"Until today, we lacked one thing. We lacked the scale required to compete effectively in the large, rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud computing market. Now, that changes,"
Login with LinkedIn + AD = SSO won. Also: "Massively scaling the reach and engagement of LinkedIn by using the network to power the social and identity layers of Microsoft's ecosystem of over one billion customers. Think about things like LinkedIn's graph interwoven throughout Outlook, Calendar, Active Directory, Office, Windows, Skype, Dynamics, Cortana, Bing and more."
"Along with the new growth in our Office 365 commercial and Dynamics businesses this deal is key to our bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business processes." (MSFT CEO, from MSFT internal memo)
Ads and dumb-AI context: "This combination will make it possible for new experiences such as a LinkedIn newsfeed that serves up articles based on the project you are working on and Office suggesting an expert to connect with via LinkedIn to help with a task you're trying to complete. As these experiences get more intelligent and delightful, the LinkedIn and Office 365 engagement will grow. And in turn, new opportunities will be created for monetization through individual and organization subscriptions and targeted advertising." (MSFT CEO, from MSFT internal memo)
LinkedIn growth since Dec, 2008: "Our team has grown from 338 people to over 10,000, our membership from 32M to over 433M and our revenue from $78M to over $3 billion." (MSFT internal memo).
Others from memo: Lydia training inline in MSFT apps; paid content in MSFT apps (a la Spiceworks); HR and recruiting.
Deal PR deck - pretty good. I can see how the social graph and all the "semantic web sit" in LinkedIn, crossed with MSFT assets works well.
"Microsoft could improve LinkedIn": Microsoft designs for people who have to do boring things with computers in order to make money. It's the 9–5 software vendor.
I-banker stuff: "Microsoft will pay $196 per share to acquire LinkedIn, a 50% bump up from where it was trading ahead of the deal announcement, although well behind the $250 each share was worth in November. The price tag values LinkedIn at 8.2x trailing revenue."
"The company [Microsoft] must find new ways to differentiate. Integrations with LinkedIn offer potential functionality that will be challenging to duplicate. When the two companies are joined, there will be multiple ways that LinkedIn's member network, and the data from that, will go into improving Microsoft's Office and Dynamics apps, besides the other benefits from running a combined company."
"LinkedIn's tools for recruiters account for 58% of the $860m in revenue it generated in the first quarter of the year [so, $3.440bn run rate]. When combined with educational material from its Lynda.com acquisition, HCM tools make up 65% of sales. Tools for marketers and premium subscriptions (including its offering for sales teams) each make up less than 20% of the business, and are the slowest growing parts of the business."
"Microsoft is the world's largest software developer, with about $100bn in sales and a $400bn market cap."
The theory seems to be: SaaS companies are undervalued, and PE firms are looking to buy cheap assets and grow them, and re-exit them. This vs. the usual cut costs and re-exit then. Of course, Qlik and Ping aren't SaaS.
Habitat centers application configuration, management, and behavior around the application itself, not the infrastructure that the app runs on.
Habitat is comprised of plan and build system, a supervisor, an HTTP interface on that supervisor to report package status, a depot, a communication model for disseminating rumors through a supervisor ring, and many other components.
Cloud Native Roadshows - all year long, in many cities globally. Check 'em out and come learn about Pivotal and Cloud Foundry for free, including some lunch.
...according to Gartner analyst Lydia Leong: "Azure almost always loses tech evals to AWS hands-down, but guess what? They still win deals. Business isn't tech-only." What a weird thread that is!
"Greene is also tapping her VMware Rolodex, talking with big enterprise rivals like SAP SE, Microsoft and Oracle, to get more of their products into the Google cloud. That's must-have for some large companies, which need prepackaged software from these providers to run their businesses. No Oracle or SAP products are available on Google's cloud today. Microsoft and Oracle declined to comment, while SAP confirmed early talks." From Jack Clark's Bloomberg piece.