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Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
71–80 of 167 posts
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#72Rackspace has been looking for a buyer for a while. I suspect that their business is not in terribly good shape. They even started consulting on AWS deployments a while back: "Need some help moving your servers over to AWS? We're here to help!"
Re: "Business not in terribly good shape" - there are 4.3 Billion reasons to suggest otherwise. This isn't the type of business that gets purchased without a lot of due diligence, and, we're not really in much of a tech bubble right now - so I thinks it's reasonable to asses that the underlying revenue/profit of Rackspace was sufficient to justify the (impressive) valuation.
The assumption on Hacker News is that a buyout/acquisition === failing. This is sometimes true and sometimes not true.
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#73Are Apollo likely to make money from it?
PE companies usually do. They will just layoff a bunch of people cut salaries and probably saddle it with debt and get as much cash flow they can from the company.
...and that's if things go as planned, where the result will be a smoldering mess of mediocrity.
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#74I guess it was only a matter of time before they got bought out. It's tough to compete against one of Google, Amazon or Microsoft, competing against all 3 at the same time in an area that all three consider to be core to their future must just be cut throat! It's never great for a companies employee's to be taken over by a private equity firm, if you actually find someone whose had a good experience then please let m…
Since all the other comments are negative, I'll chime in with a somewhat positive experience with a PE firm (although it wasn't a complete going private move). I worked at OnSemi during the period that TPG was a significant investor. Initially they did enforce some fairly strict standards about how money could be spent. And there was a lot of BS where the quarterly numbers were almost enough to beat the street and so…
Hmmm, in another domain I'm familiar with, Cerberus Capital Management smushed together a number of firearms and ammo companies into the Freedom Group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Group), and without to my knowledge screwing them up.
That said, Remington Arms is still a sub-par manufacturer of guns, they haven't noticeably improved their quality, or behavior when caught out, see e.g. the lawsuit they continue to lose WRT to their unsafe Model 700 rifle safeties.
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#75Interesting year so far for PE M&A in SaaS companies Vista - Cvent $1.65B Vista - Marketo $1.80B Vista - Ping $600M Apollo - Rackspace $4.3B (moreso IaaS) Thoma Bravo - Qlik $3.0B (debatable SaaS)
Thoma Bravo has then
* Qlik (BI)
* Riverbed (APM, app & network analytics)
* Dynatrace (APM, app & network analytics)
* Compuware (mainframe maintenance, Dynatrace was a business unit of Compuware)
What does Thoma Bravo do with two old-school APM companies that barely provide a modern cloud service, a BI that barely provide a cloud service and a stone age relict? Will the merge the company assets and lay-off some "fat"? Or wait until IBM or Microsoft wants to buy one of their companies?
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#76I guess it was only a matter of time before they got bought out. It's tough to compete against one of Google, Amazon or Microsoft, competing against all 3 at the same time in an area that all three consider to be core to their future must just be cut throat! It's never great for a companies employee's to be taken over by a private equity firm, if you actually find someone whose had a good experience then please let m…
I believe the rumor is they are going to buy hpe after their spin off/merge with CSC. There might be an opportunity there.
Jesus Christ when will this end. I work for HPE and everything is constantly on hold, waiting for these split offs, mergers, new financial year etc. Cant get any travelling or training done. No internal moves. Staff quitting left right and centre. I'm tempted to join them
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#77Are Apollo likely to make money from it?
PE companies usually do. They will just layoff a bunch of people cut salaries and probably saddle it with debt and get as much cash flow they can from the company.
Layoff the people with know-how, but also hire a bunch of salespeople with lucrative commission plans.
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since all the other comments are negative, I'll chime in with a somewhat positive experience with a PE firm (although it wasn't a complete going private move). I worked at OnSemi during the period that TPG was a significant investor. Initially they did enforce some fairly strict standards about how money could be spent. And there was a lot of BS where the quarterly numbers were almost enough to beat the street and so…
Hmmm, in another domain I'm familiar with, Cerberus Capital Management smushed together a number of firearms and ammo companies into the Freedom Group ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Group ), and without to my knowledge screwing them up. That said, Remington Arms is still a sub-par manufacturer of guns, they haven't noticeably improved their quality, or behavior when caught out, see e.g. the lawsuit they cont…
Most of the "freedom group" make the same thing or operate in the same space. That is "tacti-cool" and people that want their names on lists for silencers, SBR's and other goodies they make.
I bet there was a crap-ton of consolidation that we didn't hear about. I bet a lot of people lost jobs in said consolidation.
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
what was the use case when they wanted you to have a load balancer for a single server..?
I've gotten the same recommendation from them. I complained because they pulled the network connection on the drive connected to the database and completely torched the drive. They were like: well maybe you should consider running multiple database machines with replication so you can survive the next time we screw things up.
This is true for all VPS hosting. They're cheap because they're commodity hardware that sometimes fails.
Re: Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B
#80I still have a couple of dedicated servers with Rackspace. Been with them for over 10 years and am sad to see this. They truly did have the best support and were an amazing partner to my business in the earlier years. I knew this was coming and have moved a lot of our stuff off in preparation. Partly because of the unknown but also partly because their support has diminished over the past 2 years. I was kind of hopin…
I'm in the same boat. Where are you moving to?
We have moved a lot of our stuff to AWS and plan to move 2 more sites that are on the RS dedicated server to AWS. 1 service in particular really does need a dedicated server and we plan to move that to a Hostnexus dedicated box. We have a couple of other boxes with Hostnexus that we have had for years. They are not as good as RS but they do have decent support especially for the price of the boxes (fraction of RS) http://www.hostnexus.com/solutions/dedicated-hosting.php