Acquisition Scenario 1: Price tag ≥ $1.8B

This is the second part of our Docker Inc. analysis (see part one). Although the company seems to be in fund raising mode, there are reasonable grounds to believe that an M&A route is on the table given that the company is not growing fast enough to be an attractive IPO candidate. Hence, we calculated the following predictions using our proprietary M&A predictor function to compute the probabilities of what companies may acquire Docker Inc. This was based on a number of factors including; the last private valuation, Intellectual Property and engineering talent.

According to our analysis, Microsoft is the clear favorite if the price tag is greater than or equal to $1.8B. It’s worth mentioning that in 2016 there were rumours that Microsoft did bid around $4B for Docker, however this was back when the company was at its hottest point, consequently, given the current circumstances, a comparable offer will most likely be accepted by Docker’s management and investors!

Also, since Satya Nadella took over as CEO, Microsoft seems to have recognized the importance of building trust and partnerships with the open source developer communities. Containers are a particular area of interest for Microsoft Azure, in fact Docker Inc announced a strategic commercial partnership with Microsoft back in 2016.

Docker Announces Commercial Partnership with Microsoft to Double Container Market by Extending Docker Engine to Windows Server. With industry analysts declaring Windows Server with more than 60% of the x86 server market, and citing Microsoft Azure as the fastest-growing public cloud, it comes as no surprise that Microsoft, even at its current scale, is further extending its leadership as a strategic, trusted partner to enterprise IT.

It is this industry leadership that catalyzed our technical collaboration in the Docker open source project back in October 2014, to jointly bring the agility, portability, and security benefits of the Docker platform to Windows Server.  After two years of joint engineering, we are excited to unveil a new, commercial partnership to extend these benefits for both Windows developers targeting Windows Server and enterprise IT professionals.

Scott Johnston - CPO at Docker

Next week we will cover a second scenario where the acquisition price tag is less than $1.8B. In this scenario we have quite few potential buyers including, IBM (via Red Hat), Oracle, VMware and Rackspace. We’re monitoring key executives and employees at these companies in order to compute the respective probabilities of acquiring Docker.

Did you know as a paid enterprise customer you can request our team to perform M&A analysis on any VC backed company?

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Back in 2012, John Preskill, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, invented the phrase “quantum supremacy” to describe the moment when a quantum computer finally surpasses the world’s best classical supercomputer. Although the term generated excitement among the applied quantum computing research community, there wasn’t really a general consensus on what the minimum condition should be in terms of outperforming a classical supercomputer for “quantum supremacy” to be achieved.

So when Google recently announced it had achieved the milestone using their “Sycamore” machine — IBM immediately challenged Google by releasing a statement stating that the quantum supremacy threshold has not yet been crossed! In a paper posted online, IBM provided arguments that the world’s most powerful supercomputer can nearly keep pace with Google’s new quantum machine. As a result, IBM argued that Google’s claim should be received “with a large dose of skepticism.”

Google vs IBM - Who Is Right?

With the collaboration of our parent company Zaiku Group, we sent out a survey to top quantum computing academic researchers and open source developers asking their views on Google’s milestone. The following results are from 150 researchers/developers based in Europe (~ 40%) and the USA (~ 60%), all of which took their time to reply, we’ll keep updating the results as more people take the survey.

Survey Q1: From your understanding of the quantum experiment carried out at Google, did they achieve quantum supremacy?

Survey Q2: Is Google's experiment an important milestone in quantum computing?

Survey Q3: How far are we from achieving quantum supremacy?

Survey Q4: Which of the following organizations will achieve quantum supremacy first?

Interview with John Preskill on Quantum Computing

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