Friday afternoon saw a huge breaking announcement from the Wall Street Journal. Reports indicated that Cisco had made a $20 billion offer to acquire Splunk. We discus this story and more on this week’s Rundown.
AMD Xlinx Merger Closers | 1:34
We’ve talked a lot on the Rundown about the acquisition spree that chip makers have been on and how difficult it has been to deal with regulatory bodies. AMD has bucked that trend by formallly acquiring Xilinx this week for $49 billion, the largest semiconductor acquisition in history. The deal has been in development for over a year while it cleared the various groups looking to add their input to the process. The all-stock transaction will see Xilinx bring their expertise in areas like FPGAs and DPUs under the larger AMD banner to compete with Intel and NVIDIA.
Read more: Update: AMD Xlinx Merger Closers
Juniper’s NAC for Acquisitions with WiteSand | 3:57
If you were wondering what else Juniper could integrate Mist AI into next then wait no longer. On Monday the networking giant announced an acquisition of WiteSand, makers of a cloud-native zero trust Network Access Control (NAC) solution. The development and engineering team will head over to Juniper to integrate the NAC software into Juniper and their offerings. This would make an excellent fit for their recently-announced SASE and SD-WAN solutions.
Read more: Juniper Networks Announces Acquisition of WiteSand
Intel Acquiring Tower Semiconductor | 6:53
Just one year after the arrival of Pat Gelsinger, Intel is positioning itself to be the new giant in the chip fabrication space. They announced yesterday that they are adding a new facet to this plan by acquiring Tower Semiconductor. Intel has long been a customer of Tower, which manufactures more exotic and specialized products like analog chips and CMOS image sensors. The move is seen by industry experts as a way to add additional production lines to the Intel Foundry Services banner and provide a way to gain access to additional facilities to make chips while Intel ramps up construction of their newly announced facilities in the US. The deal is expected to cost Intel around $5.4 billion.
Read more: Intel Acquiring Tow Semiconductor
San Francisco 49ers Defense Torched by Ransomware | 10:11
Just one year after the arrival of Pat Gelsinger, Intel is positioning itself to be the new giant in the chip fabrication space. They announced yesterday that they are adding a new facet to this plan by acquiring Tower Semiconductor. Intel has long been a customer of Tower, which manufactures more exotic and specialized products like analog chips and CMOS image sensors. The move is seen by industry experts as a way to add additional production lines to the Intel Foundry Services banner and provide a way to gain access to additional facilities to make chips while Intel ramps up construction of their newly announced facilities in the US. The deal is expected to cost Intel around $5.4 billion.
Akamai Hosting Linode After Acquisition | 13:37
Content Delivery Network player Akamai is getting into the hosting business. They’ve announced that they are going to be acquiring Linode, one of most popular virtual private server companies. Linode’s offerings pre-date AWS’s rise to power and has remained successful in a sea of competitors. The deal will cost Akamai around $900 million and is positioned to help Akamai grow in the face of new market trends like the metaverse.
Read more: Akamai acquires Linode for $900M
Cisco Goes Spelunking for Splunk | 16:06
Friday afternoon saw a huge breaking announcement from the Wall Street Journal. Reports indicated that Cisco had made a $20 billion offer to acquire Splunk. The networking industry titan was said to have made the offer for the data analytics and visualization company but that there were no current talks between the companies beyond that. The two companies have partnered together for a number of years to provider services to each other, especially since Splunk is seen as the leader in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) space. Aside from coverage of the story there has been no comment from either party as of yet but Splunk stock soared on the news when trading opened on Monday.
Read more: Cisco made $20 billion-plus takeover offer for Splunk -WSJ
SSDs Spoiled by Contamination | 23: 54
Spolier Alert! Western Digital announced last week that at least 6.5 exabytes worth of NAND flash cells have been contaminated and are unusable for SSDs. The contamination was detected in late January in two different Japanese manufacturing facilites operated along with Kioxia. WD and Kioxia together account for almost a third of the NAND flash market and the news has added to fears that storage cells will be hard to find in the current chip shortage and could lead to higher prices in the coming months.
Read more: SSD prices could spike after Western Digital loses 6.5 billion gigabytes of NAND chips
Cloud Field Day 13 Is now through February 18
Storage Field day 23 is March 9-11
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