Sunday Morning Tech Fix 10/11/2015: Bubble Up? GE IoT & software moves

Tom Paine

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(Where I somehow try to answer questions I haven't been able to answer the rest of the week, at a time when I'm least capable of doing so.)

I'll be periodically posting updates on the so-called 'bubble scare' of 2015, trying to emphasize facts rather than gossip, mostly as it concerns private equity and private tech companies.

As always in a hot market, there are people who want to keep talking it up, and others who want to talk it down to cool off values a bit. And some (few) are straight shooters.

Fortune's Dan Primack, on his visit to Silicon Valley last week, said of the investment class there, speaking primaarily of unicorns (private startups valued at $1 billion or more), "As in the past, they are nearly unanimous in sentiment. The difference now is that their sentiment is fear."

Mattermark's (an emerging business information and research company) Danielle Morrill gets specific and names some unicorns that might be in trouble, including the FanDuel/DraftKings duo that have been spending huge amounts to batter each other's brains out. Some suggest that merging the two is the only solution.

Boston or Wilmington-based SevOne, which has very legitimate value, announced it had closed its latest round at $50 million (the Form D filed before the close indicated up to $60 million) and failed to indicate clearly to anyone whether it had reached unicorn status, which it was on the brink of. Which is probably just as well, since the attention that brings you may be more negative than positive now.

Of course, all of this is unicorn talk, and Philadelphia is neither Silicon Valley or New York. So I will try to focus future installmments on somewhat more micro indicators most of us need to know about.

I'm still trying to decipher all the moving parts involved in GE's enormous announcents about both its Internet of Things platform and its Predix software venture. Such as what it means for PTC's ThingWorx, which has a big role to play at least in IoT (not sure about Predix), and what it means for ERP players and the software industry in general. I think ThingWorx has to be fairly quiet, following the interests of GE and its own corporate parent.

I also noticed that ThingWorx had a presence at AWS re:Invent 2015, where it was a sponsor, though it wasn't prominently mentioned in AWS' releaeses about its new IoT platform, which was built upon the acqusition of anoter IoT platform vendor. But GE says it outsources much of its processing to AWS.


Also, waiting for some clarifcaion on Quentin Clark's new role at SAP. On SAP's website for at least the past few days, he has been listed as Chief Business Officer, rather than CTO (his prior position) though no trace of an external announcement has been found. SAP did post about two other significant appointments last week.