With Cumulus, Nvidia said it … NVIDIA has this week announced it is acquiring Cumulus Networks to bolster the companies networking software capabilities. The history of chip companies buying software companies is not great. NVIDIA Acquires Cumulus Networks. At first glance, the deal logic is a big question. As a result, every data center sale is some kind of bundle. We promise no spam!StorageReview.com is a world leading independent storage authority, providing in-depth news coverage, detailed reviews, SMB/SME consulting and lab services on storage arrays, hard drives, SSDs, and the related hardware and software that makes these storage solutions work.
Today NVIDA announced its intent to acquire Cumulus Networks. Today NVIDA announced its intent to acquire Cumulus Networks. At first glance, the deal logic is a big question. Mellanox tended to do best on the leading edge of products (e.g. Nvidia is actually a textbook example of that. While the Mellanox deal went for just shy of $7 billion, there doesn’t seem to be a word yet on the price tag of Cumulus. To be honest, we are not 100% clear on what motivated this deal, but there turns out to be a fairly interesting story taking place here. Our emphasis is on storage solutions for the midmarket and enterprise, with limited coverage of core brands that offer client storage solutions.Copyright © 1998-2020 Flying Pig Ventures, LLC Cincinnati, Ohio. Intel bought and then spun off McAfee and Wind River, with little to show for either deal. No price for the deal was disclosed; Cumulus Networks has taken an estimated $134m in funding since its founding in 2010. NVIDIA isn’t exactly on an acquisition frenzy, but they did recently acquire Mellanox as well. Credit: Dreamstime . There are too many sub-segments and niches and no easy acquisitions left. Nvidia makes chips for gaming and for data centers (read AI/ML). No financial terms were disclosed. Part of the reason that they became so dominant in GPUs for AI rests in the investment they made in an obscure piece of code called Cuda.
The company was a pioneer in the disaggregation of network software and hardware. As noted, this has never really turned out well. All rights reserved.Copyright © 1998-2020 Flying Pig Ventures, LLC Cincinnati, Ohio. NVIDIA isn’t exactly on an acquisition frenzy, but they did Today NVIDA announced its intent to acquire Cumulus Networks. Nonetheless, the deal has a clear logic to it and could provide a nice boost to Nvidia, albeit one which we may not be able to observe from the outside. Bringing Cumulus in house makes joint sales that much easier.There are very few people today who directly interact with chips. If you make a product that gets sold in a bundle, but your product only costs 20% of the total, and the rest of that bundle is largely commoditized bent metal, you are going to need some other leverage to close deals. The best example of this is Linux, which exists in its dominant form today in large part because Intel engineers contributed countless hours to building it. Semiconductors only consume abut $0.20 of every dollar spent on a rack of servers. No chip company has ever really been able to develop robust software as a product. Nvidia set to acquire data centre outfit Cumulus Networks Details of the deal haven't been announced but could be in the hundreds of millions . 5 May 2020. NVIDIA isn’t exactly on an acquisition frenzy, but they did Founded in 2010 by JR Rivers and Nolan Leake, Cumulus Networks started to change the way networking is addressed. And this leads to our third deal rationale – software. The history of chip companies buying software companies is not great. Acquisition targets large data centre, cloud and enterprise environments. Even the most advanced cloud builders have very small teams (relative to their total work force) who pay much attention to the chips. The result is that any company that wants to grow a networking business needs to cobble together what it can, and Cumulus is a close-enough adjacency.We imagine the pitch internally at Nvidia goes along the lines of “you sales people are already calling on the ten cloud scale customers out there, while you are selling them GPUs and Mellanox Ethernet cards, get the customer to sign up for a license to Cumulus software.”Too often, this kind of rationale is designed by the Corporate Development team (ahem) and then left to the sales team to make into reality. GPU biz Nvidia on Monday said it plans to buy network software maker Cumulus Networks, just days after closing its $6.9bn deal to acquire Mellanox, another networking-oriented business.
by: Jane McCallion. The company focused on infrastructure specifically simplicity, transparency, and scalability in the data center. Michael Cooney (Network World) 06 May, 2020 04:18. share ; print email Comments. The key to understanding the Networking semis market is Broadcom. In many segments of the market, Broadcom enjoys a near-monopoly position. the fastest versions of Ethernet), but Broadcom has, by far, the leading market share and port count.
“NVIDIA’s approach to … But that same Nvidia blog post points out that Cumulus has been working with Mellanox for a long time already. Mellanox and Cumulus have worked together since 2013, when the former began its Open Ethernet strategy. All rights reserved. Fresh off of closing its $6.9 billion deal to buy Mellanox last week, Nvidia said on Monday that it's buying Cumulus Networks for an undisclosed sum. Nvidia makes chips for gaming and for data centers (read AI/ML). So it is very possible that those two companies already have a common sales playbook. Through its work over the years, we now have high-performance switches that can utilize Cumulus’ Linux-based software for management and telemetry. At the very least, this may make sales of Mellanox products easier, but if done right (and they get very lucky) they may be able to differentiate their products enough to pry open other parts of the networking stack and give them an opening into Broadcom’s treasure hoard.We do not know how the deal played out inside Nvidia, nor which of the scenarios above carried the day. The acquisition will continue to augment NVIDIA’s approach to creating both the hardware and software for accelerated computing.Little to no details were given on pricing or timing of the deal.Adam is the chief news editor for StorageReview.com, managing our internal and freelance content teams.Subscribe to the StorageReview newsletter to stay up to date on the latest news and reviews.