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.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia, for instance, replaced its core banking platform in 2012 with the help of Accenture and software company SAP SE. The job ultimately took five years and cost more than 1 billion Australian dollars ($749.9 million). Being conservative, multiply $500m across the top 20 banks, and you’ve got $10bn, using $749.8m directly, you get much closer to $15bn. Better start planning. Source: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT ‘cowboys’ ride into sunset

The Register closes out it’s reporting on the rumor that Oracle was considering buying Accenture: ...spokeswoman Deborah Hillinger has since denied that an acquisition will take place, claiming: "The Accenture rumour is completely untrue. Never even considered it." Meanwhile, Dennis covers the many reasons why the deal wouldn’t make sense in the first place. The margin argument is always a good, quick one: ...consultants are not normally selling software solutions, but are selling the bodies and expertise needed to make the chosen solution work, the second part of this model.

On March 27, 2016, Dell entered into a definitive agreement with NTT Data International L.L.C. to sell substantially all of Dell Services for cash consideration of approximately $3.0 billion. On June 19, 2016, Dell entered into a definitive agreement with Francisco Partners and Elliot Management Corporation to sell substantially all of Dell Software Group for cash consideration of approximately $2.4 billion. Link

Pivotal had a pretty major milestone this last quarter, over a quarter-billion dollars in 2016 bookings, up 130 percent year-over-year. The momentum with Pivotal in terms of digital transformation is white hot. Pivotal is now engaged in a third of the Fortune 100, and I would say the strategy so far has been to only go after the tallest buildings in the city. The opportunity to take Pivotal Cloud Foundry into Fortune 2000 and beyond is enormous.

Now that they don’t have to compete with AWS, they have an extra $300m floating around in the spreadsheets: "Ultimately now it's about how are we going to build a stronger company. If we don't have to go spend $300 million a year in capital competing against Amazon, building computing storage and networking, where should we go put that? In things like managed cybersecurity and professional services," said Rhodes. On OpenStack, finding the product/market for for private cloud:

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.