HPE To Acquire Juniper Networks For $14 Billion

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced plans to buy data center networking hardware maker Juniper Networks for about $14 billion, or $40 per share, in an all-cash deal. The company expects to close the deal by the end of this year or in early 2025. CNBC reports: The acquisition would double HPE’s existing networking business after years of competition. If it’s completed, Juniper CEO Rami Rahim would lead the combined group and report to HPE’s CEO, Antonio Neri, according to the statement. HP got deeper into the category when it bought Aruba Networks in 2015, and months later, the technology conglomerate split in two, resulting in the formation of HPE, which sells servers and other equipment for data centers, and HP Inc., which makes PCs and printers. HPE said adding Juniper to its portfolio would bolster margins and speed up growth.

Founded in 1996, Juniper spent many years chasing Cisco in the market for networking gear. Revenue grew 12% year over year in 2022, the fastest growth since 2010. In the most recent quarter, Juniper eked out a $76 million profit on $1.4 billion in revenue, which declined 1%. HPE’s networking segment was the company’s top source of earnings before taxes, at $401 million on $1.4 billion in revenue, which was up 41%. Coming together would lead to $450 million in annual cost savings within three years of the deal’s completion, HPE said.

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Amazon’s Twitch To Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

According to Bloomberg, Amazon’s livestreaming site Twitch is expected to cut 35% of its staff, or about 500 workers. “The cuts, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, come amid concerns over losses at Twitch and after several top executives left the company in the span of a few months,” notes Bloomberg. Slashdot reader quonset shares the report: Running a large-scale website supporting 1.8 billion hours of live video content a month is enormously expensive, despite Twitch’s reliance on Amazon’s infrastructure, company executives have said. In December, Twitch Chief Executive Officer Dan Clancy said the company would cease operations in South Korea, where the costs are “prohibitively expensive,” according to a blog post he wrote. Twitch has increased its focus on advertising in recent years. Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, the business remains unprofitable, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

In the final months of 2023, several top executives announced their departures, including Twitch’s chief product officer, chief customer officer and chief content officer. Twitch also lost its chief revenue officer, who worked on Twitch from within Amazon’s Ads unit. “It’s always bittersweet when talented leaders move on to pursue new opportunities,'” a Twitch spokesperson said at the time. “We are incredibly grateful for their contributions to Twitch and our community, and wish them all the best.”

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When Apple Comes Calling, ‘It’s the Kiss of Death’

Aspiring partners accuse Apple of copying their ideas. From a report: It sounded like a dream partnership when Apple reached out to Joe Kiani, the founder of a company that makes blood-oxygen measurement devices. He figured his technology was a perfect fit for the Apple Watch. Soon after meeting him, Apple began hiring employees from his company, Masimo, including engineers and its chief medical officer. Apple offered to double their salaries, Mr. Kiani said. In 2019, Apple published patents under the name of a former Masimo engineer for sensors similar to Masimo’s, documents show. The following year, Apple launched a watch that could measure blood oxygen levels. “When Apple takes an interest in a company, it’s the kiss of death,” said Mr. Kiani. “First, you get all excited. Then you realize that the long-term plan is to do it themselves and take it all.” Mr. Kiani is one of more than two dozen executives, inventors, investors and lawyers who described similar encounters with Apple. First, they said, came discussions about potential partnerships or integration of their technology into Apple products. Then, they said, talks stopped and Apple launched its own similar features.

Apple said that it doesn’t steal technology and that it respects the intellectual property of other companies. It said Masimo and other companies cited in this article are copying Apple, and that it would fight the claims in court. Apple has tried to invalidate hundreds of patents owned by companies that have accused Apple of violating their patents. According to lawyers and executives at some smaller companies, Apple sometimes files multiple petitions on a single patent claim and attempts to invalidate patents unrelated to the initial dispute. Many large companies, particularly in tech, have been known to scoop up employees and technology from smaller potential rivals. Software developers have given a name to what they describe as Apple’s behavior in such cases: sherlocking. The term refers to an episode about two decades ago, when Apple released a software product called “Sherlock” that helped users find files on its Mac computers and perform internet searches.

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The Biggest EV Battery Recycling Plant In the US Is Open For Business

Ascend Elements opened a recycling plant in Covington, Georgia in late March that it says is the largest electric-vehicle battery recycling facility in North America. “It can process 30,000 metric tons of input each year, breaking down old batteries and prepping the most valuable materials inside to be processed and turned into new batteries,” reports Canary Media. “That capacity equates to breaking down the battery packs from 70,000 electric vehicles annually, said Ascend CEO Mike O’Kronley.” From the report: Recycling can deliver new battery materials without the expense and environmental impact of new mining. It is extremely hard to develop new mines in the U.S., but the federal government is lavishing funds on new battery recycling plants. The revamped EV tax credits also call for increasing shares of domestically sourced batteries and battery materials. Those market and policy shifts made recycling sufficiently desirable that Ascend is paying other companies for their old batteries. At the moment, those deals are mostly with EV or battery makers that have high volumes to get rid of.

“Paying for these spent batteries keeps them from going into the landfill,” O’Kronley told Canary Media. “It’s better to get paid for it rather than throw them away.” Ascend also accepts used consumer electronics from battery-collection programs, such as Call2Recycle. That’s not to say there are enough old batteries coming in to fill the factory. Currently, 80 to 90 percent of what’s going into Ascend’s Covington facility is scrap materials from battery factories, including SK Battery America’s plant in Commerce, Georgia.

That relationship influenced Ascend’s choice of location: Covington sits in the emerging “Battery Belt,” a swath of new battery factories and electric-vehicle plants opening up across the Midwest and the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky (look for all the blue icons in this White House map of new industrial investments). Fellow battery-recycling startup Redwood Materials also chose South Carolina for a forthcoming $3.5 billion recycling facility. “There will need to be a recycling plant within about an hour’s drive of every single one of those [new battery gigafactories],” O’Kronley said. “You don’t want to be [long-distance] shipping these very large, heavy EV batteries that are classified as Class 9 hazardous materials.” The report notes that the company’s second commercial-scale facility in Hopkinsville, Kentucky will “introduce a brand-new technique for efficiently extracting cathode materials from black mass, which Ascend has dubbed ‘hydro to cathode.'”

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Walmart US CEO Says Automation At Stores Won’t Displace Workers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Insider: Walmart will be increasingly relying on automation at its stores in the coming years — but that won’t diminish the country’s largest private employer’s workforce, company leaders said during an investor event this week. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant recently made headlines when it announced that 65% of its stores will be “serviced by automation” by the end of fiscal year 2026. Walmart currently has more than 4,700 stores throughout the US and employs roughly 1.6 million people nationwide.

More specifically, one area where Walmart is seeking to increase investment is in market fulfillment centers (MFCs), which are automated fulfillment centers built within, or added to, a store. Walmart piloted this concept at a store in Salem, New Jersey, in 2019, using automated robot technology from Alert Innovation — a robotics company Walmart acquired in October 2022. Since then, Walmart has built MFCs at several stores, such as in Jacksonville, Florida, and Dallas, Texas. Those include “manual MFCs,” where associates pick items for online orders but in a separate area from the sales floor.

Walmart will still need at least the same level of workers to help in stores even as automation picks up, company leaders say. John Furner, Walmart US president and CEO, told investors this week that automation “helps” employees, as it will result in less manual labor. “Over time, we believe we’ll have the same or more associates and a larger business overall,” Furner said. “There will be new roles emerging that are less manual, better designed to serve customers, and pay more.”

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Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games To Acquire Gaming Company Scopely For $4.9 Billion

Disney Unplugs Metaverse Unit During Initial Round of Layoffs

Nasdaq Tells Yandex, Other Russian Firms of Plan To Delist Stocks

Tech Layoffs Caused by Vain Over-Hiring for ‘Fake Work’, Argues Former PayPal Executive

Fortune reports:
The thousands of layoffs in Big Tech are thanks to an over-hiring spree to satisfy the “vanity” of bosses at the likes of Meta and Alphabet, according to a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia. Speaking remotely at an event hosted by banking firm Evercore, Silicon Valley VC Keith Rabois said Meta and Google had hired thousands of people to do “fake work” to hit hiring metrics out of “vanity”.

Rabois, who was an executive at PayPal in the early 2000s alongside Tesla CEO Elon Musk, said the axing of droves of jobs is overdue. “All these people were extraneous, this has been true for a long time, the vanity metric of hiring employees was this false god in some ways,” Rabois said, according to Insider. “There’s nothing for these people to do — it’s all fake work. Now that’s being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings.”
The DoorDash investor added Google had intentionally hired engineers and tech talent to stop them from being snapped up by competitors.

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Amazon Is Permanently Closing Eight Cashierless Stores

Amazon is permanently closing eight of its 29 Amazon Go convenience stores that offer customers the ability to shop without any kind of checkout process. From a report: Amazon debuted the Go store in Seattle in 2016. It hailed the stores as the future of shopping, especially for convenience stores in busy downtowns of major cities. At one point Amazon expected there to be hundreds if not thousands of the stores nationwide, according to published reports that were never confirmed by the company. But they never lived up to those expectations.

[T]he closings, first reported by Geekwire, are another sign of cost-cutting efforts at the online shopping giant. […] The stores being closed include two in downturn Seattle that had already been shut on a temporary basis, leaving five in the city. In addition it is closing two in New York City and four in San Francisco. The six closings of stores still operating are due to take place April 1. In addition to the 21 Amazon Go stores that will remain, there are two locations in New York that the brand shares with Starbucks.

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