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The cloud tech IPO landscape may have struggled a little of late, but the analysts at EY – formerly Ernst & Young – argue that on a global scale, 2016 saw an all-time record high in overall technology activity due to the “massive digital transformation” caused by disruptive technologies.<\/p>\n
The overall aggregate 2016 value of $466.6 billion (£373bn) was up 2% over 2015’s previous record, while the Q416 figure of $117.2bn was down 38% year over year.<\/p>\n
For the full year of 2016, the consultancy put together a graph of number of deals in the sector compared with average value of deal. As expected from a more mature market, cloud and software as a service (SaaS) was miles ahead in terms of volume – between 1,200 and 1,400 – but paled in monetary terms compared to connected car and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.<\/p>\n
The report coins the term ‘background radiation’ when describing cloud deals, adding that the IoT and artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to fuel high tech-targeted M&A in 2017.<\/p>\n
In terms of specific regions, cloud and SaaS was a factor in more than a quarter (28%) of EMEA deals in Q416, compared with the Americas where it factored into almost 950 deals.<\/p>\n
The standout, as the report affirms, was the Oracle-NetSuite acquisition<\/a> for $9.3bn, announced in July but only completed in November. Microsoft’s $26.2bn outlay for LinkedIn<\/a> was described by EY as a reflection of “the way social networking is transforming business, the rising role of big data and the potential for both those technologies to transform Microsoft products.” Equinix’s $3.6bn move to snaffle 29 data centres from Verizon in December<\/a> was also noted.<\/p>\n Earlier this month<\/a>, the yearly analysis issued by Byron Deeter, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), came to a pretty similar conclusion. While IPOs ran comparatively dry in the cloud space, with Twilio the star performer, companies acquired in the public cloud space represented 40% of the $300bn market cap. The top 100 private cloud companies, as noted by Forbes in September, also represented more than $100bn of private enterprise value alone.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The artificial intelligence (AI) market is set to reach $3,061 billion by 2024 according to recent research. The AI Expo<\/a> world series looks at the future impact of these technologies, including business intelligence, machine learning, and chatbots. Find out more here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The cloud tech IPO landscape may have struggled a little of late, but the analysts at EY – formerly Ernst & Young – argue that on a global scale, 2016 saw an all-time record high in overall technology activity due to the “massive …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28175,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28174\/revisions\/28175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}