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The storied 911 will not be immune from Porsche’s electrification plans and that could be a good thing. The car company’s CEO recently told Autocar that the hybrid 911 “will be the most powerful 911 we’ve ever had; 700 bhp might be possible.” Count me in (as long as someone buys it for me).

Porsche already makes 911 models above the 700 mark so it’s likely CEO Oliver Blume was referring to a non-performance version of the 911.

There was a time when anything but an air-cooled 911 was considered a disgrace. A hybrid drivetrain will likely be met with similar outcries. In the end, Porsche has to adopt measures to keep up with performance trends and meet fuel economy regulations. A hybrid system can likely do both.

Porsche has been playing with performance hybrid powertrains for several years including the Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid that outputs 680 hp thanks to a 136-HP electric motor — that’s up from the 550 hp 4.0-liter V8 also available. Most notable the 2013-2015 Porsche 918 Spyder showed Porsche was able to make a gas, electric car worthy of the Porsche nameplate.

A hybrid 911 would sit alongside Porsche’s upcoming pure EV lineup that currently includes a sedan and crossover.

As far as a hybrid 911, it’s expected after the next version of the 911, which puts its release around 2020 or 2021.

source:TechCrunch

EMC announced this morning that it had purchased Virtustream, a cloud management firm, for $1.2 billion. The company has indicated it will incorporate Virtustream as the company’s newly formed cloud managed services business.

Virtustream, which launched in 2008 has raised of $129 million since its inception. A billion dollar exit on that kind of raise is not too shabby, and it gives EMC more cloud credibility with one fat check.

It’s not the first time EMC has used its checkbook to buy a cloud company. Last Fall, it bought three of them in quick succession. Much like every traditional IT vendor — whether we are talking Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle or SAP — EMC sees the world changing around it. It knows that its established hardware business is beginning to fade as companies shift their attention to the cloud. As a company, it clearly understand, it’s absolutely essential to its long-term viability that it makes this pivot to the cloud.

There is always an inherent pressure around building or buying. A big company like EMC with deep pockets can use its wallet to purchase established cloud companies. The cash enables it to string together these purchases, and begin to build them into a credible cloud business.

The Virtustream purchase is a huge step in the right direction as it gives it a managed services business in the cloud, an area that addresses a huge pain point for large enterprise customers around moving and managing software like SAP to the cloud. These companies struggle with how to move these large applications to the cloud, and a company like Virtustream can help ease the way.

The company has an impressive client list including Coca-Cola, Heinz, Hess and Kawasaki, among others.

There’s an interesting dynamic in play here. On one hand you have large, established vendors who are struggling to move to the cloud with their customers, while fighting disruption from startups at the bottom of the market. On the other, you have customers who are struggling to make that same transition to the cloud.

Large enterprises are sometimes reluctant to work with smaller vendors and want that comfort of working with a name they know. As companies like EMC, HP and IBM purchase their way to the cloud, they give customers these established vendors, along with the energy and innovation of the smaller companies they purchased.

The danger here is that bringing a smaller company inside the huge corporate infrastructure can suck out its innovation, and all of the reasons it bought the company get lost in the corporate bureaucracy.

But big companies bring advantages too, like resources and processes that a smaller company can’t possibly achieve on its own. The big company just needs to have the good sense to leave the company alone and let it do what it does well.

EMC has experience in this regard. It has left VMware as a separate company. It has also helped spin out Pivotal, and it has had the foresight to leave these companies alone.

If it can take Virtustream and fold it smoothly into the corporate fabric, this will be a good purchase. The problem is that with any purchase, combining companies and cultures is always a challenge, and the devil remains in the detail.

Since Dell announced its intention to buy EMC for $67 billion in October, there has been a lot of speculation about how the company was going to pay off the massive $40 billion debt it used to finance the deal.

I wrote about some of the EMC assets Dell might consider selling to help offset the huge obligation. Other rumors have had the company selling off its PC business to HP, but it turns out there could be more than one way to reduce the amount due.

Dell has a bunch of pieces that might not be in its future plans, and it could be looking to sell Quest Software and SonicWall, according to a Reuters report. These are two companies Dell bought in 2012 during a bit of an enterprise shopping spree.

Quest produces software that helps IT manage and work with complex enterprise software packages. Think of a tool to build Microsoft SharePoint applications more rapidly or a diagnostic and monitoring tool for SQL Server and you’ll get the idea.

As for SonicWall, as the name implies, it’s a firewall product that offers a range of security services including secure remote access, email security and so forth.

The company could also be shopping Perot Systems, the IT consulting company it bought for $3.9 billion back in 2009, and could fetch between $5 and $6 billion, according to the same Reuters post.

The potential buyers looking at Quest and SonicWall appear to be a collection of private equity firms including KKR, Thoma Bravo and Vista Equity Partners Management.

All of these pieces could be considered extraneous in the face of the debt load Dell is facing, and the assets it will acquire once the EMC deal is done. If the company can get back billions for a few pieces that it won’t need, why wouldn’t it do it?

It also might make sense to leak these potential asset sales as the Dell-EMC deal has come under pressure since it was announced. In particular, the price of VMware stock (in which EMC owns an 80 percent stake) has dropped 30 percent since the announcement. Dell could be sending a signal to calm the nerves of Wall Street, which has grown increasingly jittery about this deal, causing the price of VMware stock to slide.

source: TechCrunch

In the largest tech deal in history by far*, Dell and partners MSD Partners and Silver Lake agreed to buy EMC today for $67 billion or $33.15 a share.

This is way over the $27 price being rumored last week, and makes the deal far larger than the $37 billion that Avago paid for Broadcom just last May.

What makes this deal even more interesting is that Dell, with a valuation of around $25 billion, was by far the smaller fish at approximately half the size of EMC.

The biggest part of EMC by far is VMware, which was included in the deal and will continue to be a separately publicly traded company, but EMC will go private and become part of Dell ending the company’s long history as a publicly traded company.

The two combined companies will make the Dell and EMC the world’s largest privately controlled, integrated technology company, according to a statement released by EMC.

As expected, Dell will lead the newly formed organization and long-time EMC CEO Joe Tucci will retire. Tucci has put off retirement a couple of times because of problems finding a suitable successor. Michael Dell will run the combined organization.

The question is with any deal of this sort, how will two massive companies with entrenched cultures come together into a single entity — and that remains to be seen.

Aija Leiponen, an associate professor at Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management thinks the companies could have problems.

Many if not most mergers actually destroy value, and merging two companies that have had trouble renewing and reviving themselves rarely succeed when combined. The merger is thus extremely risky. EMC and Dell are in complementary segments of the computer industry and if all goes well the two companies might be more valuable together than apart. But that’s a big if,

she said.

Dell has been looking to move away from the server business, which has grown commoditized in recent years and get deeper into enterprise with private cloud computing and storage where it could compete with IBM, HP and other traditional vendors, as well as Pure Storage and newer vendors.

“Dell looks like they want to be the last man standing in cloud infrastructure,” R Ray Wang, founder at Constellation Research told TechCrunch.

There’s no getting around the fact that this is a huge gamble on Dell’s part, forcing it to find a new financial partner to make the deal happen, but the fact is this is the only way it could get big enough to compete in this space.

For EMC, it gives Tucci a way to retire on a high note after more than 15 years as the company’s leader, leaving shareholders with the maximum value they could have possibly hoped for. Even though CNBC is reporting Tucci said, there is a “go-shop” provision that will allow the data storage company to seek out other buyers and give EMC a discounted breakup fee if it finds a more desirable deal, the chances of anyone offering this kind of dough for EMC are slim.

The deal is expected to close in mid-2016 and is of course subject to regulatory approval. It also remains to be seen once this deal closes whether Dell will sell off some of the pieces of EMC, particularly VMware, to help pay for it.

Rumors of this deal began surfacing last week, and as we wrote, when a rumor is this strong, chances are there is something to it. As it turned out, there was.

* The acquisition of Time Warner by Aol (owner of TechCrunch) in 2000 for $106 billion was actually bigger, but it was a media/tech deal. Dell buying EMC is the biggest tech acquisition in history.

In a Suburb, Sunny Palo Alto, more than 2000 local businesses and earns up to $400,000 a year but they still describe themselves as "middle class".

You are correct. This is Silicon Valley where people earning several times the national average.

According to a survey by the local press Palo Alto Weekly, inhabitants of this suburb, who is at least seven times richer than the average "middle class" in America, when it comes to living Palo Alto, they can’t consider themselves “privileged class.”

In the survey conducted by Palo Alto Weekly with more than 250 participants between December 2017 and January 2018, about a third of participants ranging from $10,000 to $399,999 identifying as "middle class."

Less than 10 percent of participants identified as "lower middle class,” but the annual income of this group included people who earns about $350,000 a year.

In this suburb, home to technology giants such as HP, Tesla, Google and Facebook. And with that comes wealth can not be regarded as modest. Another one said “While hundreds of millionaires live in Palo Alto, how can we define ourselves as superior class?”

For more: Palo Alto Weekly

In the brave new enterprise world, organizations will be awash in big data, and it’s against this backdrop that Dell bought EMC this week for the astonishing sum of $67 billion.

All of this data needs to be stored somewhere and that’s where EMC comes in. Dell already has been selling storage of course. In fact, it bought EqualLogic in 2007 for $1.4 billion, which seemed like a tidy sum at the time.

This deal is about getting much bigger, but at a cost — $40 billion in debt financing, according to the Wall Street Journal. Dell said it would finance the deal in part using EMC’s cash on-hand, and boldly predicted it could pay off the rest in 18 to 24 months after closing the deal, presumably believing that sales from the combined entities could bring it back to financial equilibrium quickly. That’s optimistic to say the least

With EMC, Dell could be going after all of the storage marbles, but it could take more than those combined sales to make this deal work. It could also involve getting rid of some of the pieces from EMC that aren’t necessarily part of the core mission

If that’s the case, it would seem that Dell has to make some decisions here. If this were a cut and dried acquisition, you could point to Dell’s core business and say anything that doesn’t serve that core should be shed. The problem is figuring out the core business in this instance. Dell has its fingers in a lot of pies and some broad ambition in the enterprise.

In theory, you could say it keeps EMC storage, cloud and big data — and gets rid of everything else.

Yet Michael Dell in a letter to EMC customers about the deal wasn’t giving anything away:

I am excited to work with the EMC, VMware, Pivotal, VCE, Virtustream and RSA teams, and I am personally committed to the success of our new company, our partners and above all, to you, our customers.

It’s a nice sentiment, but it becomes a bit like a team trying to find ways to shed salary to get under the salary cap. Sometimes you have to let go of players you like to make the economics work.
What To Keep, What To Dump

Using that as a metric, it makes it easier to start by selling off shares of VMware and its $30 billion in market cap to help pay for this deal. It’s entirely probable that Dell would still maintain some stake in the virtualization giant, but it’s a good way to move that needle and erase a substantial piece of the cost of this acquisition.

It would very likely dump Documentum, Captiva and the rest of the content management division.

It could say buh-bye to Virtustream, the cloud management company EMC bought just last May for $1.2 billion.

It gets somewhat tricky around security and archiving as these things are tangentially related to storage, but if it’s about paying for the deal, it could ditch RSA, the security company EMC bought in 2006 for $1.2 billion — and perhaps its data protection and archiving pieces too.

One open question is what it will it do with Pivotal Labs. EMC spun out Pivotal a couple of years ago with GE and VMware when it recognized it was getting big and slow and needed an independent piece to help drive some innovative thinking. Now that Pivotal is part of Dell, it could sell off the EMC share of it or keep it for its big data and cloud pieces — and a combined Dell/EMC could use some of that agility right about now.

Fortune’s Dan Primack looked at this from a bit of a different angle, speculating that Dell may shed its PC division and sell it to HP to raise some cash.
Show Me The Money

It’s truly a case of a billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money. As it sells these pieces off, assuming that’s the plan, it would presumably start to recoup some of its investment. At the same time of course, it’s not just sitting there — it’s making money.

It’s hard to know just how much value these pieces might have in the open market, especially when everyone knows it’s an extremely motivated seller, but the fact is that Dell has to focus on something here, and it seems that storage is as good a place to make a stand as anywhere.

The trouble with this approach, if this is Dell’s thinking, is the changing nature of the storage market. There are a number of players out there including Amazon Web Services, Pure Storage (which went public last week), DataGravity (which is run by Paula Long, who helped found EqualLogic) Nutanix and others nipping at the heels of traditional vendors like EMC, looking at creative ways to attack the growing storage problem.

If it’s about data, EMC certainly is a formidable player, but is it the right player to propel Dell in the enterprise datacenter market? Dell made an enormous bet that EMC is the right choice.

Time will tell if it was right. In the meantime, it has to be planning a huge garage sale to help pay for that trophy house it just bought.

A 600-horsepower electrified coupe will make any auto show better.

Polestar, Volvo's standalone performance arm, may have revealed its first car back in October, but it hasn't been shown off to the public yet. That changes in March.

Polestar will have its own booth at the 2018 Geneva Motor Show, marking the fledgling brand's first major auto show appearance. It only has one car for now, so that's what'll be on display -- the Polestar 1, which looks like a coupe version of the Volvo S90 but packs one hell of an electrified punch.

Relying on a plug-in hybrid setup that sees electric motors powering the rear wheels while a gas engine powers the wheels up front, the Polestar 1's output is a whopping 600 horsepower and 738 pound-feet of torque. A 34-kWh battery pack permits a claimed 93 miles of EV-only range, which is the longest PHEV range in the industry, outperforming some older pure EVs in the process.

This is only the start. In the future, Polestar claims that all its future models will be pure battery-electric affairs. It will still continue to play with Volvo's standard stable of cars, as well, offering a sort of performance middle ground between standard Volvos and pure Polestars.

The Polestar 1 won't enter production until the middle of 2019, so you'll have plenty of time to salivate while you stash piles of money under your mattress.

Polestar 1 is a 600-hp electrified GT

source:CNet Roadshow

The company, one of the first of the Silicon Valley unicorns, says it has 11 million paying subscribers out of 500 million total registered users.

With its SEC filing, the unicorn lets its user and revenue numbers out of the box. Dropbox

Dropbox hopes to upload 500 million files to its account. Little green files, with pictures of presidents on them.

The cloud-based file-storing and -sharing company submitted paperwork Friday to raise up to $500 million in an initial public offering.

Apple's Steve Jobs once famously wrote off the Dropbox service as a "feature, not a product," but that didn't stop the company from becoming one the first and largest Silicon Valley unicorns, or businesses valued at more than $1 billion.

Dropbox lets you easily upload computer files to a storage drive in the cloud. From there, you can access them on other computers or share them with friends and co-workers. There's a free version, as well as a "premium" subscription offering.

THINKING INSIDE THE 'BOX

The Dropbox IPO filing is here
Equity shot: Dropbox is going public, and Aaron Levie has some advice

In its IPO filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Dropbox said it has 11 million paying subscribers out of 500 million total registered users in 180 countries. Its average revenue per paying user is $111.91. The service brought in $1.1 billion in revenue last year, the company said. That's up from $845 million in 2016 and $604 million in 2015.

Dropbox isn't profitable yet, though: It lost almost $112 million in 2017. That's less than the $210 million loss the year before and 2015's deficit of $326 million.

And it's not the only player in the market. In its filing, the company name-checks Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft as rivals in the cloud storage space. It further names Atlassian, Google and Microsoft as competitors when it comes to content collaboration. It also says it competes with Box in cloud storage used by large enterprises.

Other tidbits from the filing: Founder Drew Houston owns 25.3 percent of the company; the board includes former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former HP CEO and onetime California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman; and the company will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol DBX.

source:CNet