Today’s topics include Verizon’s $4.83 billion acquisition of Yahoo’s internet businesses, the Federal Communication Commission chairman’s appeal for efforts to stop robocallers, the resignation of Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg following another poor earnings report, and the newly created company that will market a hyperconverged cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platform.
Microsoft tried seriously to buy Yahoo in its entirety eight-and-a-half years ago for $47 billion. How history would have been changed had Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang and his board had listened to Carl Icahn, Eric Jackson, Daniel Loeb and other activist investors and consummated that deal.
Now Yahoo’s core businesses are worth a mere 10.3 percent of that $47 billion at $4.83 billion, the amount that Verizon has agreed to pay for the once high-flying internet company.
Under the deal Verizon will acquire all of Yahoo’s internet businesses, including the home page that served as the web home page for multiple millions of users for more than two decades; its highly respected financial, sports and home goods-related pages; Yahoo email and more.
Robocalls—those annoying, unsolicited recorded messages that now even pretend to be delivered from your area code—are the No. 1 source of consumer complaints to the Federal Communications Commission, its chairman, Tom Wheeler, said in a July 22 blog post announcing he’d taken new steps to stop them.
“I have sent letters to the CEOs of major wireless and wireline phone companies calling on them to offer call-blocking services to their customers now—at no cost to you,” Wheeler wrote in the post.
Wheeler also said he has called on standards groups, in addition to the carriers, to accelerate the “development and deployment of technical standards that would prevent spoofing of caller ID and thus make blocking technologies more effective.”
Ericsson fired CEO Hans Vestberg July 25 after the latest quarterly financial numbers showed the Swedish telecommunications equipment provider was continuing to struggle in a rapidly changing market that includes rising competitors such as Huawei Technologies and Nokia.
Vestberg ouster came a week after Ericsson announced that revenue in the second quarter fell another 11 percent over the same period in 2015 along with lower gross margins and operating margins. Company officials at the time said they were initiating another round of cost-cutting measures in hopes of doubling savings in its operations by 2017. Those measures include cutting jobs and reducing investments in R&D and other areas.
Jan Frykhammar, the company’s executive vice president and CFO, will be the interim CEO until a successor to Vestberg is found.
The booming hyperconverged infrastructure space has a new company in the mix now that startups Gridstore and DCHQ have merged to create HyperGrid, which company officials say is offering a hyperconverged infrastructure-as-a-service. HyperGrid officials announced the Gridstore-DCHQ deal July 25, although they didn’t publicly disclose financial details.
The company is looking to combine Gridstore’s hyperconverged all-flash infrastructure with DCHQ’s software platform, which automatically moves and manages applications across cloud and container environments. The result is an offering that provides a hyperconverged infrastructure that comes with a pay-as-you-consume pricing model.