SDxCentral Weekly Wrap for Sept. 20, 2019

Plus, Cloudflare's stock soars on Wall Street debut, and executives tamp down 5G expectations

Kubernetes is central to the VMware-IBM rivalry; Cloudflare's IPO scorched Wall Street; and 5G gets a reality check.

VMware CEO: IBM Paid Too Much for Red Hat

Cloudflare IPO Scorches Wall Street

AT&T, Sprint, and Cisco Execs Throw Cold Water on 5G

Full Weekly Wrap Transcript

Today is September 20, 2019, and this is the SDxCentral Weekly Wrap where we cover the week’s top stories on next-generation IT infrastructure.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said rival IBM paid too much for Red Hat and its OpenShift Kubernetes platform.

He then added that when it comes to Kubernetes his company has better assets.

Gelsinger made those stinging comments during a recent investor conference, where he also stated that VMware was raking in nearly $2 billion from its SDN operations.

The pointed jab at rival IBM highlights the increasingly competitive nature of the Kubernetes-focused ecosystem that has been central to a number of big financial deals over the past year.

IBM paid a company record $34 billion to acquire Red Hat, which has made a name and business for itself in the open source software and growing Kubernetes market.

However, VMware itself has also spent billions of dollars on similar properties.

That includes its recent $2.8 billion purchase of sister company Pivotal, with both companies operating under the Dell EMC umbrella.

VMware has also acquired Kubernetes-focused companies Heptio and Bitnami.

Gelsinger noted that those combined assets better position his company in the space and that it accomplished that positioning at around one-tenth of the price of what IBM paid.

Content delivery network powerhouse Cloudflare lit up Wall Street with an initial public offering that generated $525 million for the company and gave it a nearly $4 billion valuation.

The firm’s IPO was initially priced at $12 per share before spiking to $15 per share just ahead of its listing.

Investors quickly gobbled up the 35 million shares offered with that interest sending the stock price up an additional 20 percent shortly after its debut.

Cloudflare is best known for its CDN services with its IPO paperwork citing support for more than 20 million internet properties.

It also has a stake in both cloud and security and said it blocks 44 billion cyberthreats per day.

In that filing it also said it competes against companies like Amazon, Cisco, and Oracle.

However it also directly competes against CDN firms like Akamai, Limelight, and Fastly.

Cloudflare reported $129 million in revenues for the first half of this year, which was a 48-percent increase compared to the first half of 2018.

However, it continues to operate in the red with net losses of $37 million through the first ha...