Silver Lake plans to announce on Tuesday that it has closed its fifth buyout fund at $15 billion, one of the biggest ever dedicated to technology deals. That exceeds the $12.5 billion fund-raising target that the firm had previously aimed for and brings the firm’s total assets and committed capital to about $39 billion. They seem to get good returns: Silver Lake’s fourth fund, with $10.5 billion under management, currently boasts returns of nearly 31 percent, according to the data provider PitchBook.

Silver Lake plans to announce on Tuesday that it has closed its fifth buyout fund at $15 billion, one of the biggest ever dedicated to technology deals. That exceeds the $12.5 billion fund-raising target that the firm had previously aimed for and brings the firm’s total assets and committed capital to about $39 billion. They seem to get good returns: Silver Lake’s fourth fund, with $10.5 billion under management, currently boasts returns of nearly 31 percent, according to the data provider PitchBook.

Silver Lake plans to announce on Tuesday that it has closed its fifth buyout fund at $15 billion, one of the biggest ever dedicated to technology deals. That exceeds the $12.5 billion fund-raising target that the firm had previously aimed for and brings the firm’s total assets and committed capital to about $39 billion. They seem to get good returns: Silver Lake’s fourth fund, with $10.5 billion under management, currently boasts returns of nearly 31 percent, according to the data provider PitchBook.

Corporate departments outside of the IT department, globally, are forecast to spend $609bn in 2017: A new update to the Worldwide Semiannual IT Spending Guide: Line of Business from the International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts worldwide corporate IT spending funded by non-IT business units will reach $609 billion in 2017, an increase of 5.9% over 2016. The Spending Guide, which quantifies the purchasing power of line of business (LoB) technology buyers by providing a detailed examination of where the funding for a variety of IT purchases originates, also forecasts LoB spending to achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.

Video: "In 2017 Amazon is expected to spend $4.5bn on television and film content, roughly twice what HBO will spend. But it has a big payoff." Prime momentum: "Mr Nowak reckons the company had 72m Prime members last year, up by 32% from 2015." Cloud: "Last year AWS’s revenue reached $12bn, up by more than 150% since 2014." Anti-trust, in the US: "If competitors fail to halt Amazon’s whirl of activities, antitrust enforcers might yet do so instead.

From 451’s report on Google Next: Google believes that a hybrid architecture will persist in the coming years as enterprises continue to migrate workloads to various clouds. Its hybrid cloud architecture revolves around its virtual private cloud. Google VPC is an instantiation of GCP that can dedicate compute, storage and network resources to an enterprise. It is built upon Google's proprietary private global network designed for high reliability, low latency and hardened security.

If there’s one complaint that I hear consistently in my studies of IT in large organizations, it’s that government IT, as traditionally practiced, is fucked. Compared to the private sector, the amount of paperwork, the role of contractors, and the seeming separation between doing a good job and working software drives all sorts of angst and failure. Mark Schwartz’s book on figuring out “business value” in IT is turning out to be pretty amazing and refreshing, especially on the topic of government IT.

A few weeks back my book review of two “the robots are taking over” came out over on The New Stack. Here’s some responses, and also some highlights from a McKinsey piece on automation. Don’t call it “automation” From John Allspaw: There is much more to this topic. Nick Carr’s book, The Glass Cage, has a different perspective. The ramifications of new technology (don’t call it automation) are notoriously difficult to predict, and what we think are forgone conclusions (unemployment of truck drivers even though the tech for self-driving cars needs to see much more diversity of conditions before it can get to the 99%+ accuracy) are not.

A nice discussion that highlights the complexity id trade policy and, thus, rhe high risks of fucking it up. I like this critique of trade criticism: What makes Navarro’s critique challenging is that it’s not wholly wrong, at least from the American worker perspective, yet it’s not particularly actionable. So often, that last part is overlooked: you have to actually be able to on something, despite the past. Until we have time machines, finding flaws and suggesting how we should have fixed them is little use on its own.

A nice discussion that highlights the complexity id trade policy and, thus, rhe high risks of fucking it up. I like this critique of trade criticism: What makes Navarro’s critique challenging is that it’s not wholly wrong, at least from the American worker perspective, yet it’s not particularly actionable. So often, that last part is overlooked: you have to actually be able to on something, despite the past. Until we have time machines, finding flaws and suggesting how we should have fixed them is little use on its own.