Top 10 Money Moves of 2019 in SDxCentral's World

Finances remained a hot topic in the cloud and SDN space for 2019, as tens of billions of dollars were thrown at various mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings (IPOs), and through venture capital investments. Here are 10 of the biggest Money Moves of 2019 as compiled by the SDxCentral Editorial staff. Finances remained a hot topic in the cloud and SDN space for 2019, as tens of billions of dollars were thrown at various mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings (IPOs), and through venture capital investments. Here are 10 of the biggest Money Moves of 2019 as compiled by the SDxCentral Editorial staff. Cloudflare lit up Wall Street in September after raising $525 million in an IPO that surged past initial expectations. The content delivery network (CDN) provider’s IPO attracted strong attention with the firm’s stock surging 20% on its debut. Cloudflare had initially priced its offer at between $10 to $12 per share before increasing the price tag to $15 per share just ahead of its launch on the New York Stock Exchange. Prior to its IPO, Cloudflare raised more than $330 million in venture capital. Its latest haul in March raised $150 million, which pushed its valuation to more than $3 billion. In February, Palo Alto Networks purchased security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) startup Demisto for $560 million in cash and stock. The deal closed in late March. Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora on a conference call with investors said that the purchase would help its customers to “further automate parts of their security operations and allow them to solve unique, complex threats.” F5 Networks began 2019 with a big leap into software for cloud-based applications with its $670 million acquisition of Nginx in March. The move reinforced F5 Networks’ continued evolution from a hardware company to one oriented around services and software with a broader reach in the market. Nginx’s open-source web server for multi-cloud architecture powers more than 374 million websites, including many of the most popular sites online today. The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2011, and raised $103 million in venture capital funding before F5 Networks came calling. F5 Networks followed that deal up with its largest acquisition to date in purchasing fraud prevention company Shape Security for $1 billion. CEO and President François Locoh-Donou said that deal “changes the game in application security.” Splunk penned a deal to acquire SignalFx for $1.05 billion in August. Splunk hopes the company, which provides real-time monitoring and metrics for the cloud, microservices, and applications, will help bolster its position in observability and application performance management (APM) among enterprises that have cloud-native or on-premises applications. The deal, which Splunk expects to close in the second half of fiscal 2020, is slated to be paid with about 60% in cash and 40% in Splunk common stock. Splunk says the acquisition will lower costs for customers and reduce friction points for enterprises that seek a central hub for multiple applications and capabilities at scale. In November, Google acquired CloudSimple, a startup that makes it easier for customers to move VMware workloads from their on-premises data centers into public clouds. The acquisition gives Google an edge as it competes against Amazon Web Services (AWS) and that public cloud provider’s hybrid cloud service with VMware called VMware Cloud on AWS. Google first started working with the Santa Clara, California-based startup earlier this year, and this summer announced a VMware partnership that used CloudSimple technology to give customers native access to the full VMware stack deployed on Google Cloud Platform. Rich Sanzi, VP of engineering at Google Cloud, said the acquisition allows Google to “accelerate a fully integrated VMware migration solution.” In July, Cisco announced plans to acquire Acacia Communications for $2.6 billion in a move to boost its optical networking portfolio. Acacia, which is an existing Cisco supplier, makes high-speed optical interconnect products for webscale companies, service providers, and data center operators. “The acquisition of Acacia will allow us to build on the strength of our switching, routing, and optical networking portfolio to address our customers’ most demanding requirements,” said David Goeckeler, EVP and GM of Cisco’s networking and security business, in a prepared statement. The companies expect the acquisition to close during the second half of Cisco’s fiscal 2020. At that time, Acacia employees will join Cisco’s optical systems and optics business within the networking and security business under Goeckeler. In August, VMware acquired Pivotal in a deal valued at $2.7 billion and endpoint security company Carbon Black in a deal valued at $2.1 billion. The acquisitions capped a massive buying spree that has seen the software vendor scoop up six companies since May. Carbon Black developed a cloud-based endpoint security platform that uses big data and behavioral analytics to provide several security capabilities including threat hunting, incident response, antivirus and endpoint detection, and real-time endpoint query and remediation. It has more than 5,600 customers and 500 partners globally. Both VMware and Pivotal are majority owned by Dell. The acquisition, however, will only increase Dell’s stake in VMware by .34 percentage points, to 81.09%. Digital Realty penned a deal to buy fellow data center operator Interxion for about $8.4 billion in October. The deal will expand the San Francisco-based Digital Realty’s European footprint and better positions it to compete against colocation market leader Equinix. Digital Realty said the acquisition will help it meet growing global demand from cloud and service providers as well as enterprises seeking colocation, hybrid cloud, and hyperscale data center services. In March, Nvidia announced that it will acquire fellow chipmaker Mellanox Technologies for $6.9 billion in a deal that will boost Nvidia’s data center business and better position it to compete against Intel in that space. The companies expected the transaction to close by the end of this year; however, given the current uncertainty of a US-China trade war, it is likely that the deal will not close until 2020. Nvidia reportedly outbid other companies including Intel, programmable silicon company Xilinx, and Microsoft, all of which also had their eye on Mellanox for its strength in artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), and other big data and analytics workloads. The two companies have partnered over the years on data center servers that combine Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) and Mellanox interconnects. The two chipmakers also worked together to build the world’s two fastest supercomputers, Sierra and Summit, operated by the U.S. Department of Energy. Both use Nvidia GPUs and Mellanox interconnects. In August, Broadcom reached a deal to buy Symantec’s enterprise security business and its name for $10.7 billion in cash. The deal doesn’t include Symantec’s consumer security business, which will continue under the Norton LifeLock brand. The Symantec acquisition will expand Broadcom’s infrastructure software portfolio, and it follows the chipmaker’s $18.9 billion CA Technologies purchase late last year. Broadcom bought that company in large part for its enterprise software business. The acquisition followed a rocky couple of years for Symantec, which has struggled to shift its business — or at least its reputation — from a legacy firewall vendor to an enterprise cloud security specialist. The firm last year launched an internal investigation into its financial reporting (and a related SEC probe), announced plans to slash jobs as part of a broader restructuring, and lost a handful of top executives. The vendor’s roller coaster continued this year. It managed to post fiscal third-quarter results that came in above expectations; acquired software-defined perimeter technology startup Luminate Security; and announced collaboration plans with cloud giants AWS, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud. However, in early May, its CEO Greg Clark abruptly resigned following dismal fiscal fourth-quarter results, which included weak enterprise sales and disappointing forecasts for the first quarter and full 2020 fiscal year. Clark told investors that the move was tied to family considerations.