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:
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

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

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

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