Denouement (intention and outcome)
The general outcome of any acquisition and merger is the increased strength of acquirer and dilution of the acquired. Under the name of acquisition the act of silent butchery of growing competitors and establishing market supremacy take place. It would not be an exaggeration if we mark the year 2016 as breeding and budding time of machine learning, artificial intelligence and similar technologies that grew and showed its promising future from the nests of IT start-ups?
Let’s have a look at the activities of some giant corporates who acquired many start-ups. These may help us to understand what made them acquire rapidly growing and promising start-ups. Salesforce alone acquired 12 companies spending $5 billion; in other words, every month it acquired one company!
(set –Data Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning)
Act I, scene I:
Intel Corporation acquired computer vision and machine learning start-up Itseez in the month of May 2016 as part of its strategic shift from PC chip to cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and analyzing data from devices.
Scene II:
It seemed as if Google was waiting for a few months to analyze the outcome of Intel’s acquisition. In the month of September, it acquired API.AI which developed ‘Siri’ like bot that can recognize speech, intent, and context of the commands.
Act II, Scene I:
In Jan 2016 Apple acquired Emotient that works on Artificial Intelligence to develop technology for detecting emotion from facial expressions. After a few months, in July 2016, Twitter Inc. acquired Magic Pony which works on improving User Experience through better image and videos search.
Scene II:
How can any other company think something that relates to search bypassing Google! Yes, Google could not tolerate Twitter’s move and in the same month of July 2016, it acquired Moodstocks which develops machine-learning based image recognition technology.
Prolog (break the convention)
An Acquisition is no sudden incidents only from the likes of Google, Apple, Twitter or Intel. Cloud computing and king of CRM, Salesforce, was found to acquire PredictionIO in the month of February 2016. The start-up develops an open source-based machine learning server which would strengthen Salesforce’s grip in machine learning and data analytics. It also repeated the acquisition in April 2016 by acquiring MetaMind which works on predictive analysis to predict outcomes for language, vision, and database task. The end of the year 2016 saw Salesforce acquire Twinprime which works on app User experience optimization. Hat’s off to the aggressiveness of Salesforce for going to the ‘extreme’ level of acquisition (more than 40 acquisitions) which forced them to post a negative profit.
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