IBM Acquires UStream, Forms New Cloud Video Unit | Hacker News Reader

IBM Acquires UStream, Forms New Cloud Video Unit

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84 pointscarlsbaddev23 comments

This aquisition is not a great exit for UStream, that was valued at $150M in 2010, but an exit none the less. I doubt the founders or employees would see as much of the $130M as they would have hoped, due to a massive $62M VC investment being in place... but still likely a much better outcome then if the company would have had to slowly wind down. (The investment structure of UStream is a bit complicated, but this article summarizes well why the amount is likely very close to this number https://gigaom.com/2011/12/09/ustream-softbank-funding-colla...).

In 2011 the company rebooted itself to a B2B direction - see http://www.businessinsider.com/this-once-red-hot-startup-had.... This direction has only been a modest success. For a bootstrapped company it would have been completely fine to go on like that indefinitely, but for a VC investment heavy one, this - or any other - sale must have been in the making since the hopes of an IPO have clearly disappeared.

One thing the article doesn't mention is that this aquisition makes a lot of sense for IBM. They get access to a lot of businesses who host their internal video streaming on UStream, like Facebook (company update videos all running on it). Also the main UStream engineering office is in Budapest, Hungary, where there is a large IBM office as well, so that will make integration smoother.

UStream employees who joined to disrupt the startup consumer video space a couple years back - welcome to IBM. I hope you've gotten some handsome payouts or golden handcuffs - and congratulations.

It just seems like IBM is always 5-10 years behind where they should be.

I don't think you quite understand IBM's value proposition - IBM's business has always been about serving the late majority and laggards.

No, that is not even slightly true. Historically they were on the forefront of hardware and software for business. Hence the name. In recent years, they have struggled to keep up. But their lagging product lines are a result of poor execution, not deliberate strategy.

IBM has an incredible salesforce with connections to every government in the world. They were resellers for some of my last company's software and the countries and companies they closed were unbelievable, and impossible for any startup to have a chance of selling into on their own. The big companies and governments that is IBM's bread and butter do not purchase hot new SaaS products from 10 person companies. They want stable, functional, enterprise software that integrates with a bunch of ancient systems and can run on-premises (private cloud).

I can't see the problem if their customers are also 5-10 years behind where they should be..

Worked at IBM most of my professional career. Normally do not comment.... cuz... job and whatnot. IBM is pretty big. One downfall is they can't turn on a dime. For IBM to see something new and move on it, means, possibly spending two years on it... which means it won't be the big thing anymore. Or buying something that is hot.... to find out later if its hot and new or a flash in the pan. So yeah, they are behind. What has MicroSoft done lately? Where is Apple without Jobs?

Where is Apple without Jobs? When Steve resigned (2011) they had 108B in revenue, 2015 they had 230B. That's phenomenal growth.

MSFT? 73B in 2012 to 93B in 2015. Solid growth.

IBM: from 103B in 2012 down to 82B in 2015.

So yeah, Apple and MS are growing, while IBM is declining.

These numbers can be explained with IBM having peaked before Microsoft which in turn peaked before Apple in terms of product development. So Apple's revenues are still growing fast, Microsoft's are growing more slowly and IBM's are declining - with none of them doing new stuff and all of them being past the peak (I'm not sure that's actually true, just saying that grandparent's point/question was what they've done lately/that they didn't do much, and this point is not refuted by revenue growth numbers because revenue lags a lot after product starts. Microsoft's greatest hits by far are still Windows and Office which it develops since the 80s.)

Yet AAPL has the same P/E as IBM lol...Wall Street really hates that company...

IBM has so much cool stuff you don't even know about. I'm not even really sure what they would be 5-10 years behind in: they're not an Internet company, their hardware is not commodity, their services are not aimed at YC-culture at all...

Dunno. The last CES had all the major companies using Ustream to stream their keynotes.

> It just seems like IBM is always 5-10 years behind where they should be.

What do you think they should be doing that's modern, cool and not 5-10 years behind?

Unikernels? X-for-Y services ( Uber for dogs )?

IBM should have built AWS before Amazon did.

And they still would have lost to Amazon as they would have priced it such that no one except the government and extra large companies could pay the bill.

AWS, or their own version of Box/Dropbox. (I guess that's why they have such a strong partnership with Box now).

Working at (a company subsidiary to) IBM, I think there's a pretty unique culture of "buy rather than build" here. IBM has its own share of weird internal infrastructure (hello Notes/Domino), but for the things we don't "have our own version of", IBM seems perfectly happy to pick some small company and use their service, rather than entering a vertical just to have an answer for a competitor's entry.

Basically, IBM is still fundamentally a consulting "solutions" company; their products are things they needed to build to solve a particular recurring consulting problem for their clients, that couldn't be solved with an application of off-the-shelf technology from a partner. This is reflected in IBM's own culture; we'll also look for an off-the-shelf solution[0]—or ask a partner to tailor their product to us—before even considering building something internal. "Scratching an itch" infrastructure projects like Facebook's Cassandra just don't really happen here.

I doubt IBM could have "productized the infrastructure" the way Amazon did to end up with AWS; IBM doesn't have any unique infrastructure. BlueMix, such as it is, isn't a reflection of anything we were already doing; it was simply a de novo solution to a particular recurring consulting problem with unique constraints (high levels of isolation and on-premise collocation) that meant we couldn't just sell the client a solution by some IaaS partner of ours. For internal projects, we frequently still just use AWS or DigitalOcean or whathaveyou (although this is changing as BlueMix becomes more competent to serve our own particular needs as an "internal customer.")

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[0] ...as long as it's not built by one of our competitors in the "all things to all people megacorp" world. We use Slack, but turning on Google Docs integration is against security policy: we trust a small company like Slack with our IP, but trusting Google is right out.

Where "should" they be?

Heading where the puck is going to be! ;)

Ustream is the first place I worked, exciting to see this news

Not sure though layoffs may come after IBM acquisitions.

That depends on how strong the business is -- blekko didn't lay off any engineers when we were purchased by IBM Watson. We did lay off marketing/biz dev folks related to the business we were no longer in. It all made good sense.

SpaceX broadcasts on UStream were not viewable on Firefox/Flash on Fedora. A known problem, tech support said too bad, use Chrome. I get it, it was not high on their list. What are the odds of it now? (Only a cursory look, it didn't appear they supported anything other than Flash)

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