I think spot deserved to stay within our portfolio. What’s next?
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This su-ks. Spot had healthy revenue, and the money generated was never reinvested back into Spot. The sale price is crazy low, considering how much the ARR is.
Hopefully Flexera is smart with this acquisition. Spot is still industry leading in many areas.
Yep. We should not have bought Spot. And yes, we lost money on it. However, in our history of acquisitions, this is one of the few that wasn't outright ki-led (i.e. total loss). I can only think of one other acquisition that we sold off, which was NetCache (to BlueCoat). I'm sure there were others.
We paid way more for spot than we should have (shouldn’t have bought it in the first place)
Anthony Liar was told by multiple people not to buy it, he did so anyway. He bought a few other companies as well, most have already been ki-led off.
The cloud teams are still reeling from his disastrous management.
Kelly, Christine, and Dan S ki-led this company
So 340m to 100m?
That's an insane loss on paper
Bloomberg says
"The deal is valued at about $100 million and includes some businesses from NetApp’s acquisitions of startups Spot and CloudCheckr, people with knowledge of the matter said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private."
it's unclear if the sale is all of the assets associated with Spot and CloudCheckr
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-15/netapp-selling-some-software-assets-to-thoma-bravo-s-flexera
on the Spot and CloudCheckr acquisitions
Spot, Inc. Acquisition
On July 9, 2020, we acquired all the outstanding shares of privately-held Spot, Inc. (Spot), a provider of compute management cost optimization services on the public clouds based in Israel, for $340 million in cash. The acquisition of Spot will allow us to establish an application driven infrastructure for the continuous optimization of both compute and storage, which we believe will facilitate customers deploying more applications to the cloud.
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001002047/000156459020041759/ntap-10q_20200731.htm
On November 5, 2021, we acquired all the outstanding shares of privately-held CloudCheckr Inc., a leading cloud optimization platform that provides cloud visibility and insights to lower costs, maintain security and compliance, and optimize cloud resources. We are in the process of completing the allocation of approximately $348 million of purchase price among the assets acquired and liabilities assumed.
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001002047/000095017021005014/ntap-20211029.htm
What happens to all the spot employees?
the press release
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/01/15/3009970/0/en/Flexera-to-Acquire-FinOps-Business-from-NetApp-Inc-to-Strengthen-FinOps-Portfolio.html
It was announced yesterday
Spot is sold to Flexera. Official announcement will come today. Other cloud solutions, 1P and 3P storage, BlueXP, Instaclustr and Data Infrastructure Insights (aka Cloud Insights), are safe for now.
@@bs+1jhjqk0f4, I doubt CI is going anywhere. Just because it has the word "Cloud" in it, it's just the current iteration of OnCommand Insight. That product is in a ton of companies and is useful for multi-vendor reporting (so not just NetApp-owned things). It's a pretty big product for the customers that can afford it.
I would not be surprised if instacluster and other product groups are next. Maybe Cloud Insights? Even though they’re turning a new page with the whole intelligence pitch. It is probably on its last leg too. 1P seems safe enough for now. NetApp seems to be reverting back to its 30 year roots and focusing on HARDWARE.
I wonder how the remaining cloud acquisitions will fare now? Instead of cloud acquisitions establishing a beach-head of innovation and new markets, it seems to have been a temporary attraction, with a retreat back to storage. I get the sense this SPOT sell-off has been planned for quite a long time. Anyone know what this means for the remaining cloud groups?
Legitimate question--how many unique end customers used Spot? And quite unique for NetApp to actually sell it off rather than ki-l the product line.
A lot of the original Spot sales team were je-koffs that no one wanted to work with. They felt they were the only ones that could sell Spot and treated field sales folks as backwards rather than just put together good trainings that brought all the field sales into the fold. Granted, Anthony was part of creating that sort of adversarial culture. But a lot of blame goes towards the Spot team as well not understanding and adjusting to their new owners and conditions.
Sad to see so many happy that hundreds of employees are in limbo as Spot gets sold and their fates are uncertain.
I’d argue this was a huge Netapp core failure. Spot wasn’t a good fit, the efforts made to integrate it were terrible. Core reps didn’t understand it. Luckily AI bo-m put wind in the sails for storage.
More surprised that another company is stupid enough to buy it
Wow, surprised NetApp is selling Spot.
Sounds like Flexera is the buyer - no press release yet
https://www.flexera.com/
No mention of how they plan to handle the employees. Do we still get bonuses? Severance?