra in Alaska.

So the important question is: what changed?

Technology.

Technologies for finding and extracting gold and oil were basically non-existent when the Alaska Purchase happened. Russia didn't know they were selling a gold mine because they couldn't find it. Simple as that.

The discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay happened because of major advancements in tech. It took 100 years and a slew of breakthroughs in geological surveying, seismic testing, exploratory drilling to finally discover one of the largest oil fields in North America. On top of all that, it took an 800-mile pipeline to actually use it.

You can rag on Russia all you want for selling a gold mine. The reality is there's no way they could have found it in 1867. The technology just wasn't there yet.

Splunk could be the Alaska Purchase of tech acquisitions. Why?

Artificial intelligence. Specifically, how artificial intelligence gets applied to the security problems we've been struggling with for a long time.

Security Operations makes up a giant subset of the problems. It's one of cybersecurity's largest estates. The company that develops the best AI and ends problems like alert fatigue, SOC analyst burnout, long MTTD/MTTR cycles, and (just maybe) the holy grail of reducing breaches is going to get paid.

Palo Alto Networks and others are working towards this audacious future. But Cisco's acquisition of Splunk might be the savviest strategic move yet.

When you’re building AI models, one of the only factors that matters is how much high-quality data you can run through the algorithm to train it. Training AI to solve security problems for you is a whole different ballgame than building products and storing security logs for customers to analyze themselves.

In the context of AI, Splunk is uniquely valuable. They have access to more operational security data than just about anybody, with 790 enterprise customers paying over $1 million in annual subscription fees.⁴ Customers add petabytes of data to Splunk every year. The total amount of data stored on their platform is probably into the exabytes. Let's just bluntly summarize by saying Splunk has a $%&#-load of data.

AI completely reframes Splunk’s unprofitable business model because its upside is so high. Charging a pile of money to store SIEM data was expensive for customers and unprofitable for Splunk. Taking a loss on the cost of storage and using the data to train AI models looks like a bargain for Cisco.

Buying access to exabytes of security data is like discovering oil at Prudhoe Bay. If Cisco's hunch about Splunk’s value to AI is right, it completely validates the purchase and changes the trajectory of the company forever.

Like William Seward and the Alaska Purchase, we may not know the real outcome of Cisco and Splunk for many years. Part of Cisco’s strategy is being able to wait long enough to find out. Sometimes, you get lucky.

Footnotes

¹Technically, Russia sold a gold mine and an oil field, but this is a metaphor!

²According to Crunchbase data. This stat only includes startups listed on Gartner's Magic Quadrant. Total investments in SIEM companies who didn't make the quadrant raises the amount even higher.

³Saying this out loud so there is no ambiguity: I categorically condemn the current Russian administration's attacks on Ukraine and its behavior towards the rest of the world. Using the Alaska Purchase and the Russia of 1867 as a metaphor for this story is not meant to make or imply a connection or parallel between Splunk and Russia today.

⁴As of its Q4 2023 earnings report.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Strategy of Security authored by Cole Grolmus. Read the original post at: https://strategyofsecurity.com/ciscos-cybersecurity-shopping-spree-part-2/

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 05:56:00 -0600 by Cole Grolmus on November 16, 2023 en-US text/html https://securityboulevard.com/2023/11/ciscos-cybersecurity-shopping-spree-part-2/ Splunk to cut 7% of workforce, or about 500 employees, ahead of Cisco acquisition

The Splunk logo is displayed on a phone screen on top of a laptop keyboard in this photo taken in Krakow, Poland, on Oct. 30, 2021.

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Cybersecurity firm Splunk, set to be Cisco's largest-ever acquisition, announced Wednesday it would lay off approximately 7% of its global workforce, months ahead of the deal close.

Splunk had nearly 8,000 employees as of January, according to its regulatory filings, meaning that around 500 employees will likely lose their jobs. The company laid off about 300 employees earlier this year.

Splunk CEO Gary Steele said the firings "are not a result of our agreement with Cisco" in a letter to employees that was filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Most of the laid-off employees are located in the U.S., according to a concurrent filing with the SEC, and will receive unspecified severance and health-care packages. "Within the next 24 hours, each ELT member will communicate with their organization to summarize any changes to their teams," Steele wrote.

Splunk will incur about $42 million in restructuring costs, with most occurring before the end of April 2024. The company declined to comment on which teams would be affected or the timing of the layoffs shortly after the acquisition announcement, and referred CNBC back to its SEC filing.

In September, Cisco announced it would acquire Splunk in an all-cash deal valued at $28 billion. The companies said the deal was expected to close by the third quarter of 2024.

Shortly after the announcement, Steele and Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins discussed the deal on a call with analysts. "Together, we will become one of the largest software companies globally," Robbins told analysts.

Layoffs have struck tech companies large and small over the past year. Companies such as Google and Microsoft have cut thousands of employees, while many venture-backed companies have become so-called "zombie startups."

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins on Splunk acquisition: Deal will add $4 billion in annual recurring revenue

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Wed, 01 Nov 2023 02:10:00 -0500 en text/html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/01/splunk-layoffs-7percent-of-workforce-to-be-cut-ahead-of-cisco-acquisition.html The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights Cadence Design Systems, Splunk and Vipshop No result found, try new keyword!The company's flagship offering, Splunk Enterprise, is primarily a machine data platform. It can collect and index petabytes of machine data on a daily basis. Splunk Enterprise also enables users ... Mon, 23 Oct 2023 17:51:00 -0500 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-zacks-analyst-blog-highlights-cadence-design-systems-splunk-and-vipshop The biggest enterprise technology M&A deals of the year

Cisco’s $28 billion offer for enterprise cloud protection company Splunk is the biggest enterprise software deal so far in 2023, while last year’s biggest, Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware, is creeping closer to securing regulatory approval.

There was a sharp decline in software merger and acquisition activity in the second quarter of 2023, after limited signs of a recovery in the first quarter. Deal values for Q2 were down 85% year-on-year, compared to a 52% drop in Q1. Deal numbers also declined in Q2, after a small rise in Q1, according to risk and financial advisor Kroll.

One reason deals are getting smaller is that buyers are less willing to bet on future growth, and so ratios of enterprise value to revenue are getting smaller. Kroll noted that the ratio for ERP and supply chain management software vendors dropped from 11.0 in December 2021 to a low of 7.1 in December 2022, recovering slightly to 7.4 in June 2023. Over the same period the EV-to-revenue ratio for HCM software vendors dropped from 11.3 to 6.5 and for financial and accounting software vendors from 12.0 to 6.3. Vertical software vendors, already valued less highly, saw their EV-to-revenue ratio decline from 4.4 to 2.7 over the same period.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors have also seen their valuations crash. After a euphoric period early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when the median EV-to-revenue ratio for SaaS companies topped 15, it had dropped below 10 by December 2021 and was as low as 5.9 in June 2023.

Despite the broader slump in valuations, there have still been a handful of billion-dollar-plus enterprise technology M&A deals thus far in 2023, including the acquisitions of Splunk, Qualtrics, Apptio, MosaicML, and Software AG.

For CIOs, these deals can disrupt strategic rollouts, spell a need to pivot to a new solution, signal sunsetting of essential technology, provide new opportunities to leverage newly synergized systems, and be a bellwether of further shifts to come in the IT landscape. Keeping on top of activity in this area can help your company make the most of emerging opportunities and steer clear of issues that often arise when vendors combine.

Here CIO.com rounds up of some of the most significant tech M&As of 2023 to date that could impact IT.

October 2023

Atlassian pays almost $1B for Loom

Atlassian, the developer of work management tools such as Jira, Confluence, and Trello, has agreed to acquire video messaging platform Loom for $975 million in stock and cash. It’s betting big that workers will prefer to send one another asynchronous video messages rather than text.

AMD plans to acquire AI software company Nod.ai

Chipmaker AMD is taking a leaf out of rival Nvidia’s playbook with a plan to buy AI software developer Nod.ai for an undisclosed sum. Nvidia has turned itself into a trillion-dollar company by building a full stack of generative AI models, tools to create them, and hardware to run them. In contrast to Nvidia’s proprietary software approach, AMD is pinning its hopes on an open-source strategy to drive demand for its hardware.

September 2023

Cisco to pay $28B for Splunk

Enterprise and cloud protection company Splunk could be part of Cisco a year from now, following a $28 billion bid from the networking equipment vendor. CEO Chuck Robbins sees the acquisition as a way for Cisco to expand its existing security products into a full-stack observability platform. He expects to close the deal by October 2024.

SAP adds LeanIX to its software portfolio

SAP is adding enterprise architecture management specialist LeanIX to its software stable. SAP is hoping that LeanIX’s AI-powered tool can help customers move off its legacy ERP system and onto S/4HANA in the cloud. accurate research by LeanIX showed that only 12% of SAP customers have completed their move to the cloud, eight years after S/4HANA was released and just four years before SAP ends mainstream support for its predecessor, ECC6.

Akeneo buys Unifai to clean up product catalogs

Product information management (PIM) specialist Akeneo has acquired Unifai, which uses AI for data collection, cleansing, and categorization. Akeneo plans to roll Unifai’s tools into its Product Cloud offering, where it will help with supplier data onboarding and pricing integration.

Rocket Software integrates tcVision developer BOS

Rocket Software, the company that lost out in July’s bidding war for Software AG, has landed on another acquisition target. On Sept. 7, it bought BOS, a German developer of data integration tools, including tcVision, which has been renamed Rocket Data Replicate and Sync. The deal will help Rocket round out its portfolio of mainframe modernization tools.

August 2023

IFS buys Falkonry to boost its ERP asset management services

IFS has agreed to acquire Falkonry, developer of an AI-based time-series data analytics tool. IFS plans to incorporate it into its ERP platform to boost its enterprise asset management (EAM) services capabilities.

Broadcom closes in on VMware acquisition

Broadcom secured approval for its $61 billion acquisition of VMware from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority on Aug. 21, five weeks after gaining similar approval from the European Commission, the EU’s antitrust regulator. However, the company still needs the go-ahead from Chinese regulators for the bid, which it launched way back in May 2022. Broadcom representatives are still confident the deal will close by the end of the company’s fiscal year on Oct. 30, 2023.

Adobe-Figma deal runs into regulatory trouble

Adobe’s plan to buy one of the largest rivals to its online design tool Creative Cloud is having less luck with competition regulators. On Aug. 7 the European Commission called in Adobe’s September 2022 agreement to buy Figma for $20 billion for a full investigation, while the UK Competition and Markets Authority said in late June that it would oppose the deal unless Adobe made undertakings to avoid the deal resulting in a substantial lessening of competition. The US Department of Justice is also said to be considering an antitrust lawsuit to block the deal. Figma is more often seen in the art department than the IT department, but with Adobe also a big player in customer data platforms, CIOs will be wary of the company getting an even bigger hold on their cloud software spend.

ServiceNow partners in Scandinavia and Germany merge

The Cloud People (TCP), a ServiceNow partner based in Norway, has acquired its German counterpart Nuvolax. The deal nets TCP a delivery center in Brazil, giving it 24-hour service coverage and opening up access to the US market, where it has growth ambitions.

July 2023

Teradata acquires Stemma to enhance analytics

Teradata has bought Stemma, the three-year-old developer of an AI-based data exploration tool, to accelerate its Vantage self-service analytics platform.

ServiceNow agrees to buy retail data platform G2K

ServiceNow is Studying to sprinkle some more AI magic on its automation of workflows in the retail industry. It has agreed to buy G2K, the developer of the Parsifal data platform, which the company says can analyze the movement of customers and products around stores.

Silver Lake buys majority stake in Software AG

Software AG, the German maker of tools for managing IoT data, APIs, and legacy mainframe apps, looks set to become part of Silver Lake, which also owns stakes in Airtable, Celonis, Qualtrics and Splunk. The investment fund secured a 63% stake in the company, valuing it at $2.4 billion, after a bidding war that pitted it against mainframe modernization firm Rocket Software. Prior to the deal, Software AG’s largest shareholder was a foundation, SAGST, created by one of its founders: SAGST’s 30% holding had for years protected the company from takeovers, but in April the foundation agreed to sell most of its stake to Silver Lake. Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO of Software AG since August 2018, said the company will benefit from the stability and certainty provided by a single major shareholder.

June 2023

IBM offers $4.6 billion for Apptio

IBM has agreed to buy cloud cost control specialist Apptio from private equity firm Vista, which has owned it since 2018. IBM plans to roll Apptio’s offering into its IT automation portfolio — AIOps, Instana and Turbonomics, — to help enterprises optimize both application cost and application performance from a single control center. The acquisition will also give IBM access to anonymized data on $450 billion of IT spending that it can use to train AI tools for further optimization.

FTC case against Microsoft’s $68.7 billion bid for Activision Blizzard reaches court

The US Federal Trade Commission has aired its concerns about Microsoft’s plans to acquire games developer Activision Blizzard in a US federal court, six months after it sought an injunction to stop the deal and 18 months after the companies announced it. Microsoft’s bid, a whopping $68.7 billion, dwarfs even the $19.7 billion it paid for Nuance Communications in 2021 or the $26.2 billion it paid for LinkedIn in 2018.

Activision Blizzard’s apps are not typically authorized on enterprise networks, but when the deal was first announced, it seemed there was a chance its technology for creating and animating virtual worlds could make it into the workplace. Back then, Microsoft said the acquisition would give it the building blocks for the metaverse. However, since then Microsoft has laid off 100 staff in its industrial metaverse unit, essentially closing it down.

While regulators in the European Union and South Africa have now approved the deal, the FTC and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority are still against it.

Databricks buys MosaicML for $1.3 billion

Generative AI is a hot commodity these days, and Databricks for one can’t get enough of it. In addition to developing its own large language model (LLM) based on open data, Dolly, it has now acquired MosaicML, the creator of two open source models, MPT-7B and MPT-30B. With the acquisition, Databricks hopes to make it easier for enterprises to build large language models based on their own data.

Silver Lake buys Qualtrics for $12.5 billion

Qualtrics has changed hands again. SAP acquired it for $8 billion in 2018, but the graft didn’t take, and SAP soon sold a minority stake. Now Silver Lake and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board have snapped up the whole company. The deal closed June 28. SAP will remain a go-to-market partner of Qualtrics and service their joint customers.

Data center operator nLighten has bought Euclyde, owner of six data centers in neighboring France. One of nLighten’s goals with the acquisition is to reduce its carbon footprint: in France 70% of electricity comes from nuclear power stations, while in nLighten’s home country, Germany, around one-third of it comes from coal, which has the highest carbon intensity of all electricity sources.

HCM vendor UKG buys payroll provider Immedis

UKG’s cloud-based HCM software already delivers a wide range of functions to some enterprise HR departments. Now it is now adding to those capabilities with the acquisition of Immedis, which helps enterprises and mid-size companies operating in more than one country to manage payroll across borders. UKG plans to integrate the new functionality into its software suite as UKG One View later this year.

IBM buys French cloud services firm Agyla

Looking to Boost its offering for French clients, IBM has agreed to buy Agyla, a provider cloud platform engineering services. It plans to incorporate Agyla into its IBM Consulting division.

May 2023

Survey company Momentive says yes to STG deal

Symphony Technology Group has closed its acquisition of Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey) for $1.5 billion. STG’s portfolio also includes ERP vendor CAI Software and a stake in cybersecurity firm RSA.

Snowflake adds Neeva’s generative AI to its data warehouse platform

Snowflake has acquired Neeva, a small startup that used generative AI to Boost the search experience. The deal came just days after Neeva closed its subscription-based, ad-free search engine. Building a search experience people were willing to pay for, while hard, turned out to be the easy part, according to a farewell blog post from Neeva’s founders: “Convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place.” Now it’s up to Snowflake to convince its customers to change.

IBM to automate cloud data protection with Polar Security acquisition

Data security posture management specialist Polar Security will soon be part of IBM, which plans to integrate the Israeli company into its Guardium range of data security products. There, it will help IBM customers pinpoint security risks and compliance violations. IBM didn’t say how much it had paid for the company, but Israeli news site Tech12 put the price at $60 million.

Databricks buys Okera to keep tabs on LLMs

Databricks has been encouraging enterprises to experiment with large language models, offering one of its own, Dolly, as open source. Now it’s offering its customers a way to keep such models under control with the acquisition of LLM governance specialist Okera.

April 2023

Ciphr adds diversity with Marshall acquisition

Marshall E-learning, a provider of diversity and inclusion training, is now part of Ciphr, a UK-based HR SaaS platform. Ciphr expects the deal will enable it to expand its existing online learning offering.

March 2023

Vista buys Equity Partners buys insurance software firm Duck CreekQuantive buys OKR consulting firm

Following its acquisition of consulting firm AuxinOKR, strategy execution platform Quantive is rolling out a new consulting division to support enterprises adopting its tools for measuring business results.

Quantexa is loving the Aylien

Quantexa has acquired Aylien, a Dublin-based natural language processing firm specializing in risk management and market insight. It will use Aylien’s NLP skills to enhance its AI-based decision intelligence tools for the finance industry.

Capita lays off employment screening business

Matrix SCM, a British IT staffing agency, has acquired Security Watchdog, a provider of employment screening services, from Capita, the giant IT services business. It’s part of a broader sell-off for Capita, which also let go of three other human resources companies in March: Capita Resourcing, HR Solutions, and ThirtyThree. Capita is selling non-core businesses to reduce its debts and refocusing on public sector and customer experience work.

Key secures Rocket

Mainframe software developer Rocket Software has bought mainframe security specialist Key Resources. The deal will enable Rocket to offer additional security-related services to the mainframe users it works with.

February 2023

Thomas Bravo manages $8B spend on Coupa Software

Coupa Software, a provider of business spend management tools, has been acquired by investment firm Thomas Bravo in an $8 billion deal. Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has taken a minority stake. Thomas Bravo also owns business payments company BottomLine, open finance platform Solifi, data management tool Talend and a raft of security and identity management software companies.

Arm sells software arm

Processor designer Arm has sold Forge, its suite of software development tools for high-performance computing, to Linaro, which develops and supports a range of other Arm-specific software for enterprises. Arm originally acquired Forge in 2016 to support its entry into the HPC market.

Accenture buys Morphus, adds new South-American cybersecurity center

With its acquisition of Brazilian cybersecurity and threat intelligence provider Morphus, Accenture has added a new site from which to supervise its offering of managed security services and advanced analytics. The cyber fusion center in Fortaleza, Brazil, was previously Morphus Labs.

January 2023

OpenText buys Micro Focus for $5.8 billion

OpenText has closed its acquisition of Micro Focus, a vendor of mainframe modernization and application portfolio management tools. OpenText’s first move on completing the deal was to begin laying off staff. It announced an 8% reduction in workforce to realize $400 million in annual cost savings to help finance the $5.8 million purchase, which it first announced in August 2022.

Dell buys Cloudify

After selling off its stake in VMware, Dell is moving back into the cloud software business with the acquisition of Cloudify. The Israeli startup has developed a cloud orchestration platform to help devops teams automate provisioning.

McKinsey buys machine MLops platform Iguazio

McKinsey is adding to its stable of machine learning experts with the acquisition of software developer Iguazio. In time, it plans to integrate it into QuantumBlack, a McKinsey business unit that has specialized in AI for the last decade. Iguazio is the developer of a commercial MLops platform and two open-source tools: MLRun, for ML pipeline orchestration, and Nuclio, which offers real-time serverless functions for automating application deployment.

HPE buys Pachyderm to automate ML development

Pachyderm, a developer of data pipeline automation tools used in training machine learning models, is now part of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. The company’s software will become part of the HPE Machine Learning Development Environment.

Quantum fusion: IonQ ties up with Entangled Networks

With each of the handful of companies developing quantum computers betting on a different architecture, a cross-platform quantum computing operating system is still a way off. That’s why quantum hardware companies like IonQ are developing their own software tools too. To speed up the process, IonQ has acquired Entangled Networks, a developer of software optimization tools for quantum computers, and is building a new Canadian subsidiary around the software team.

Two ServiceNow partners tie the knot

ServiceNow solutions provider Thirdera has acquired another ServiceNow partner, SilverStorm Solutions, to expand its reach in Europe. Thirdera also operates in South America. Combined, the two ServiceNow Elite-level partners have over 900 employees.

December 2022

IBM buys Octo Consulting Group

Appropriately enough for its eighth deal of 2022, IBM’s latest acquisition is called Octo Consulting Group. Not to be confused with Octo Technology, a French consulting company bought by Accenture in 2017, IBM’s Octo is a US company specializing in government IT modernization projects that was until recently owned by Arlington Capital Partners. Its 1,500 staff will join IBM Consulting.

Intercontinental Exchange’s bid for Black Knight in doubt

Another of the biggest software deals of 2022 is also in doubt. In May, Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange and a host of mortgage technology companies, bid $13.1 billion for Black Knight, a mortgage software company.

In late December, though, the Financial Services Committee of the US House of Representatives wrote to the US Federal Trade Commission to express its concern that the deal could result in too much concentration in the mortgage origination market.

Big though the deal is, it’ll have few consequences for CIOs outside the mortgage services industry.

Cognizant buys AustinCSI and assets of OneSource Virtual

IT services giant Cognizant has added 175 digital transformation consultants in Texas with the acquisition of AustinCSI, a company specializing in the design of cloud and automation systems. It has also acquired 400 specialists from another Texas company, Workday partner OneSource Virtual, and bought Houston-based SAP services company Utegration, bringing it close to 350,000 employees worldwide.

LumApps buys chatbot maker Vizir to Boost employee experience

French employee experience platform LumApps has snapped up Vizir, developer of a no code chatbot creation platform, to help enterprises deliver more interactive services to employees. Companies building their own tools for natural language understanding like this will face strong headwinds from the likes of ChatGPT, an interactive version of the giant AI language model GPT that can be trained for use in multiple domains.

November 2022

VMware shareholders approve acquisition by Broadcom

After Broadcom made its offer in May, it’s a step closer to closing the $61 billion deal to buy VMware, after that company’s shareholders voted to accept the offer. VMware is looking to expand its virtualization technologies into the 5G edge computing market, where Broadcom’s radio and networking chip business could give it a foothold.

RegScale, GovReady join forces to implement OSCAL governance formats

RegScale, a developer of governance, risk, and compliance software, has acquired compliance-as-code platform GovReady. The two companies are early adopters of NIST’s Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL), used for representing control catalogs and system security plans in machine-readable format.

SAP service providers join forces

Codestone Group is still expanding. After its May acquisition of Clarivos, the company has added data analytics and BI specialist DSCallards to its collection. The purchase will allow it to expand its services capabilities around SAP and Microsoft ERP tools.

Anonos buys Statice to boost data protection

Anonos, a developer of software for pseudonymizing personal data in use, has acquired Statice, creator of a tool for generating synthetic data. With European regulators cranking up fines for breaches of GDPR, tools that allow enterprises to move data between jurisdictions while maintaining protection will only grow in importance.

For last year’s mergers and buyouts, see The biggest enterprise technology M&A deals of 2022.

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0500 en-US text/html https://www.cio.com/article/196371/the-biggest-enterprise-technology-ma-deals.html Cisco stock tumbles after cutting full-year guidance

Cisco Systems (CSCO) reported fiscal first quarter results that topped analyst estimates, but guidance fell short of expectations. In the first quarter, the tech giant reported adjusted earnings of $1.11 per share versus estimates of $1.03 and revenue of $14.67 billion compared to an expectation of $14.63 billion. However, Cisco's second quarter and full-year revenue guidance was well below what Wall Street had been expecting. Its revenue outlook for the second quarter is $12.6 billion-$12.8 billion compared to a $14.2 billion estimate. Cisco cut its full-year revenue outlook to $53.8 billion-$55.0 billion versus the previous estimate of $57 billion-$58.2 billion. Yahoo Finance Live breaks down Cisco's first quarter report.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: All right, we've got some earnings that we are watching. Cisco systems plunging by about 9% after it came out and cut its full-year revenue forecast. The company now says revenue for the full year will be at most $55 billion, a range of $53.8 to $55 billion. It had seen $57 to $58.2 billion, so it looks like that there is a read through here in terms of spending on the part of its clients here.

The company's forecast for the current period also coming in below estimates. As you can see here last quarter, they beat. But analysts and investors are obviously really focusing here on the outlook from the company.

JOSH LIPTON: Yeah, I mean Cisco-- listen, we focus on Cisco because it is still seen as an important barometer of tech spending. You know, obviously, became a Silicon Valley giant by selling hardware, the switches and routers. Now very focused on software and services, so analytics, and security, and video conferencing.

I think some key questions on the call are going to be what is the second half of the company's fiscal year going to look like? It's just in terms of enterprise demand. I also think you're going to have a lot of questions about remember that big deal they did for Splunk? They announced that back, Julie, in September 20, $8 billion deal.

Bulls liked it because they thought it could strengthen the company's footprint in security, but you know there were questions, of course, about execution and deal integration. Chuck Robbins here, the CEO, trying to sound an optimistic tone in the release talking about a solid start to fiscal '24. Strongest Q1 results, he says, in our history on both revenue and profitability. But obviously, investors have questions here about the results and the outlook.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, and something else that Scott Herren, the CFO of the company, is saying here in the statement. He says, "After customers implement large amounts of recently shipped product, we expect to see product order growth rates accelerate in the second half of the year." So you said there's going to be questions about the second half of the year getting a little bit of hints of what we might hear from Cisco in that commentary. He also says, "We are committed to delivering operating leverage and increasing capital returns to our shareholders." But, you know, at least the first blush reaction here on the part of investors is not reassured by that commentary on looking a little bit further ahead.

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 07:26:00 -0600 en-US text/html https://finance.yahoo.com/video/cisco-stock-tumbles-cutting-full-212626820.html Splunk cuts 7% of workforce ahead of Cisco acquisition

The layoffs are happening in the wake of a market retraction, Splunk CEO Gary Steele said.

Network management and visualization vendor Splunk, which is set to be acquired by Cisco in a $28 billion deal, will cut about 560 jobs in a global restructuring, the company announced Wednesday in an SEC filing.

Splunk president and CEO Gary Steele said in the filing that employees in the Americas set to lose their jobs will be notified throughout today, and that the company plans to offer severance packages to laid-off employees, as well as healthcare coverage and job placement assistance for an undisclosed length of time.

The announcement comes after Splunk announced a first wave of 325 job cuts in February.

“The overall market has retracted and we expect the macro environment will continue to be unpredictable for the foreseeable future,” Steele’s message to employees said.

The cuts amount to 7% of Splunk’s global workforce, according to Steele’s filing, and are unrelated to the company’s pending acquisition by networking giant Cisco, which was initially announced in September of this year. (Splunk employed roughly 8,000 people globally as of early 2023, according to Macrotrends, which represents an increase of more than 14% from its 2022 totals.)

“The changes we are announcing are not a result of our agreement with Cisco; they are the continuation of the important initiatives we’ve undertaken across Splunk for more than a year to align our resources and operating structure to deliver ongoing and incremental value for our customers,” Steele said.

Though technology companies announced massive layoffs last year, 2023 has been much worse. Tech suppliers went on a hiring binge during the pandemic when lockdowns sparked a tech buying spree to support remote work, only to face revenue declines as COVID cases subsided.

Meanwhile Splunk’s $28 billion price tag for the Cisco acquisiton reflects the value placed on the company’s observability products, which are central for the type of network traffic monitoring required for the modern threat environment. Those capabilities will complement Cisco’s already extensive network security portfolio, and integrate with the larger company’s existing XDR and Security Cloud platforms.

Cisco said that, when both companies’ products are combined, it will be able to offer what it called “full stack observability,” providing end-to-end visibility into network traffic moving on a user’s systems.

That’s partially due to complementary but not overlapping nature of the two companies’ offerings, Cisco chair and CEO Chuck Robbins told Network World in September.

“I don’t think we have significant overlap,” he said. “But I think we have if you think about the data platform and the observability progress that [Splunk] has made, and you couple that with our application visibility with ThousandEyes we think we can actually extend well.”

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 06:54:00 -0500 en-US text/html https://www.networkworld.com/article/957454/splunk-cuts-7-of-workforce-ahead-of-cisco-acquisition.html Cisco Stock Tumbles on Better-Than-Expected Earnings. Here’s Why. No result found, try new keyword!C isco Systems just threw a monkey wrench into the accurate rebound in technology stocks. While the networking firm reported slightly better-than-expected results for its latest quarter, the company’s ... Wed, 15 Nov 2023 23:54:00 -0600 en-us text/html https://www.msn.com/

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November 13, 2023, 01:49 PM EST