Episode Details

With a new CEO and president at IBM, we talk about what’s been going on good and bad at IBM in recent years. Big bets were made and that whole cloud things overshadowed things. We also talk about the mysteries of private equity, here what Thoma Bravo has done to make billions of dollars of Dynatrace and Compuware. Finally, we briefly talk about the whole microservices and serverless are silly trend - monoliths rule! (Oh, and some small Java talk.)

(Sorry there’s so much high-volume on Coté's end. Hopefully your ear-holes won’t hurt too much. Coté needs to get a new pop-filter.)

Mood board:

• Interpol can’t find me in Australia, right?
• Digital transformation is bad.
• Did they decide that the kids are all right?
• Thought leader me into happiness.
• You are so much more cynical than me.
• What does IBM do?
• Reverse halo effect.
• Surviving the trough of disillusionment.
• We’ll stick up for digital transformation - No!
• For the rest of your life, do better.
• Minor bread talk.

Relevant to your interests

• IBM
  • IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is stepping down, Arvind Krishna to take over
  • 1 big thing: Ginni Rometty out at IBM
  • IBM’s Lost Decade
  • IBM didn’t spent much CAPEX, three others did.
  • Coté: what’s there to say that’s new? Cloud wasn’t executed well (I guess?) and Watson was a poor choice for such a high priority.
• Thoma Bravo to Explore $2 Billion Sale of Compuware
  • So, did Thoma Bravo do well here?
  • “could value the mainframe software provider at around $2 billion, including debt, according to people familiar with the matter.”
  • “Thoma Bravo took Compuware private in 2014 in a deal valued at $2.5 billion. It carved out Compuware’s application performance management division, renamed it Dynatrace Inc. and took it public last year.”
  • Dynatrace market cap is ~$9.1bn, was ~$6.7bn on IPO day (August 2019).
  • Brenon@451 on the IPO, August 2019: “Post-offering, the PE firm still owns about 70% of Dynatrace.”
  • And: “Dynatrace raised roughly $570m in its offering, some of which will go toward paying down its nearly $1bn in debt.”
  • 451’s note on the 2014 going private.
  • So, if Thoma Bravo still owns 70%, then have ~$6.37bn worth of equity (70% of market cap of $9.1bn)…sounds… really good for laying for laying down $2.5bn, plus you might get $2bn more from the rest of Compuware.
  • That’s crazy, right? That Compuware was sitting on that much extra value?
• This week in cloud architecture patterns
  • tl