Monday, November 07, 2016

Big Stuff Happening

Following the news of CenturyLink buying Level3 and C-Link dumping its data center business on a coalition of PE Firms. (There are also many other deals, read here.) The rumors once again prove true with Windstream doing an all-stock deal to acquire EarthLink (value $1.1B.) Nice graphic of the synergies. I guess WIND had to do something while its rival, C-Link, got bigger by eating Level3. And buying EarthLink was cheap. It gives them fiber - from old CLECs that ELNK bought: Deltacom, IFN, One Comm and Choice - as well as the New Edge Networks nationwide DSL network. It gives WIND a retail vertical that maybe they can focus on. It does not fill in gaps in the Western USA and does provide some overlap in the Eastern USA -- if ELNK can provide accurate fiber maps (if not call me I have them!).

One interesting deal is Oracle wanting to buy NetSuite. "Oracle said in a statement on Saturday that holders of 53 percent of unaffiliated NetSuite shares agreed to tender their shares by the deadline of Friday. The deal will be completed on Monday, Oracle said. Oracle offered to buy NetSuite in July for $109 a share in response to challenges from rival enterprise software companies like Workday and Salesforce that have popular cloud-based software products."

Oracle is mish-mash of acquisitions (Acme Packet?). No idea what the strategy is there other than to sell up and down the stack to every sector of business on the globe. You? We have something for you. And for you and you and you!

How LinkedIn Drove a Wedge Between Microsoft and Salesforce. The value of the data on LinkedIn made for a bloody fight. Worth the read on NYT.

Facebook reported $7.01 billion in revenue, up 56 percent year-over-year, and quarterly profit nearly tripled to $2.38 billion.
The company saw $6.82 billion in ad revenue, roughly 84 percent of which stemmed from mobile. What's next for FB? The telecom gear industry! "Facebook announced a piece of network equipment known as an optical switch, which it calls Voyager. In geek-speak, this is the first "white box" transponder and routing device for Open Packet DWDM optical networks."

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