I can tell you that nothing could be further from the truth, as I have followed the space for a couple of decades now and have never seen it dull.
There is a lot of money in the enterprise, like the $28 billion acquisition of Cerner by Oracle last week, or the $35 billion acquisition of UiPath earlier this year.
There is intrigue when activist investors try to force companies to make moves they normally wouldn't want to make, and battles for control of the board like we saw at Box this year.
The procurement process for the $10 billion Department of Defense JEDI cloud contract had everything from lawsuits to repeated internal reviews, and there was a lot of drama.
You can say a lot about the enterprise, but it's boring. This year was no different. I decided to look at five stories that were important to the enterprise. It is difficult to narrow down the news to the five biggest stories.
The Bezos-Jassy-Selipsky chairs are at Amazon.
Jeff Bezos decided to step back as CEO and take on the role of chairman. Amazon is an e-commerce company, which doesn't fall within my purview, but then there was what happened next, because it was 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884
When Bezos made his announcement, he indicated he had chosen Andy Jassy as his replacement. He helped build the cloud infrastructure business at Amazon into a massive business, with a 64 billion run rate in the most recent quarter.
Replacing him wouldn't be easy, but they turned to an old friend when they hired Adam Selipsky to take over. When Selipsky left to take over Tableau, he had previously been at the company. His job is to keep the train moving. Competition is getting more fierce, and it is important to watch what happens next year under Selipsky.
It was an excellent week with Bret Taylor.
One of the top stories of the year was about an executive atSalesforce getting two big jobs in the same week. He was named chairman of the board. He was named co-CEO of the company after it was acquired for $750 million.
The bigger news from an enterprise perspective was the move to co-CEO at the giant, which was the reason Jack Dorsey stepped down and Parag Agrawal took over. The promotion put Taylor in line to be the company's heir apparent should Benioff decide to step back into the chairman role in the same way that Bezos did earlier this year. In 2022, there is a possibility thatSalesforce revisits its desire to buyTwitter, a move it thought of making in 2016 before walking away.
Box-Starboard Value proxy fight.
Box beat back an attempt by Starboard Value to take over the board, a move that likely would have resulted in the removal of co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie, the sale of the company, or both. It was the culmination of months of drama and made it a major enterprise story line for 2021.
Starboard Value bought a 7.5% stake in the cloud content management company, which will give the firm considerable influence over the company. They remained quiet for a while, but last year they decided to make a move and put Box on notice that they wanted to take over the board, which resulted in a proxy battle.
Along the way, Box answered with a $500 million investment from KKR, further angering Starboard, filed a document with the SEC pushing back against Starboard's slate of board candidates and issued their earnings report early to give voters a chance to see their latest results. The company scored two decent quarters after Starboard took action and easily won the proxy battle, leaving the status quo for now. What will happen in the year 2022. I wrote that it was time for Box to make some bold moves and use some of KKR's money to buy some adjacent functions.
The Department of Defense announces a new cloud initiative.
The $10 billion, decade-long JEDI cloud contract has been a source of drama since it was announced. When the Pentagon decided to kill it this year, it was a big news.
Conventional wisdom said that it was Amazon's contract to win. Microsoft won the deal despite the fact that the RFP was written with Amazon in mind. The previous president interfered with the procurement process because of his dislike for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, according to Amazon. Amazon said that it should have won on merit.
The project was put on hold in February 2020. The Department of Defense decided to go with a multi-vendor approach with its new initiative, instead of the winner-take-all approach it had pursued, because technology had changed since last year.
Dell has a partnership with VMware.
The largest tech deal of all time was Dell's acquisition of EMC in 2015, and it's just one of many stories to follow and write about over the years. enterprise reporters like me kept a close eye on what Dell was going to do with the crown jewel of the deal, VMware. It was a big story in the early part of the year when it announced it was spinning out the company in a $9 billion deal.
The amount of money that is still on the books for the deal seemed a little light. What will happen next year? Is it possible that someone will make a run at acquiring VMware now that it is free of Dell? Dell still has a lot of debt left over from that deal, so it's definitely something to watch in 2022.
I have left out some worthy storylines so it is hard to choose just five. What would you have included? Let me know if you leave a comment.
