Hyperscale: The week where everything happened at once

Hello, and welcome back to Hyperscale, the Business Insider enterprise tech newsletter. I’m Matt Weinberger, deputy tech editor out of the San Francisco bureau.

First, a brief programming note: I’m taking next week for a long-awaited staycation, so Hyperscale will be back after the Labor Day holiday in the US. But anyway...

In the words of my favorite Twitter account of all time, the long-dormant Horse eBooks: “Everything happens so much.” 

Here’s a breakdown of this very busy week in tech so far:

• On Monday, Asana, JFrog, Sumo Logic, Unity, and Snowflake — all of them enterprise or developer technology companies — filed to go public, with Asana notably choosing a direct listing over a traditional IPO. It may or may not come as a shock that while all of them show notable revenue growth, none of them are profitable.
• On Tuesday, Palantir dropped its own long-awaited S-1, showing that it lost about $580 million last year. At roughly the same time, Salesforce announces blockbuster earnings far beyond Wall Street estimates, even as CEO Marc Benioff hints that it won’t be making any more big acquisitions in the near future.
• On Wednesday, Salesforce shares spiked up 29% in early trading after all the good news at earnings. Later in the day, Salesforce announced layoffs of about 1,000 employees, or under 2% of its workforce. “We're reallocating resources to position the company for continued growth,” a spokesperson said.
• On Thursday, the TikTok drama flared back up in a big way. TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer stepped down, only months after joining from Disney, in a clear signal that a deal is imminent. Not long after, Walmart joined in on Microsoft’s bid to buy the viral video app as a would-be minority stakeholder. Microsoft and Oracle were widely reported as locking in their respective bids as of Thursday evening, with any potential deal having to pass the Trump administration’s review before getting approved.
• On Friday, which is when I’m writing this — who knows? By the time this is published, maybe the TikTok deal will have been locked in. Maybe we’ll have to get used to saying “TikTok, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle.” Maybe no deal will be reached and TikTok will have to use its contingency plans for a shutdown as Trump’s deadline nears. I don’t know! Nobody knows! It’s bonkers!

And all of that doesn’t even mention all the other important things that happened this week. You know, like the new BTS single Dynamite breaking 200 million views on YouTube. (I like all the BTS members, but find RM the most relatable. He’s sort of the deputy tech editor of the band.) 

To go back to TikTok for a moment, the thing that strikes me most is how most of its potential buyers have Amazon as a mutual enemy. When it comes to Microsoft and Walmart joining forces on the bid, well, here’s the extremely nuanced take I posted on Twitter:

But seriously, folks, it stands out that both Microsoft and Walmart — already united in their respective rivalries with Amazon — see such value in TikTok. 

For Microsoft, it’s possibly the $1.6 trillion tech titan’s last chance to get in on social networking. But it’s also the chance to show off just what its Microsoft Azure cloud can do: As the New York Times reported this week, this all began when Microsoft explored the opportunity to make a minority investment in TikTok, and in so doing move the app to Azure. Things snowballed from there, as we now know, but the fact remains that putting TikTok on Azure would be a heck of a bullet point on a marketing presentation when convincing customers not to use the dominant Amazon Web Services.

For Walmart, it’s a bold new front in its ecommerce strategy. As Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reports, TikTok would give Walmart a whole new way of reaching customers, as well as a treasure trove of shopping data. That’s important for Walmart, which needs to convince a new generation of shoppers, accustomed to ordering literally anything and everything from Amazon and other online stores, into its “bricks and clicks” ecosystem. It seems a little out there to American eyes, but Douyin — TikTok’s Chinese counterpart, also owned by ByteDance — is already an ecommerce giant in the country. That could give Walmart its own secret weapon against Amazon.

And then there’s Oracle, whose bid is said to hinge around a play to become an even bigger force in the advertising data market. The company has no consumer technology businesses whatsoever at the moment, but it does sell a lot of data to a lot of customers, likely making TikTok an attractive target. And if it could bring TikTok over to the Oracle Cloud, it would get one over on its eternal rivals at Microsoft and at Amazon Web Services, further proving founder Larry Ellison’s consistent claims that the company is a serious contender in the market.

I don’t exactly think Amazon is shaking in its boots. But given that the current level of antitrust scrutiny of the retail giant makes a TikTok bid unlikely to pass muster at the White House level (which is still an odd part of this whole process, honestly!), it’s notable that all of these rivals are scrambling to turn the app’s massive popularity with Today’s Youth into a competitive advantage.

Anyway, that’s enough out of me this week. Here are a few recent highlights from the Business Insider enterprise tech team:

• Oracle salaries revealed: Here are the six-figure salaries the $175 billion enterprise tech giant offers for jobs in software development, sales and marketing
• Experts say $12.4 billion Snowflake's much-anticipated IPO will be a hit on Wall Street thanks to the pandemic economy, but its partnerships with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google could become a major liability
• Here's what you need to know about Unreal Engine, the game development software with 7.5 million users that's caught in the middle of the legal battle between Epic Games and Apple
• The FBI's criminal case against former Uber security chief Joe Sullivan sent 'shock waves through the cybersecurity community' that may change how companies handle hacks
• Cybersecurity salaries revealed: How much security companies like McAfee, Palo Alto Networks, and Cloudflare pay engineers, analysts, and other roles, with salaries as high as $300,000

As always, feel free to get in touch via email or Twitter if you have questions, comments, concerns, or suggestions for this newsletter. Otherwise, I’ll see you in September — and in the meanwhile, take care of yourselves and others.