Cognizant to acquire New Signature

Cognizant has entered into an agreement to acquire New Signature, one of the world’s largest independent Microsoft Public cloud transformation specialists. The transaction is expected to close in Q3 2020.

 

The acquisition of New Signature expands Cognizant's hyper-scale cloud advisory services and will provide the foundation for a new, dedicated group within Cognizant centered on Microsoft cloud solutions. New Signature, an award-winning Microsoft Partner, is exclusively focused on Microsoft technologies, with an integrated offering across all three of Microsoft's business clouds: Azure, Microsoft 365, and Dynamics 365. Upon the close of the acquisition, New Signature's more than 500 cloud experts, based primarily in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, will join Cognizant's newly-formed Microsoft Business Group.

New Signature's success is built upon helping clients create and accelerate their business transformation through the adoption of Microsoft cloud technologies. In joining Cognizant, they will have access to Cognizant's deep industry expertise and global scale, and together, provide best-in-class cloud solutions for the intelligent workplace, applied innovation, and managed services.

 

New Signature's global client portfolio includes businesses across a broad range of industries, as well as government and non-profit institutions. Engagements have included a cloud migration for Virgin Atlantic Airways, an IoT solution for The Hershey Company, and a solution to map all public defibrillators in the U.K. for the National Health Service (NHS) and the British Heart Foundation. 

Microsoft acquires PromoteIQ

Microsoft scooped up New York-based PromoteIQ, a startup that helps retailers build digital advertising and e-commerce offerings for an undisclosed amount.

PromoteIQ brings with it a roster of big-name customers, including Kroger, Kohl’s and Overstock.com. The start-up will continue to operate under its name and will become a division of Microsoft Advertising.

PromoteIQ noted that the retail landscape is changing, and Microsoft brings “a humble, thoughtful approach to building out the defining operating system to power the future of commerce. PromoteIQ has pioneered the private marketplace approach to digital vendor marketing. PromoteIQ technology strategically complements Microsoft’s current retail advertising offerings.

Microsoft earlier this year separated its advertising division from the search engine Bing, to signify that the organization has ambitions beyond search. The change came almost a year after the debut of Microsoft Audience Network, a program that uses artificial intelligence and data from Microsoft services including Bing, MSN, Outlook, Skype and LinkedIn to help advertisers target native ads to specific audiences based on their online activities.

Microsoft to acquire XOXCO

Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Xoxco, an Austin-based software developer with a focus on bot design, making it the fourth AI-related company Microsoft has purchased this year.

Xoxco, which was founded in 2009 — long before most of us were thinking about conversational bots — has raised $1.5 million. It began working on bots in 2013, and is credited with developing the first bot for Slack to help schedule meetings. The companies did not reveal the price, but it fits nicely with Microsoft’s overall acquisition strategy this year, and an announcement today involving a new bot building tool to help companies build conversational bots more easily.

When you call into a call center these days, or even interact on chat, chances are your initial interaction is with a conversational bot, rather than a human. Microsoft is trying to make it easier for developers without AI experience to tap into Microsoft’s expertise on the Azure platform (or by downloading the bot framework from its newly acquired GitHub).

Microsoft also released guidelines for companies that are building chatbots, encouraging them to make sure they are “responsible and trustworthy,” a nod to past problems involving the technology reacting in unexpected ways. Microsoft, for instance, received criticism for its Tay chat bot that fielded offensive comments from online trolls and then repeated them.

IBM bought Red Hat

IBM’s purchase of Red Hat Inc. is a $33 Billion bid aimed at catapulting the company into the ranks of the top cloud software competitors. The cash deal, IBM’s biggest ever by far, boosts the 107-year-old computer-services giant’s credentials overnight in the fast-growing and lucrative cloud market — and gives it much-needed potential for real revenue growth.

The company once synonymous with mainframe computing has been slow to adopt cloud-related technologies and has had to play catch-up to market leaders Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in offering computing and other software and services over the internet.

IBM has seen revenue decline by almost a quarter. While some of that has been from divestitures, most is from declining sales in existing hardware, software and services offerings, as the company has struggled to compete with younger technology companies.

Revenue at Red Hat, which sells software and services based on the open-source Linux operating system, is expected to top $3 billion for the first time this year as the company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux product attracts business from large customers. JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Lazard Ltd. advised IBM on the deal. Morgan Stanley and Guggenheim Partners were financial advisers to Red Hat, while Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom provided legal advice.

Adobe to acquire Marketo

Adobe Systems announced that it is acquiring software maker Marketo for $4.75 Bn in a move widely seen as one of that will strengthen its position in the fiercely competitive cloud computing and marketing tech sector.

The maker of image-editing tool Photoshop said in a statement that the deal would bring together Marketo’s B2B-focused platform with the capabilities of Adobe Experience Cloud that include analytics, content, personalization and advertising.

It also comes just months after Adobe acquired e-commerce specialist Magento for $1.68bn, indicating that the company is highly focused on expanding its presence in the fast-growing cloud sector, which is currently dominated by Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce.

Adobe and Marketo tools will enable businesses to use a data-driven approach to focus sales and marketing activities on the most valuable prospects and customers, deliver cross-channel experiences and acquire more customers through targeted, account-based advertising.

Microsoft to buy GitHub

Microsoft Corp. reached an agreement to buy GitHub Inc., the code repository company popular with many software developers, for $7.5 Billion in stock. Microsoft expects the deal to close by the end of 2018.

The acquisition provides a way forward for San Francisco-based GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new chief executive officer and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work. It also helps Microsoft, which is increasingly relying on open-source software, to add programming tools and tie up with a company that has become a key part of the way Microsoft writes its own software.

San Francisco-based GitHub is an essential tool for coders. Many corporations, including Microsoft and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, use it to store their corporate code and to collaborate. It’s also a social network of sorts for developers. Still, GitHub’s losses have been significant -- it lost $66 million over three quarters in 2016. The company had revenue of $98 million in nine months of 2016.

Microsoft has talked to GitHub, which hosts more than 28 million software developers working on 80 million repositories of code, on and off for a few years. Recently they began talks about a partnership but progressed to discussing an acquisition, according to another person familiar with the situation. GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in 2015, making today’s deal a win for GitHub backers like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

Microsoft acquires Semantic Machines

Microsoft is betting big on Artificial Intelligence. The Redmond, Washington based technology giant announced the acquisition of Semantic Machines, a company focused on building conversational AI. The move could help give Cortana the leg up it needs on competitors like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.

Semantic has previously worked with major tech firms, leading automatic speech recognition development for Apple’s Siri. In essence, Semantic employs machine learning in order to provide context to chatbot conversations, making dialogue seem a bit more natural and better-flowing.

Microsoft is by no means the only company trying to make strides when it comes to artificial intelligence and its smart assistants. Amazon, for example, is trying to give Alexa a better memory, while Google is making bots so human-esque that they’re practically indistinguishable from humans during phone conversations with its new Duplex offering.

Microsoft buys PlayFab

In the latest chapter of GAFAM’s continuing bid to conquer online gaming, Microsoft has acquired PlayFab, which helps game developers launch their titles online more quickly with simplified back-end services. The startup will be integrated into Microsoft’s Azure gaming group. The Seattle based startup had raised around $13 Million in funding from investors.

PlayFab offered game developers a platform to host and operate online games and the analytics tools to help understand and monetize users. The startup helped game developers cut down on the work needed to launch a title widely with infrastructure that could handle a global player base. While this pitch is one that obviously appeals largely to indie developers, the startup also boasted much larger customers, including Disney, NBCUniversal, Rovio and Capcom.

As major tech giants have wised up to the fact that there’s much more to the gaming market than mobile, there’s been an increasing amount of attention paid to the backbone technologies enabling game development and monetization. Microsoft has been more in tune with this than most as they have focused on the company’s Xbox division and its latest console hardware and services.

The company has also been active in more consumer-facing gaming acquisitions like the interactive streaming service Beam just over a year ago and the social virtual reality app AltspaceVR this past fall.

Google acquires Halli Labs

American Technology giant Google has acquired Bangalore based artificial Intelligence firm Halli Labs for an undisclosed sum. The firm becomes the latest AI start up to be snapped by a technology giant after a spate of similar acquisitions by firms such as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple among others.

Halli Labs was founded with the goal of applying modern AI and Machine Learning techniques to old problems and domains. In order to help technology enable people to do whatever it is what they want to do, easier and better. According to research by CB Insights, 34 Artificial Intelligence startups have been acquired in the first quarter of this year, which is double the number compared to the year-ago period.

The study also notes that Google has been the most aggressive in this space with 11 acquisitions since 2012 followed by Apple, Intel and Facebook. Some of the acquisitions by Google in AI include firms such deep learning and neural network startup DNNresearch from the computer science department at the University of Toronto in 2013; British company DeepMind Technologies in 2014 for $600 Million, visual search startup Moodstock, and bot platform Api.ai last year.

It acquired predictive analytics platform Kaggle in the first quarter of this year. Even though India has become the third largest market for start-ups, acquisitions by global technology companies have been few. Some of the notable ones include ZipDial which was acquired by Twitter in January 2015 and LittleEyeLabs that was snapped up by Facebook in January 2014.

Google buys Apigee

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is buying software company Apigee Group Corp, for roughly $625 Million, the latest move to bolster its offerings to corporate customers. Apigee specializes in Application Programming Interface or APIs – increasingly important software in modern commerce because they serve as the conduit for automated communication between company’s digital systems and their partners and customers.

For example, when a person buys a pair of jeans on a mobile app, that app typically uses an API to send the sale to the retailer’s computers, which in some cases then use other APIs to connect to suppliers and shippers. Or, rather than calling a pharmacy to send a prescription, doctors can now send the order via app that uses an API to connect with the pharmacy.

Apigee customers, which include AT&T Inc., Walgreen Co., and Burberry Group PLC, pay Apigee a fraction of a cent every time they tap the API. Google has been bolstering its pitch to companies to effectively store and run their digital businesses on Google servers with Google services. The search giant is betting this so called enterprise cloud business can be a major revenue driver over the next several years helping to diversify its business from advertising through Google trials rivals Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in that arena.

Apigee recorded revenue of $66.9 Million for the nine months ended April 30, an increase of 34% from the year earlier period. It posted a $32 Million loss. Apigee had more than 300 customers, an increase of 114 customers since the end of the quarter ended in April of 2015. 

Microsoft buys AI Startup Genee

Microsoft Corp. is betting big on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make the software and services smarter. The company has announced the acquisition of AI powered scheduling tool Genee, and will be integrating these capabilities in future versions of the Office 365 cloud based productivity suite.

Before Microsoft swooped in, Genee offered virtual personal assistant services in two ways, first through email and second as messaging chatbots on SMS, Facebook, Twitter and Skype. For example, if you may want to meet a friend for lunch sometime in the next few days, all you need to do is mark Genee in “cc” in the mail you send to the friend. Genee will detect that you need to find the time for the meeting, will scan your calendar, and directly mail your friend with multiple time options. If there are any updates to the calendar leading up to meeting time, Genee will update all parties involved, automatically.

Genee uses natural language processing algorithms to understand the contents of a conversation. And this could come in very handy for Microsoft as it looks to enhance its virtual assistant Cortana, which rivals Google’s Now and Apple’s Siri. Also, Microsoft would do well to add the AI capabilities on to the Office 365 suite and make the Outlook mail service smarter.

This ties in well with Microsoft’s recent acquisition of the Sunrise Calendar app, a more powerful and feature rich calendar app, with automatic scheduling features, which gives Office 365 a big advantage. Enterprise and productivity apps as well as services are critical for Microsoft as the company wants to create a niche for itself in a smartphone market which is now undoubtedly dominated by Google Android and Apple iOS platform. 

Microsoft acquires Beam

Microsoft has acquired Beam; a Seattle based interactive game streaming service that lets viewers play along with streamers as they watch. Beam’s model takes the mostly passive interaction that streaming fans may be used to form services like Twitch and YouTube adds the ability for viewers to interact with the streamer via crowdsourced controls.

Players interacting through Beam can direct the play of the person streaming, doing things like setting which weapon load out they take into battle for multiplayer shooters. Visual controls provide viewers the ability to help players pick quests, and you can even assign challenges that alter the gameplay considerably from what you’d get via a typical play through.

Microsoft Beam acquisition is an attempt to strengthen company Xbox gaming service. Microsoft says it is bringing Beam interactive technology into the Xbox family to make Xbox Live more Social and fun. Beam interactive streaming platform can be enabled with any game. With Minecraft for instance, Beam users can not only see their favorite streamer but can also play along with them.

Microsoft has been steadily acquiring startups and big name tech organization in order to strengthen some of its core services. Earlier this year, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for a record $26 Billon in order to better connect with professionals and expand its productivity services. With Beam, Microsoft would try to strengthen its core Xbox Live service while Beam will gain resources to build its product into a bigger game streaming platform.

Microsoft acquires Wand Labs

Technology giant Microsoft corp. has acquired a messaging app developer founded by an Indian as the US based software firm aims to strengthen its position in the emerging era of combining the power of human language with advanced machine intelligence.

Microsoft acquired California based Wand Labs, a startup which builds messaging technology for apps, founded in 2013. Wand Labs technology and talent would strengthen Microsoft position in the emerging era of conversational intelligence where they bring together the power of human language with advanced machine intelligence, connecting people to knowledge, information, services and other people in more relevant and natural ways.

The acquisition builds on and extends the power of the Microsoft search Engine Bing, its cloud computing platform Azure, Office 365 and Windows platform to empower developers everywhere. Wand Labs expertise around services mapping, third party developer integration and conversational interfaces makes it a great fit to join the Bing Engineering and platform team.

Microsoft to buy LinkedIn for $26.2 Billion

Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy LinkedIn Corp for $26.2 Billion in its biggest ever deal, combining the software giant fast growing cloud service business with an online network of 433 million professionals. The offer of $196 per share represents a premium of 49.5% to LinkedIn Friday closing price.

Microsoft plans to speed-up monetization of LinkedIn by growing individual and organization subscriptions as well as targeted advertising. Despite the rich premium paid by Microsoft, LinkedIn is selling for well below its peak of more than $270 per share in 2015, but a weak forecast earlier this year sent its shares tumbling and slowing online ad revenue. LinkedIn went public in 2011 at $45.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest and most valuable professional network and continues to build a strong and growing business. Over the past year, the company has launched a new version of its mobile app that has led to increased member engagement, enhanced the LinkedIn newsfeed to deliver better business insights, acquired a leading online learning platform called Lynda.com to enter a new market and rolled out a new version of its recruiter product to its enterprise customers. 

Microsoft buys SwiftKey

Microsoft had acquired British based software keyboard maker SwiftKey and it would be integrated with the tech giant “intelligent systems” for mobile devices. SwiftKey makes keyboard apps which are used on some 300 million Android and Apple devices, replacing the default interfaces with a more efficient one.

SwiftKey, which uses artificial intelligence to help make keystrokes more intuitive and efficient, expands Microsoft efforts in the domain. SwiftKey estimates that its users have saved nearly 10 trillion keystrokes, across 100 languages, saving more than 100,000 years in combined typing time. Microsoft would continue to make the service available on all platforms not just those operated by Microsoft.

SwiftKey for most smartphone users comes through as just another third party keyboard app, an upgrade on the default keyboard that most platforms offer. But beyond the app and its user interface, what the company offers, and something that makes it attractive for the likes of Microsoft, is the very technology that powers the app, artificial Intelligence or AI. Its predictive technology learns from the user’s personal writing style, on the basis of previous usage of text, chat messages or social media interactions, and predicts the next word or phrase that the user intends to type. 

HCL Technologies Acquires PowerObjects

HCL Technologies has acquired PowerObjects, a US based provider of Microsoft Dynamics Customer resource management solution, for $46 Million, to bolster its offerings in the applications development space. Together HCL and Power Objects will now offer one of the largest Microsoft Dynamic Practices in North America.

Based in Minneapolis, PowerObjects has more than 250 employees who will now be transferred to the rolls of HCL. The total consideration for the transaction includes contingent payments which are subject to certain financial milestones. The existing leadership team of PowerObjects will remain in place and no workforce changes are planned.

HCL has been on an acquisition spree of mostly small companies. PowerObjects is the fourth company it has bought this year. This week, HCL would buy Swedish automaker Volvo Group’s External IT business, which provides IT Infrastructure, mainframe services and application operation services, for an all-cash payment of $138 Million.

Microsoft Dynamics is one of the fastest growing CRM products. Research firm Gartner expects CRM to become a $36 Billion Worldwide market by 2017 growing at an annual rate of 13.3% since 2014. It is projected to grow faster than any other enterprise software category, as businesses look to build upon term customer relationships.

Microsoft acquires Double Labs

Microsoft has added to its stable of Android Apps with the acquisition of Double Labs, the makers of Echo Notification Lockscreen, a popular app on Google’s mobile platform that helps user control the notifications they see. Echo replaces the default Android Lock screen with a new interface for handling push notifications.

The app’s marquee feature is its ability to categorize and sort user’s incoming notifications and only wake their phone for high priority messages. In addition, users can tell the lock screen to remind them of notifications at a later time or in a different place, so they can postpone seeing notifications about personal emails until they get home. It’s not the company’s first foray into Android Lock screens.

Microsoft’s garage division put out the Next Lock Screen app last year, which is another take on replacing the default experience for users of Google’s mobile platform. The acquisition, which took place in August, gives Microsoft another beachhead on Android, but it is also aimed at getting Microsoft access to the personalization technology that powers the lock screen’s features. The work with Next and Echo will translate the information the company will use to improve products like Office and Windows 10.

By acquiring Echo, Microsoft is picking up more information that it can use to power products like its Cortana virtual assistant, which is currently available in public beta for Android users. Microsoft has a variety of other Android utilities available including an app launcher currently in private beta, a voice search tool for Bing and an app that provides information about air quality to users in China. 

Flipkart acquires Appiterate

E-commerce major Flipkart has been very clear about its mobile only strategy and in order to strengthen its presence in the area of mobile technology, it has acquired a New-Delhi based mobile engagement and marketing automation company Appiterate. This is Flipkart third acquisition of this year.

Appiterate helps E-commerce companies target customers better through push notifications and in-app messages. The funding team has a strong experience in the mobile app space and has in the past built mobile apps for companies such as Microsoft, Zomato, Groupon, Sears etc. In a short span Appiterate has carved out a niche in the industry as being one of the most disruptive companies in its space.

Flipkart is planning to go mobile-only within a year. Following the announcement that Myntra will shut down its website on May 1, Flipkart had said the E-commerce firm will too shift to an app only model within a year as traffic from mobile had grown nearly 10 times in just 12 months. Flipkart has been persistently looking to improve and expand its mobile app capabilities and plans to invest in and acquire other companies in this domain.

After this acquisition, Appiterate mobile marketing automation platform will be integrated into Flipkart mobile app to help in precise targeting of users based on their activity on the app and website. Appiterate has raised money from institutional investors like SAIF partners and angel investors.

Microsoft buys Office Collaborator app LiveLoop

Microsoft has made another move to augment its productivity services, with the acquisition of an Office collaboration tool developer named LiveLoop for an undisclosed amount. The San-Francisco based LiveLoop is best known for its collaboration tools for Microsoft Office, allowing teams of people to work together on documents.

Its popular LiveLoop for PowerPoint plugin converts presentations into a web URL that becomes a collaborative document accessible by variety of devices without any additional software. Microsoft is facing increased competition in the productivity space. Google, Amazon, Apple and others are all pushing their own productivity suites and Microsoft needs to continue innovating to compete.

Microsoft in the recent past has been making several productivity themed acquisitions, such as Acompli email client, and the Sunrise calendar app. More recently, Microsoft announced its Office productivity suite will be free for devices with screen sizes smaller than 10.1 inches. The company also announced a partnership with Adobe to help build Windows 10’s new default browser ‘Spartan’.

Facebook acquires Speech Recognition firm

Facebook Inc acquired wit.ai, a company that makes voice recognition technology for wearable devices and Internet connected appliances, the latest sign of its ambition to extend its reach beyond computers and smartphones. The price for the deal is not disclosed yet. Wit.ai is a company based in Palo Alto, California, which makes software that can understand spoken words as well as written text phrased in “natural language.”

The deal comes as technology companies are racing to bring Internet connectivity to a new crop of devices, from watches to washing machines. Voice recognition, the technology that helps power services such as Apple Inc Siri, is considered a key building block for the new devices to earn mainstream consumer appeal.

Alex Lebrun, Willy Blandin, and Laurent Landowski founded wit.ai. The company announced in October that it had raised $3 Million in a funding round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. This deal for wit.ai is likely to have been significantly smaller. Facebook rivals Apple Inc, Google Inc, and Microsoft Corp. all have integrated voice recognition technology into their mobile operating systems for smartphones.

Wit.ai technology could allow Facebook users to speak commands that could be converted to text as posts or messages. The technology could have other uses. Facebook already has an optional feature that can recognize music and television shows and encourage users to post about what they are listening to or watching. Facebook mission is to connect everyone and build amazing experiences for the over 1.3 Billion people on the platform technology that understands natural language is a big part of that.