The six vendor acquisitions that puzzled partners in 2019
CRN sister publication CPI casts its eye over the most head-scratching vendor M&A activity this year
1. IBM and Red Hat
Purchase price: $34bn
Impact on the channel:
The largest software acquisition in history, IBM's mammoth $34bn closed on July 9, 2019.
The deal was part of IBM's gambit on cloud computing. Late to the stage, IBM CEO Ginni Rommety said that its Red Hat buy was Big Blue making up for lost time.
The vendor said cloud-related revenue is now about 25 per cent of its total, up from just four per cent in 2013.
However, two months on, partners at IBM's EMEA Think conference admitted to CPI that they were still in the dark about what IBM's plans are for its open source prize.
The chief sales officer of MSP CSI, Scotty Morgan, asked: "My biggest question I have for IBM is: how do we make money with this? How do we take what IBM is putting together [with Red Hat] and incorporate that into our proposition?"
The six vendor acquisitions that puzzled partners in 2019
CRN sister publication CPI casts its eye over the most head-scratching vendor M&A activity this year
2. Salesforce and Tableau
Purchase price: $15.7bn
Impact on the channel:
By far the biggest acquisition made by Salesforce and biggest ever in the self-service business intelligence (BI) space. On 1 October, CRM leader Salesforce's $15.7bn buy of data visualisation leader Tableau closed.
It came hot on the heels of Google acquiring Looker, another BI giant.
At the time, CEO Mark Benioff said their deal was top trumps for partners, claiming: "We are bringing together the world's number one CRM with the number one analytics platform."
Salesforce added that its mega-acquisition will be a boost to partners, in providing lucrative business intelligence capabilities to its suite of products.
However, some analysts have expressed concerns over integration.
If Salesforce's plan was to get at Tableau's customers who run Tableau analytics on top of big rival's Oracle or SAP, how will that pressure to become joint customers be managed?
Salesforce has sought to alleviate such concerns by pointing to the boost its buy will add to its financials. It forecasts that the acquisition will add $350m to its full-year 2020 results, and is now expecting its FY2020 top line to hit between $16.45bn and $16.65bn.
Check out the rest of the list on Channel Partner Insight here