Episode 141: Broadcom acquiring CA, AT&T acquiring AlienVault, the mysteries of cloud native vendor product management

We try to discern the strategy behind two acquisitions this week: Broadcom buying CA and AT&T buying AlienVault. Seems fine. Meanwhile, you get to join conversation as we talk about how much different product management seems at cloud native vendors than traditional, “enterprise product management.”

Important nonsense

• Vinsanto is the Greek wine Coté was talking about.
• No more hot-dogs at Le Café CostCo.
• Coté rides a Lime scooter

Sponsored by Datadog

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Relevant to your interests

• AT&T to Acquire AlienVault
• Broadcom buying CA:
  • Broadcom buying CA for US$18.9bn. "Mainframe solutions dominate CA’s income, pulling nearly $2.2bn in the 2017-2018 financial year, followed by its enterprise solutions segment at $1.75bn and services at $311m."
  • Coté’s 7 tips for becoming a software company, 2016.
  • “Wait… what?”
• Basho investor to pay up $20m in damages for campaign that put biz on 'greased slide to failure'
  • Coté: what was Davenport’s plan to profit?
• A customer complaint about Google Cloud went viral last week, and now Google is doing damage control to 'ensure this does not happen again’
• The mysterious value of dancing hot dog shares, i.e., Snap: ‘You might point out that you own a share in the company that grows in value as the company does, and that right now you can sell that share on the stock exchange for $13.31. But that evades rather than answering the question: What does the person who buys the share from you expect to get from it? The value of a stock in the market is supposed to be equal to the present value of its future cash flows, and there’s nothing about the stock itself that promises you any cash flows. Or you might say that Snap’s directors and officers have a fiduciary duty to you to maximize the profits of the company and the value of your shares, but even if that were true—it’s pretty debatable—it continues to avoid the question. If Snap made massive consistent profits for decades, it would still never have to give any money back to shareholders, and the shareholders would have no way to force it to. “I own a 1/1,258,171,112 share of a massive pile of cash,” you could say, but you could never spend it.’
• Improving intranet search, always a problem:
  • Box buys AI thing: “a startup whose software lets users search within files across multiple work applications. Butter.ai will be shutting down its application as part of the deal.”
  • Slack fixing search: most anything would be better than how it is now.
• IT spending survey from Goldman: security, private cloud, and storage rise. Public cloud and SaaS fall, BI/analytics stays the same.

Conferences, et. al.

• Sep 24th to 27th - SpringOne Platform, in DC/Maryland (crabs!) get $200 off registration with the code S1P200_Cote. Also, check out the Spring One Tour - coming to a city near you!

Listener Feedback

• Emeric from Romina got a sticker and we will send you one too.

SDT news & hype

• Check out Software Defined Interviews, our new podcast. Pretty self-descriptive, plus the #exegesis podcast we’ve been doing, all in one, for free.
• Join us in Slack.
• Buy some t-shirts! DISCOUNT CODE: SDTFSG (20% off)
• Send your name and address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you a sticker.
• Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App and he wants you to buy it for $0.99.

Recommendations

• Brandon: In the Dark Podcast.
• Matt: Apple hardware, “should be fine.”
• Coté: Lovecraft’s commonplace book and such: pictures, some transcription (better spaced version).