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There may be usually a mistaken impression that overlaying the enterprise is sort of boring when in comparison with the buyer aspect of the home, however having adopted the house for a few a long time now, I can let you know that nothing could possibly be farther from the reality.
For one factor, there’s large cash within the enterprise, like Oracle buying Cerner final week for $28 billion and shaking up the healthcare vertical whereas they have been at it, or UiPath going from obscure startup to $35 billion RPA juggernaut earlier this yr, earlier than falling again a bit after going public.
There’s intrigue, like when activist traders attempt to power corporations to make strikes they usually wouldn’t wish to make, and battles for management of the board like we noticed at Box this year.
There’s drama, just like the three-year battle among the many greatest enterprise cloud infrastructure corporations on the planet for the $10 billion Division of Protection JEDI cloud contract, a procurement course of that had all the things from lawsuits to repeated inner opinions to presidential interference.
So you may say numerous issues in regards to the enterprise… however boring? Positively not — and this yr was no completely different. So I made a decision to shut out 2021 with a take a look at 5 tales that rocked the enterprise. It’s arduous to slender 12 months of reports right down to the 5 greatest tales, however listed here are my decisions.
The Bezos-Jassy-Selipsky musical chairs at Amazon
Maybe the largest information this yr concerned Jeff Bezos deciding to step back as CEO, taking up the chairman function. Now that in itself didn’t have an enormous enterprise affect as a result of Amazon is an e-commerce firm, which doesn’t essentially fall inside my purview, however then there was what occurred subsequent.
That February day when Bezos made his announcement, he additionally indicated he had chosen his alternative, Amazon Net Companies CEO Andy Jassy. He had helped build the cloud infrastructure business at Amazon into a large enterprise, surpassing a $64 billion run rate in the newest quarter.
Changing him wouldn’t be simple, however they turned to an previous buddy when they hired Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky to take over for Jassy. Selipsky had beforehand been at AWS from its inception till 2016, when he left to take over Tableau. Now it’s his job to maintain the practice shifting. He has momentum in his favor, however competitors is getting ever extra fierce, and it bears watching what occurs subsequent yr beneath Selipsky’s management.
Bret Taylor’s completely wonderful week
One of many different high tales concerned Salesforce government Bret Taylor getting a couple of big jobs in the identical week on the finish of November, making for a pretty sweet week for him. For starters he was named chairman of the board at Twitter. If that weren’t sufficient, he was additionally named co-CEO at Salesforce, the place he had moved quickly up the ladder since his firm, Quip was acquired in 2016 for $750 million.
Whereas Twitter had turmoil of its personal with long-time CEO Jack Dorsey stepping down and Parag Agrawal taking on, the transfer to co-CEO on the CRM big was clearly the larger information from an enterprise perspective. Whereas The Information reported that Taylor would nonetheless be reporting to firm co-founder, chairman and co-CEO Marc Benioff, the promotion put Taylor in line to be Benioff’s inheritor obvious ought to Benioff resolve to step again into the chairman function in the identical means that Bezos did earlier this yr. One other storyline to think about in 2022 is whether or not Salesforce revisits its need to purchase Twitter, a move it thought of making in 2016 earlier than walking away.
Field-Starboard Worth proxy struggle
Field beat back an attempt by activist investor Starboard Worth to take over the board, a transfer that possible would have resulted within the removing of co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie, the sale of the corporate, or each. It was the end result of months of drama and it made it a significant enterprise story line for 2021.
Starboard Worth, an activist investor, purchased a 7.5% stake within the cloud content material administration firm in 2019, which might develop to eight.8%, giving the agency appreciable affect over the corporate. They remained quiet for a time, however final yr they determined to make a transfer and put Field on discover that they wished to take over the board, which resulted in a proxy battle.
Alongside the way in which, Field answered with a $500 million investment from KKR, additional angering Starboard, filed a document with the SEC pushing again in opposition to Starboard’s slate of board candidates and issued their earnings report early to present voters an opportunity to see their newest outcomes. As luck would have it, the corporate scored two first rate quarters following Starboard’s motion and simply received the proxy battle, leaving the established order for now. What occurs in 2022? As I wrote, maybe it’s time for Box to make some bold moves, and use a few of KKR’s cash to purchase some adjoining performance.
DoD kills JEDI and broadcasts new cloud initiative
The $10 billion, decade-long JEDI cloud contract has been drama-filled from the day it was introduced in 2018. Over these years, I wrote more than 30 articles on it, so when the Pentagon determined to kill it finally this year, that was large information.
From the beginning, standard knowledge mentioned that it was Amazon’s contract to win. There have been complaints that the RFP was written with Amazon in thoughts, however ultimately it was Microsoft that won the deal. Amazon went to court although, stating that the earlier president had straight interfered with the procurement course of due to his private dislike for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who additionally occurs to personal The Washington Submit newspaper. Amazon additionally argued that it ought to have received on benefit.
Regardless, it succeeded in convincing a decide to put the project on hold in February 2020. It might by no means restart, and the DoD determined to move on to a new project in July, stating that expertise had modified since 2018 (which is true) and properly deciding to go along with a multi-vendor strategy with its new initiative, as an alternative of the winner-take-all approach it had pursued with JEDI.
Dell spins out VMware
When Dell bought EMC in 2015 for $67 billion (later amended to $58 billion), it was the biggest deal in tech historical past, and one other doozy of a narrative to follow and write about through the years. VMware was all the time the crown jewel of the deal, and so enterprise reporters like me stored a detailed eye on what Dell was going to do with it. For a very long time it stood pat, but it surely was an enormous story within the early a part of the yr when it introduced it was spinning out the corporate in a deal valued at $9 billion.
It appeared a little light perhaps given the amount of cash that’s still on the books for the EMC deal. What occurs subsequent yr? May somebody make a run to acquire VMware now that it’s freed from Dell? Dell stays a significant shareholder and nonetheless has loads of debt left over from that EMC deal, so it’s undoubtedly one thing to look at in 2022.
It’s arduous to decide on simply 5 as a result of inevitably I’ve not noted some worthy storylines. What would you may have included? Go away a remark and let me know.
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