Monday, July 25th, 2016

Time	Event
12:00p	What’s Behind CoreSite’s Fortune 100 Channel Partner Deals With the barrage of news coverage around the UK’s Brexit referendum in late June, as those in the business and technology world were attempting to wrap their heads around what it would all mean, it was easy to miss the announcement by CoreSite, a top performing US data center REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust), of a partnership it recently struck with the Fortune 100 IT services giant Ingram Micro. CoreSite made the announcement the same day Britons went to the polls. This was a second such partnership the data center provider struck recently — the first one was with Avnet in June — and represents an effort by CoreSite to squeeze more profit out of its current facility portfolio that is largely occupied. As of March 31, CoreSite reported occupancy of 90.6 percent, or 1,447,000 of 1,597,000 stabilized rentable square feet. (While this represents high utilization, stabilized data center occupancy was actually down sequentially from 92.5 percent at year-end 2015.) In a nutshell, it is highly profitable to add cabinet density to stabilized data centers. CoreSite hopes to learn if granular deployments from channel partners will help turbocharge occupancy when space utilization is running at such high levels, the company’s VP of channel sales, Dave Sroka, and senior VP of sales and marketing, Steve Smith. said in an interview with Data Center Knowledge. The data center REIT expects to generate considerable business from Ingram Micro and Avnet by offering cabinet choices which are easy to configure and price. See also: Brexit: Keep Calm and Hold Onto Data Center REITs Channel Partners Expected to Drive Higher Profits Both Ingram and Avnet are global IT services giants with multitudes of customers in every region of the globe. In comparison, CoreSite has a much smaller geographical footprint focused on eight key markets in the US. The CoreSite sales team simply does not have the headcount to reach out directly to hundreds of thousands of smaller enterprises. While it isn’t cost-effective for CoreSite to ramp up an internal effort to reach out to these customers, the availability of on-ramps to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform inside its data centers remains a compelling feature for companies of all sizes. See also: CoreSite Shares Spike as Cloud Data Center Leasing Accelerates In the announcement of the Avnet partnership, Sroka touted Avnet’s ability to bring hybrid cloud solutions around the many networks and service providers present in CoreSite’s data centers, including the three big cloud providers, while the Ingram Micro announcement promised SKU-based products that make it simple for resellers to quote and sell the data center REIT’s colocation options. Ingram Micro’s website now offers an a la carte menu of about 60 different CoreSite products for resellers to offer their customers. The available products vary by location and include a few promotional items to help kick off this new channel program. As we already mentioned, CoreSite has been a top-performing data center REIT, due in no small part to its ability to grow earnings and increase dividends at impressive double-digit rates. Like its biggest competitor, Equinix, it targets customers who value the connectivity options and dense ecosystems available at any particular location or through its Any2Exchange peering network. Investor Takeaway The plan to generate highly profitable revenue with minimal sales and administrative expenses may help management extend its string of impressive quarterly results well into the future. There is, however, a downside to high utilization for a data center REIT. CoreSite still needs to announce expansion plans in major markets in order to continue with its growth trajectory. Smith reiterated that CoreSite remains focused on allocating new capital in ways that generate the highest risk-adjusted returns. Therefore, despite persistent industry M&A rumors, expanding in existing markets like Chicago, Northern Virginia, and Santa Clara still trumps opening up new markets — either in the US, or overseas. However, a large anchor tenant or build-to-suit could serve to de-risk new market expansions which CoreSite views as being strategic. See also: Report: Microsoft and Oracle Gobble Up Data Center Space in Virginia (Comment on this)
4:38p	Equinix + Arrow Deal Boosts Azure Last week’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference saw renewed efforts by the company to rally its sales and consulting partners around more consolidated brands and product lines for the back office and data center. As Windows Server is allowed to fade into the background, Azure steps up to the podium as Microsoft’s principal data center brand, extending its cloud services directly into hybrid installations with Azure Stack. In perhaps the most prevalent example of this transition under way, colocation leader Equinix touted a new partnership with managed service provider Arrow Electronics. The company’s objective is to begin making available turnkey systems on HPE server platforms that provide hybrid cloud connectivity to Microsoft Azure services through Equinix’ connectivity resources. “HPE is bringing a specific technology stack that is tested and that we know interconnects well with Azure,” said Greg Adgate, Equinix’ vice president for global technology partnerships, in an interview with Datacenter Knowledge. “What we’re doing is assembling their specific storage, compute, and software, privately connecting it through Equinix Cloud Exchange into the Microsoft Cloud platform over their private on-ramp, ExpressRoute.” Repaving the ExpressRoute Equinix first announced its embrace of Microsoft’s ExpressRoute program for managed services partners two years ago. As part of the program, Microsoft provides a reference architecture for hardware and systems that partners assemble and deploy for customers. Once deployed, those systems give customers a faster route to adopting Azure storage and compute resources. With each passing Microsoft Conference, Azure Stack — the company’s on-premise deployment package for Azure-compatible services, which incorporates Windows Server — is looking more and more like the center of gravity for Microsoft’s server ecosystem. “The combination of Azure and Azure Stack provides you that unparalleled cloud platform,” explained Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to a packed crowd of partners and service providers during his keynote address last Tuesday. “It’s the only hyperscale cloud platform that is available across the globe. It also provides you with that true hybrid computing infrastructure that is needed. “Essentially,” Nadella continued, “I think of our service as the edge of the cloud.” The “edge” metaphor is following in the wake of the “cloud” metaphor’s success, but nearly every purveyor (or, as some would say, perpetrator) conveys its meaning differently. In Nadella’s case, the edge is that zone of interconnectedness where the customers’ premises end, and cloud services begins. That’s not Microsoft’s territory; and with this latest round of ExpressRoute partnerships, it’s not trying to acquire that territory. Rather, Microsoft wants partners like Equinix and Arrow to build the bridges between hybrid data centers and Azure solutions. “Arrow can enable MSPs, with their normal distribution relationships, and VARs that want to become MSPs, to fill the gap,” Adgate told us. “As we integrate our story into those of the many, many partners that Arrow supports today, there’s going to be a broader set of companies who have the competencies to deliver the whole hybrid IT solution. Equinix is going to continue to recruit managed service partners, regardless.” Where’s the Carrot and Where’s the Stick? If Azure is the beneficiary at the end of the chain, though, what incentives would Microsoft give to such partners to have them connect Azure to their customers on its behalf? We asked Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Dan Conde. “In my opinion, it’s a matter of who adds unique value, and they can get paid accordingly,” Conde responded by e-mail. “Equinix is more of a platform rather than just a colocation facility, that leverages its presence (physical location and network connection) to create great connectivity between cloud providers, to provide better performance to its customers. So it makes sense to work with companies like Arrow to create a hybrid solution that leverages Equinix’s platform as well as on-premises solutions in an easy to consume way.” As Equinix’ Adgate explained, rarely does it achieve a customer win where it effectively assumes all of that customer’s data center resources — especially including all of its legacy mainframes. Rather, it wins subsets of applications or projects that require high availability, low latency, maximum bandwidth, undiminished uptime, and a variety of network service provider connectivity choices. And these applications will be the big revenue generators. As currently configured, HPE systems offered by Arrow through this deal would enable high-speed, private connectivity (off of the public Internet) into Microsoft Azure. Whether data centers would then be eligible for migration into Azure’s staging platforms, such as Azure Container Service, could be determined by the customer working in concert with Arrow’s consultants and Microsoft’s technical specialists. Usually, it’s these specialists who wait at the end of the supply chain, said Adgate, for enterprises to get to the point where they’re ready to migrate their applications. All the components of the solution usually have to be installed, tested, and running first; then, and only then, can they start reaping any revenue. It’s the design of ExpressRoute, he told us, that turns that equation on its ear. “What this does is shrink that front end,” he explained, “to be able to actually get that cloud workload moving faster. [Cloud providers] like it because it bills faster. The faster it can get to billing, the better. “Why Arrow’s partners like it — the managed service providers and integrators — is that now, they’re not relying on that enterprise, corporate IT person to find the space, the power, and the bandwidth to connect it and make it happen. Equinix becomes that place — that enterprise, on-prem. They carve out their own cage, with their own security policies, and they physically connect it back to a data center that may be in transformation, to allow them to quickly connect, scale, and start consuming.” “The key thing,” ESG’s Conde reminded us, “is not to focus on the ‘commodity aspects’ where you get paid last, but to focus on the value add that each party brings to the table. Firms like Amazon AWS are pretty much all public cloud based, which is fine for some workloads. But firms like Microsoft via Azure, and Equinix as a platform for infrastructure, are focused on providing a solution that can address hybrid computing needs.” (Comment on this)
7:44p	Cisco Advances CliQr’s Tech for Automation Four months after its acquisition of data center automation platform maker CliQr, Cisco is making the strongest case yet for a hyperscale automation system that blurs the boundaries between clouds and customer premises, and renders opaque the containment mechanisms for workloads. “The old world for our customers, for your business, of hard-wiring applications to all the nuances of different infrastructure environments, just doesn’t scale anymore,” declared Cisco Senior Director for CloudCenter Business Development David Cope [pictured above], during his Day 2 address to the Cisco Live conference. Cope’s comments came by way of introducing a new server platform for Cisco that incorporates high-level workload automation with the company’s new Tetration network analytics system. “There needs to be a way to really turn the proposition around,” Cope continued. “Instead of getting apps to work for the infrastructure, there needs to be a way to get the infrastructure to dynamically conform to the needs of the application, providing complete portability and manageability across any of the environments.” Homogenizing Heterogeneity The dream of server and networking vendors, including Cisco, is to produce a single solution that fills all the gaps in most everyone’s data center. In 2011, the overwhelming need for scalability led Facebook to organize the Open Compute Project — an effort at a common definition for the most homogenous, undistinguished “bare metal” a company could buy or build in bulk. Hardware makers, including the very short list of companies that produce CPUs nowadays, saw OCP as a threat to their ability to craft a value proposition. If data centers everywhere relied upon tens of thousands of expendable, basic boxes, margins could plummet, and value-added servers could follow desktop PCs into obscurity. Along came Docker and containerization, and the hardware community saw a glimmer of hope. Suddenly they foresaw a future where applications were completely decoupled from their underlying infrastructure. Applications could perceive the data center as completely homogenous, when in fact it could be multifarious. Up to now, the boldest effort by a server maker to capitalize on this trend has been HPE’s promotion of what it calls composable infrastructure. As HPE’s SVP and general manager for data center infrastructure Ric Lewis laid out for us last March, the basic concept there is to stage workloads on whatever infrastructure is best suited for it at the moment, and to separate that decision entirely from the workload’s scheduling, execution, and maintenance. “We worked with customers and partners like yourselves to develop a single infrastructure,” said Lewis, as he introduced HPE’s composable infrastructure last December, “that… has fluid resources that can dynamically flex to the specific needs of an application, in any deployment model — whether it virtual, physical or bare metal, or even in containers.” The platform Cisco’s Cope introduced at Cisco Live definitely has many of the same goals. But in Cisco’s case, accomplishing its version of dynamic infrastructure involves the implementation of a kind of general-purpose manifest for workloads, which Cope described as a composite topology. “It starts with graphically capturing the topology and dependencies of the application, in an application profile or blueprint, which contains the topology, the dependencies of the application, and related policies,” he told his audience, “again, completely agnostic of infrastructure.” The rendering of a topology looks a bit like a genealogy tree. As Cope described, a topology may include first-generation virtual machines (VMware, KVM, Xen, etc.), containerized workloads, or symbols for PaaS services provided through the public cloud. A composite topology would include meta-applications, if you will, that combine elements from all three. With an Asterisk Next to Docker But “completely agnostic,” as Cope and his Cisco colleagues demonstrated on stage, somehow does not entail a failure to take advantage of modern infrastructures when they become available. In a very convincing demo involving Docker, Cisco showed how its platform generates labels that may be used in staging containerized workloads, steering them through the network. Specifically, a label can be deployed when spinning up containers with Docker Engine. Each label has no direct purpose for Docker itself, although as it travels with the workload, it associates the application it contains with an SDN path that Cisco’s orchestration produced for it. Segment routing, as Cisco Director of Engineering Brook Crossman showed the audience, uses Tetration to help determine the optimum route for an application as it traverses the network. “We’ve actually extended Docker,” Crossman explained, “to take advantage of this functionality, so that we can present some really interesting opportunities to solve your problem.” Crossman’s demo clearly showed three segment routing labels representing the path between the gateways of two data centers. Each label referred to a segment of the network whose access policies were governed by Contiv, the company’s policy enforcement engine. This way, packets are sent over the network over paths that have already been secured, and whose access policies are already being enforced, without arbitration having to take place for each and every packet individually. While Cisco’s goal is for its new infrastructure to behave with absolute agnosticism, it’s clear that newer classes of virtualized infrastructure will exhibit behaviors that any staging platform will need to take into consideration, especially if it wishes to continue presenting the appearance of integration. “I think you’ll find, as these containerized applications move into mainstream production,” said Cisco’s David Cope, “they will almost always have non-containerized dependencies — reaching out to a PaaS, reaching out to a database. Cisco’s CloudCenter is unique, in that it allows you to create and manage these composite topologies.” As software continues to take over the architecture of data centers, look for hardware manufacturers to find clever ways to take the lead in pursuing software-defined evolutionary paths. (Comment on this)
9:09p	Lance Crosby Comes Out of Stealth with New Developer-Centric Cloud Security Venture Brought to you by The WHIR Almost exactly one year after Lance Crosby, SoftLayer founder and 20-year hosting industry veteran took the stage at HostingCon Global in San Diego, he is back with a new company that answers the question on many minds in the hosting industry since he left IBM last February – just what will Crosby do next? The answer is StackPath – a Security-as-a-Service company that launched on Monday with a significant investment from Abry Partners. According to the company’s announcement, the funding will be used for M&A, and infrastructure and services development. “The genesis is to create a developer-centric security platform that’s going to be API-driven, and going to allow developers and DevOps to actually integrate security into their applications as they are building it,” Stackpath CEO and chairman Crosby tells the WHIR. “They can make the calls and apply the security policy themselves, and they won’t necessarily have to involve the security team anymore.” Security that meets needs of cloud So what does this mean? According to Crosby, StackPath will initially include “some web facing services; content delivery, DDoS protection, VPN services, and a web application firewall.” The developer-centric security platform will get smarter over time, and by the end of the year will include secure compute, storage and DNS, with plans to release new security services every month for the next several years. The idea for StackPath came to Crosby as he observed serious flaws in cloud security – even at the level of Fortune 500 companies, who spent a fortune on security products they never deployed. Traditional security modded for cloud environments just doesn’t meet the level of scale and automation required. “After being acquired by IBM I spent the last two years seeing the shortcomings of cloud security,” Crosby says. “We had some security products at SoftLayer but we called them bolt-on; [we] took more traditional firewalls, load balancers and things like that and converted them to cloud but there was nothing that was truly, highly scalable and automated that would work.” “That’s where the concept came from. I saw companies like Netflix, big banks, and firms that were spinning up literally tens of thousands of virtual machines a day and there were no real security products that would follow that level of automation and scale.” Developers drive security engine In last year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for managed security services, the research firm identified IBM, Dell SecureWorks, Symantec, and Verizon as leaders in the space. Crosby says StackPath’s global threat intelligence engine across 35 points-of-presence will be available to customers who can integrate the security within their applications via APIs, differentiating it from other security companies. “We believe we’re going to create a whole new generation of security firms who are going to use this platform to build new widgets on top that we never dreamed about,” Crosby says. “When people ask me what that’s going to be I tell them that I didn’t know in 2005 that Facebook, Tumblr, WhatsApp, and Yelp, and all the other companies that built on top of cloud were ever going to create new verticals and new industries and I think we’re going to see the same thing here.” StackPath’s technology will not be built from scratch – the company acquired MaxCDN, Fireblade and Cloak to build out its CDN, Web Access Firewall, and VPN, respectively. The company said that its DDoS mitigation technology also includes “an impressive array of IP.” Crosby tells us that he drew from his past relationships in the cloud space to build a team including COO and president Andrew Higginbotham, who previously led CenturyLink’s Cloud and Managed Services Business, and CFO Kim Sheehy, who prior to joining StackPath served as CFO of CyrusOne. He recruited others from his background at IBM/SoftLayer, Google, and Amazon, as well. Crosby’s hosting past will also serve StackPath well in its initial stage where it will be targeting internet-centered companies and more traditional hosting companies. Hosting providers will be able to sell the security services offered by StackPath and white-label the platform. Eventually the platform will be available directly to developers. “We’re flying in the face of the way security has always been implemented and handled and managed and I think a lot of the traditional firms will have a lot of resistance. We’re going to automate a lot of things that people have done historically, but that’s also what drives us,”he says. &lt;a target=&amp;quot;_self&amp;quot; href=&amp;quot;https://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjsskO5EwP9ol5EWTgYncraTgUHZ9lIZRnm_6FZvRN4XlwyU9dVsqWdoZE3CsWWqCmJbN-9yE7YA8uJmkWcCNJQI-RVdpnT0AytCZh3Q9mPKhxVXnoZjjtaQpMZIFtokeWuZWJUR8Qg3YFKAyTZXYTYaZMR1GNlcziJszhJ_gpG0m4SQ9GfZP13Yni6m1hbYIuu8ulon6EI9EnlxF6P8NJCd2KJqgywPrx9bN0AS0vz9ANtknqlD2KaEbF5lJ7Na-xrJBqjNnx4NEhYkTjHYARzffjYl1cV7PalpQtcQPrhcmrdyFisYK2bxWad7KSUmG9P796ITRBa-L-J6TcWGIyB1R7P3UTe9k30ZaXBiG2L243Ej_faG1VUc_3mx6eQZ9YKMMig_m0ZrwnfWNMJNN8B6R8h0r9X2_yDacMwx6eEHk_X4xTwzCLVjwF9pcmvvtdz96LO01aX8aMMSkSsdE6KdSEjkL3kJTx4RFy0yId1PlV_CC0FPEKzoQbtZ8IDck-CN_MxvDJo7zDtVLmKiXwRzfYYkWYDT9SK6Ws5ZUWHPbgv5QrdCx_TDuCvZJm17UYnqwRBB9Tw9g8KO_on96Si1hhJnaA4xjw7beVwhfi9wxQhHRSnV9vtEBC4Dd3laleKP9L1NSRGFIJedKYDgrg9ooPM-_hKH1nGQtGHpsmfRXNbCycVbaEH8KBX3Ou5GVeuryLAQMWeX6aveqSstDo59l6GJY0s1XK1_gR8m_8wVAV_6BkFAE9kX7VEeo1goGBADbq-BZdYF6s1CHdw-vSUw7Z7tRPDQtZO2yJrZw1vw3mUwb_uNEZT1eVVGk8areMvk3nD2U5tnzgQgDtrL15XQSjEHAcHL_wTThKGAq75M57SROKg&amp;amp;amp;sig=Cg0ArKJSzE3zZt2KLq_UEAE&amp;amp;amp;urlfix=1&amp;amp;amp;rm_eid=2676340&amp;amp;amp;adurl=https://flyporter.com&amp;quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&amp;quot;https://s0.2mdn.net/ads/richmedia/studio/pv2/41798782/20160630063616581/DCM_GreatFares_NoText_300x250.jpg&amp;quot; width=&amp;quot;300&amp;quot; height=&amp;quot;250&amp;quot; border=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;img width=&amp;quot;0px&amp;quot; height=&amp;quot;0px&amp;quot; style=&amp;quot;visibility:hidden&amp;quot; border=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot; src=&amp;quot;&amp;quot; /&gt;<span id=”mce_marker” data-mce-type=”bookmark”>​</span> (Comment on this)
9:43p	Verizon Acquires Yahoo for $4.83 Billion By WindowsITPro Verizon Communications Inc. agreed to buy Yahoo! Inc.’s web assets for $4.83 billion, ending the company’s two-decade run as an independent business that took it from Stanford University startup at the dawn of the internet age to also-ran behind nimbler online rivals such as Google and Facebook Inc. Verizon will pay cash in a deal that includes Yahoo real estate, but excludes some intellectual property, which will be sold separately. Yahoo will be left with its stakes in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Yahoo Japan Corp., with a combined market value of about $40 billion. The telecommunications company will add Yahoo web services that still draw 1 billion monthly users, including mail, news and sports content and financial tools, gaining share in the $187 billion digital-advertising market — though it will nevertheless be a distant third behind Google and Facebook. Verizon, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, also gets smaller but faster-growing assets including mobile applications and advertising technology for video and handheld devices. “We have enormous respect for what Yahoo has accomplished: this transaction is about unleashing Yahoo’s full potential, building upon our collective synergies, and strengthening and accelerating that growth,” AOL Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong said Monday in a statement. “Combining Verizon, AOL and Yahoo will create a new powerful competitive rival in mobile media, and an open, scaled alternative offering for advertisers and publishers.” The deal amounts to an admission that Yahoo has lost much of its relevance as modern internet use shifts toward mobile, social networking and messaging. The “portal,” officially formed in 1995 by Stanford students Jerry Yang and David Filo, was once indispensable, serving as the on-ramp to the online world for millions of consumers just discovering the internet. Yahoo’s decline, which began with the rise of Google as the preferred search engine for web surfers and advertisers, was hastened in the past decade by management missteps and a failure to keep up with users’ changing habits. With annual sales forecast to drop to their lowest in more than a decade, an abandoned plan to spin off Yahoo’s valuable Asian assets, and rising pressure from investors, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had no choice but to put the company’s core up for sale earlier this year. Now, Verizon must find a way to turn around a business that, even after strategy shifts and job cuts, remains bloated with costs and held back by a fragmented product lineup. Mayer’s Plans The deal also ends the turnaround efforts of Mayer, whose appointment in 2012 was lauded by Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Mayer, Google’s No. 20 employee and its first female engineer, was hailed as a potential savior for a foundering company in management disarray. This wunderkind, who gained renown for tending Google’s spartan home page, applied her engineering chops to building new products and restoring Yahoo’s long-lost technological prowess. Yet her four-year effort — including spending billions of dollars on acquisitions and developing and updating mobile apps — did little to win a new generation of users, attract more advertising dollars or fend off competition from Google in search and Facebook in social media. Mayer said Monday she would remain at the company. “I’m planning to stay,” Mayer said in a post on the company’s website. ­“It’s important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter.” Yahoo will be integrated with Verizon’s AOL under Marni Walden, executive vice president of the product innovation and new businesses organization at Verizon. Walden said she and Armstrong planned to meet with Mayer this week. “Marissa will be very key to successful integration,” Walden said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “It’s premature to talk about who will be in what roles” longer term, she said. The shares of Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo were little changed in early trading Monday at $39.11. Asian Holdings Yahoo will change its name when the deal closes, hanging onto its cash, patents and stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, with a combined market value of about $40 billion. The company said it will return cash to shareholders and update investors on plans for the other assets later. In the late 1990s, Yahoo was the site where many people learned how to navigate the World Wide Web by serving up links from a handy search box and aggregating news and other content from disparate sources. The company went public in 1996 at $13 a share, part of a wave of Internet IPOs that included Netscape Communications Corp., Excite Inc. and Lycos Inc. Its stock more than doubled in its first day of trading, buoyed by optimism that the internet would someday become a meaningful advertising medium. As the web expanded to become a central way people communicate and do business in the new century, traversing its breadth became more difficult, and Yahoo sought to fold in more products and features. That gave an opening to another Stanford company, algorithm-based web-query startup Google, which brought fresh thinking to search and a focus on technology that could scale with the internet’s expansion — and make money by more precisely targeting advertising based on users’ searches. Consumers soon began to shift to Google, and by 2005 it surpassed Yahoo in overall sales. “It lasted a whole hell of a lot longer than I thought it would,” said Paul Saffo, who teaches forecasting at Stanford, noting that Yahoo was also held back by poor leadership over the years. “It made some right moves, but it could never get ahead of the curve.” An acquisition of Yahoo could have happened sooner. The most high-profile bid came in 2008 when it failed to consummate a potential purchase by Microsoft Corp. The software giant offered more than $45 billion for Yahoo, but then-CEO Yang eventually rebuffed the deal as too cheap. Today, the company is worth less than $38 billion, including its valuable Asian assets. The latest takeover talks began earlier this year when Mayer — after keeping investors at bay for years — said the company would explore strategic alternatives, including selling its main internet operations. Mayer was finally bowing to rising shareholder ire that gained steam after the collapse of a plan to spin off Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba in a way that would minimize tax for investors. Alibaba, the largest e-commerce provider in China, had emerged as the most valuable piece of Yahoo, and investors wanted a way to realize some of those gains. After U.S. regulators failed to give prior approval for the transaction’s tax status, Yahoo jettisoned the plan. Activist investor Starboard Value LP, a longtime Yahoo critic, stepped up its campaign to pressure Mayer to act, including threatening to oust the board through a proxy battle. In April, Yahoo struck an agreement with Starboard by naming several new directors, including Jeffrey Smith, Starboard’s CEO. As part of the deal, Smith joined the strategic review committee. Multiple Offers The latest sale process attracted strategic players and private equity firms. After the bids in early June, remaining participants included private equity firms TPG, Advent International Corp. and a partnership of Sycamore Partners and Vector Capital Management, people familiar with the matter said at the time. AT&T Inc. and Quicken Loans Inc. founder Dan Gilbert were also active in the bidding process, each vying to win Yahoo’s core Internet business, as well as some of its intellectual property and real estate assets. At the time, the multiple offers valued Yahoo’s web businesses from about $4 billion to $6 billion, except for Verizon, a person familiar with the matter said. Verizon’s bid was lower — from $3.75 billion to $4 billion — because it didn’t include Yahoo’s patents and real estate. Early in her tenure at Yahoo, Mayer focused on hiring and product development to add user traffic and generate more revenue. She expanded online news with big-name hires such as Katie Couric, made several large acquisitions to round out the company’s advertising and video services, and pushed for a shift to mobile. Her efforts never translated to a financial revival. In the first quarter of 2016, Yahoo sales fell 18 percent to $859.4 million, even as rivals such as Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Facebook posted respective revenue gains of 18 percent and 52 percent. Yahoo is projected to grab just 1.5 percent of the global digital ad market this year, down from 2.1 percent in 2015, according to EMarketer. Google is forecast to command 30.9 percent. Facebook’s slice will grow to 12 percent, the researcher said. Though Mayer expressed confidence in the turnaround plan as recently as this year, she said such efforts sometimes take five to seven years. Investors weren’t that patient. “It’s just so unfortunate that it’s kind of ending in a fire sale,” said Shar VanBoskirk, an analyst at Forrester Research. “It was such a foundational piece of the current economy. The article was published originally here: http://windowsitpro.com/industry/verizon-acquires-yahoo-483-billion   (Comment on this)

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