Pure Storage is buying Portworx, Snowflake has a big IPO, and Western Digital has a breakup. All these stories and more on this episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown!
CEO of Fraud Prevention Startup Arrested for Fraud
Fraud prevention startup NS8 is in deep trouble with the US Government. The startup has been under investigation from the SEC, accused of fraud. Additionally this week, the CEO of the company, Adam Rogas, was arrested and charged by the FBI with fraud as well. The company was founded in 2016 and has recieved around $120 million in funding, with a reported $17 million going directly to Rogas. NS8 laid off about 200 employees earlier this year after disclosing that it was under investigation.
Cradlepoint Acquired by Ericsson
Making the commute from Boise to Stockholm, Cradlepoint will be acquired by Ericsson. The latest in a long line of wireless acquisitions including Marconi, BelAir, and Redback Networks, Cradlepoint specializes in mobile and edge network access points.
Fungible Buys Cloudistics (Assets)
Fungible is one of the start-ups we’ve been hearing a lot about. They make a “data processing unit” (DPU) chip that could be useful in cloud infrastructure. We’ve also heard a lot about Cloudistics, which made software a “cloud platform OS” for disaggregated servers.
Western Digital Separates Disk and Flash
Although most people think they’re a disk drive company, Western Digital is also very active in flash storage. They have a new CEO, David Goeckler, who came over from Cisco in March. Western Digital said the reorganization “will align the company’s diversified portfolio to an acceleration strategy designed for growth, profitability and development agility.”
Pure Storage Acquiring Portworx
Portworx has become synonymous with enterprise container storage, and Pure Storage lead the deployment of flash storage in the datacenter. They have announced the purchase of Portworx, a Kubernetes data service platform, for around $370 million in cash. The deal signals that Pure is looking to move more deeply into multicloud data services and ensure that their hardware is more optimized for container workloads.
Apple’s iOS 14 software update was released last week to much fanfare. One of the features that has been lauded by privacy advocates is the ability for the OS to randomize the MAC address your wireless card uses to probe for networks. In short, this prevents networks from being about tos track you without you connecting to them because it uses a random ID every time it looks for a network. Hardware company have warned this feature could break some of their features and this week Cisco disclosed that their Identity Services Engine, also known as ISE, is affected. The disclosure said that features that rely on MAC address tracking and pinning would be affected. Also, systems leveraging mobile device management for BYOD deployments could see issues with missing devices as well.
Snowflake has been generating buzz since it was founded, as much for the management team (fresh out of ServiceNow) as for their technology. But the IPO absolutely blew everyone away, becoming the largest software IPO in history. As people watched it rocket from $33 billion to $88 billion in under an hour, the buzz turned to money left on the table and insiders enriching themselves.
We’ve been talking a lot about SoftBank, what with the sale of Arm to Nvidia and all. But something crazy is going on with the top tech stocks on Wall Street and it’s time to look at that. The options market has exploded, with the daily volume of options passing that of stocks for the first time in history. This traders game has driven the rise of tech stocks, particularly giants like Apple, Tesla, Zoom, and Amazon. This technique is increasing volatility and created a bubble that’s been bursting for weeks.
The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on YouTube every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for the show each week.
