03.21.2025

ForwardThinking 🤔

M&A makes a comeback

This week, we witnessed a surge in M&A activity, the likes of which we haven’t seen for some time. The $32 billion Google-Wiz deal stood out by its sheer size, but it was far from the only one. We also saw Softbank scoop up chip maker Ampere for $6.5 billion, and Nvidia grab synthetic data startup Gretel in a transaction believed to be worth at least several hundred million dollars.

When you add ServiceNow buying Moveworks for nearly $3 billion last week, we have ourselves a clear trend. As Jamin Ball noted on LinkedIn: M&A is back!

It’s fair to say that big tech buying has slowed some in recent years. In spite of some notable exceptions like Broadcom buying VMware for $69 billion and Cisco acquiring Splunk for $28 billion, there is a general perception that M&A activity had quieted, rightly or not.

So what’s leading to this current wave? It starts with AI of course. Companies are in desperate need of AI technology and more importantly AI talent, and the easiest way to get it is via acquisition. Aura, a workforce intelligence platform, wrote in a company blog post last year: “Pursuing AI talent is no longer just a hiring strategy—it’s a core component of long-term business survival in the age of artificial intelligence. The number of AI professionals with expertise in machine learning, AI-powered platforms, and real-time data processing is finite. Big Tech is determined to grab as much of this expertise as possible,” the company wrote.

Red sign with white lettering: We are hiring. Apply today on wooden board, which is nailed to a grey brick wall.

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

As though to prove that point, in a recent interview on Fortt Knox to discuss the Moveworks acquisition, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said adding 500 new employees, many with AI chops, was helping to supplement his company’s organic agentic AI push.

Another common narrative regarding the recent buying surge is that the new administration is going to be friendlier to M&A than the prior one, opening the door to the kinds of action we saw this week. Yet recent moves contradict this idea. Consider that we have seen the DOJ sue to stop the $14 billion HPE-Juniper Networks deal, one of last year’s bigger tech transactions. What’s more, the FTC and DOJ have put Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft all on notice with big antitrust-related actions that have not slowed down since Inauguration Day.

"Pursuing AI talent is no longer just a hiring strategy—it’s a core component of long-term business survival in the age of artificial intelligence."

None of that sounds particularly friendly to large companies or big M&A. There’s also the matter that the U.S. isn’t the only country that has to approve these transactions. The companies will still have to convince U.K. and the EU regulators, both of which have been fairly strict when it comes to large pacts like Google-Wiz. Remember, it was regulatory pushback in the EU and UK that convinced Adobe to end its pursuit of Figma, a deal that would have been worth $20 billion.

This spate of activity certainly feels different, and appears to bode well for companies looking to exit via acquisition. Still, each of these deals has to clear a gauntlet of regulatory hurdles before they close, and evidence suggests that it’s not going to be any easier than in the past. Regardless, companies looking to bolster their AI capabilities and talent seem to be willing to take that chance.

-Ron

What's new on the blog 📰

With a strong data foundation, Capital One was more prepared for generative AI than most

Capital One's chief scientist and head of enterprise data and AI, Prem Natarajan has been with the company two years, but he recognizes that the work the company has done previously to be data first and in the cloud, before most companies were thinking about this, helped prepare them when generative AI and large language models came to the fore.

"Culturally, there is a deep reverence for data in the company’s DNA,” Natarajan told FastForward . “And that manifests itself in many ways such as how much data is used for decision making and how insights are organized around tools and techniques that help us get insights from data.”

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Photo by Can Pac Swire on Flickr. Used under CC Attribution Share Alike 2.0

ServiceNow took big Agentic AI swing with Moveworks acquisition

When ServiceNow announced its intent to acquire Moveworks last week for nearly $3 billion, it put its SaaS counterparts on notice that it was dead serious about owning agentic AI in the enterprise — perhaps even going after markets like CRM where it doesn't have much presence today.

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Dropbox's Drew Houston: Startups still need to stick to fundamentals in spite of AI hype

I recently caught up with Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. Speaking as a founder who went from idea to public company, he told me that the current AI hype cycle doesn't mean you can simply abandon startup building fundamentals.

“Whenever there are these new explosions where a new era of computing shows up, like with AI, they follow a similar kind of hype path,” he said.

But that doesn't change the fundamentals of business building. He ticked off things like “raising money is not the same as making money, revenue is not the same thing as cash flow, you still have to build good products.”

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Dropbox CEO, speaks onstage during the HumanX AI Conference 2025

Photo by Big Event Media/Getty Images for HumanX Conference

Survey finds marketing pros have conflicting views of generative AI

Generative AI is having a huge impact on the marketing department, but a new survey reveals an ambivalence among marketing professionals when it comes to this technology.

"To me, it’s less about confusion and more about marketers being realistic about AI's strengths and weaknesses,” Canva's head of global marketing, Emma Robinson said.

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News of the Week 📣

Google finally gets wiz in $32 billion mega deal

Last summer Google attempted to acquire cybersecurity startup Wiz for the astonishing price of $23 billion — and was turned down. This week, Google finally got its company in a deal valued at $32 billion. The $9 billion boost apparently made all the difference.

With Wiz, the company gets a security solution that works on Google, as well as rivals Amazon and Microsoft, and that multi-cloud coverage was what attracted Google Cloud.

David Linthicum, a long-time cloud analyst, says Google is attempting to address customer concerns around vendor lock-in. "Most enterprises that I talk to are glad that they moved to a multi-cloud deployment, but they admit that the cost is much higher given the operational complexity they must endure," Linthicum told FastForward. "This is a step toward making those deployments less complex, because you’re using a single security control plane across the cloud platforms."

Google Cloud and Wiz logos on white background

Image courtesy of Google Cloud

In a statement, Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport assured customers that they would continue to support that multi-cloud approach in case there was any doubt. "Wiz and Google Cloud are fully committed to continue supporting and protecting customers across all major clouds, helping keep them safe and secure wherever they operate."

This approach has helped make Wiz a startup phenomenon from the earliest days. Started by the folks who launched Adallom, another security startup, which was sold to Microsoft for $320 million in 2015, Wiz reached $100 million in ARR in just 18 months. This year it is expected to reach $1 billion. For a company that's just five years old, that's pretty remarkable.

Of course, the agreement still needs to pass regulatory muster, certainly not a given, but if it does, the companies expect to close sometime next year. It's worth noting that if the deal falls through for any reason, Wiz still walks away with $3.2 billion, a massive take for a kill fee.

Nvidia Gtc brings powerful new GPUs and a focus on inference over training

While Nvidia had to share the spotlight this week with Google's big acquisition announcement, they still had plenty of juice of their own, and GTC is always a showcase for CEO Jensen Huang and the company. This week was no exception.

Of course, there were new GPUs aplenty including the new Blackwell Ultra, which is bigger, more powerful and able to handle larger AI models (but of course). It's expected to be available later this year, but The Information reports the company may be ahead of most of the market with these babies, who have committed to prior year's models already and may not be ready to dish out additional dollars for the latest and greatest..

The company also felt the DeepSeek moment as acutely as anyone, as AI costs seem to have shifted from training to reasoning and inference. As Frederic Lardinois reports for The New Stack, Huang sent a clear message that they were tuning their next generation of products to take advantage of that shift. As Nvidia sees the market pivoting, it's trying to make the move right along with its customers.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivering the keynote at GTC 2025 with a giant picture of earth from space behind him.

Photo courtesy of Nvidia

Adobe Unveils new agents aimed at marketing

Adobe is probably best known for its creative tools, but it also has a substantial enterprise marketing business. This week at the annual Adobe Summit, the company unveiled 10 new agents aimed at helping improve customer experience.

In fact they have shifted from calling it customer experience management (CXM) to customer experience orchestration (CXO), per CMSWire.

It's been widely reported in this publication and elsewhere that companies like Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Microsoft and other enterprise SaaS companies, along with many startups, are trying to deploy agents inside the enterprise. That Adobe has decided to focus on the marketing department shouldn't come as a big surprise.

The company isn't just releasing a set of agents though, it's doing something a bit different by releasing an orchestration tool that can manage agent activity, both from Adobe and third-parties. Agents from multiple vendors will have to work together, and this appears to be an attempt to help make that happen.

Hyperscale data center count continues to soar

Synergy Research, a firm that tracks all things cloud related, reports that the number of hyperscale data centers reached 1136 by the end of last year, a number that has doubled in the last five years. Hyperscalers are large companies with lots of capacity requirements like Amazon and Microsoft, for example.

The U.S. accounts for over half of this capacity, which Synergy measures in "megawatts of critical IT load." China is in second place, way back with 16%, followed by Europe with 15% of capacity.

Synergy research graph showing U.S. has 54% of hyperscale datacenter capacity, followed by China with 16% and EU with 15%.

Image courtesy of Synergy Research Group

We all know that the data center is business is booming as demand for AI drives more and more building. The numbers should only get bigger this year with five companies — Amazon, OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta —pledging to spend $420 billion in 2025 in an effort to increase capacity even further.

What we're reading 📚

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LivPhoto by Blaz Photo on Unsplash

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Look who's talking 👄

"But the trouble with trying to continually narrow the definitions of “free” is that it is impossible to write a license that will perfectly prohibit each possibility that makes a person go “wait, no, not like that” while retaining the benefits of free and open access."

- Molly White, [citation needed]

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ForwardThinking 🤔

M&A makes a comeback

What's new on the blog 📰

With a strong data foundation, Capital One was more prepared for generative AI than most

ServiceNow took big Agentic AI swing with Moveworks acquisition

Dropbox's Drew Houston: Startups still need to stick to fundamentals in spite of AI hype

Survey finds marketing pros have conflicting views of generative AI

News of the Week 📣

Google finally gets wiz in $32 billion mega deal

Nvidia Gtc brings powerful new GPUs and a focus on inference over training

Adobe Unveils new agents aimed at marketing

Hyperscale data center count continues to soar

What we're reading 📚

[citation needed]

"Wait, not like that": Free and open access in the age of generative AI

Bloomberg

How the AI Boom Created the Most Valuable Monopolies in History

TechCrunch

Rippling sues Deel, Deel denies 'all legal wrongdoing,' and Slack is the main witness

Computerworld

The return-to-office Catch 22

Look who's talking 👄

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FastForward #14: M&A makes a comeback

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