Episode 86: Life after artisanal pork rinds (i.e. tech M&A), CostCo Down Under

With a flurry of M&A over the past few weeks, we 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!

Mid-roll

• Coté: I’m speaking at DevOpsDays Charlotte, day two keynote, I think. Use the code SDT to get 25% off!
• Matt:
  • Talking Chef at the AWS Sydney User Group
  • Microsoft Ignite Australia: Chef will have a booth & a talk
  • ChefConf ChefConf 2017 Teaser
• Coté: much self-promotion to catch up on: I’m writing more “original content” on my blog, and plan to write more; subscribe to my newsletter for a round-up of stuff I blog, sent out on Sunday night, will tweak more.
• Also, in the “grim” vein, Coté reviews some books on "automation," which John Allspaw rightly says should be called "new technology," fair enough. The 1983 paper on automation and humans is a good read too.

CostCo field report: Australia

• It’s great!
• US: No need for a hot pizza sign holder.
• US: Rayban Wayfarers are like $130 now!

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 $660m API management market.

BONUS LINKS! Not covered in show. HP Buys Stuff

• Cloud Cruiser for management/chargeback, $650 million
• SimpliVity for converged systems, $650 million

You Know What DevOps Needs? An IEEE Standard

• They’re working on it

Twitter

• Google buying Fabric.
• Facebook still king.

Do We Talk About Trump?

• OpenStack Summits leaving the US
• Red Hat, Microsoft, others making announcements against the Muslim ban
• Coté says: these people are proven idiots. Don’t work with them.

Trump’s Twitter Moves Markets

• Apparently he 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 DB and OSS 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 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 24.5m 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)

Google buys Twitter’s Fabric

• CASH!

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! Also, how to feed three people with one bean.