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Google to buy Wiz for $32B

reuters.com

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Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#51

Post by rvnx »

InkCanon wrote: post #15
aswerty wrote: post #11

Wiz seems to only be about 4 years old, as per wikipedia. That valuation in such a short amount of time surely must be some kind of record? Or am I missing something?

~5 years by now. But there is a bit of fine print. The founders all founded another cloud security company in 2010, which was acquired by Microsoft. They were all graduates of Israel's famous Unit 8200. So while the literal company was founded in 2020, it is very likely a lot of both the knowledge, expertise and quite possibly product was already in development before it.

Not sure if it's a very wise move to hire foreign intelligence offers and give them access to the core of your tech products and to the customers data.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#53

Post by jordanb »

amazingamazing wrote: post #19

Google has some amazing negotiating skills - paying 50% more for something they literally tried to get not even a year ago... (they tried to get it at 23 billing not even a year ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042034 That being said, Instagram and WhatsApp were expensive for Facebook and those ended up being a steal. Time will tell, as usual.

Turns out McKinsey is really bad at business and letting a McKinsey ghoul run your company is a good way to run it into the ground.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#54

Post by jordanb »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #5

One wonders if $32B spent "pluggin' up the holes" would accomplish more. A lot of open source code could be rewritten at this price point.

They're paying mostly for Wiz's customer book, who they will quickly alienate and drive to competitors.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#55

Post by ebiester »

amazingamazing wrote: post #19

Google has some amazing negotiating skills - paying 50% more for something they literally tried to get not even a year ago... (they tried to get it at 23 billing not even a year ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042034 That being said, Instagram and WhatsApp were expensive for Facebook and those ended up being a steal. Time will tell, as usual.

This is meant to be politically-neutral commentary: this deal doesn't happen without a Republican in office that will squash the antitrust bent that the Biden administration started.

It's also possible the last Wiz deal happens without the antitrust swirling over Google.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#57

Post by ABS »

scarface_74 wrote: post #43
belter wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a way for Google to secure a beachhead in half the Fortune 100 If that is their objective, they will fail again, since this is the land of good account management. Being able to call somebody on the phone if required. Something AWS excels on, Microsoft a little bit, while Google is rumored to have humans working there, but they are rarely seen.

This is such an underrated weakness of Google. When I was working at AWS ProServe, we never even took GCP as a serious competitor. Their customer service, acount management and enterprise sales team was so horrendous it was laughable. I don’t think we even had talking points about why AWS was better than GCP like we did Azure.

what drives me mad is that it's not even underrated! everyone knows, everyone has been talking (and complaning) about this for something like 15 years!

I personally know of 2 big GCP customers who, over the years, left GCP because of this and the impact it had in critical situations. This very feedback was given in both cases to people considerably high up on GCP's ladder and... nothing's ever changed.

I'm sure plenty other big migrations off GCP provided the same feedback, to no avail.

When Diane Greene first and then Thomas Kurian became Google Cloud CEOs people thought that finally, due to their previous experiences in very Enterprise-aggressive companies, they would improve massively on that front.

Did they improve the situation? a bit. Massively? bringing GCP finally on-par with anyone else (not better than anyone else, just... the same)? nope, not even close.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#58

Post by myth_drannon »

InkCanon wrote: post #15
aswerty wrote: post #11

Wiz seems to only be about 4 years old, as per wikipedia. That valuation in such a short amount of time surely must be some kind of record? Or am I missing something?

~5 years by now. But there is a bit of fine print. The founders all founded another cloud security company in 2010, which was acquired by Microsoft. They were all graduates of Israel's famous Unit 8200. So while the literal company was founded in 2020, it is very likely a lot of both the knowledge, expertise and quite possibly product was already in development before it.

only 2 out of 3 are 8200 alumni.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#59

Post by Thorrez »

eitally wrote: post #7

Imho, and as a xoogler who's been in Google Cloud's ecosystem the past few years, Google Cloud's three big focus areas have been AI (this is an evolution from their historical focus on data, then also analytics), Distributed Cloud (Anthos++) and security (post the Mandiant acquisition). They'll never be able to compete on base infra, given their late entry into the game, lack of presence in certain markets, and the l…

>and security (post the Mandiant acquisition)

As a Googler who works in GCP security, security has been a key differentiator for GCP long before the Mandiant acquisition. Google invented BeyondCorp (a primary driver of Zero Trust). Google helped create security keys (U2F, FIDO, Webauthn), and was I think the first major company to adopt them, both for employees, and for consumers. Google was one of the first major companies to offer a bug bounty, in 2010. Google's Project Zero searching for vulnerabilities in other companies'/organizations' software I think was pretty much unprecedented when it was created. Look at the number of times other tech companies get hacked compared to Google. Google got hacked in 2009 by China (I believe that was the first time a major company admitted to being hacked by government). That was a major turning point. Ever since then it's been "never again".

Disclosure: my thoughts are my own.

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