Technology

Adobe could be shopping for another piece of the digital marketing puzzle, as reports surfaced today that the company might be in talks with Vista Equity Partners to buy Marketo, a company the private equity firm purchased in May 2016 for $1.8 billion in cash. Reuters was first to report the rumor.

While the report states the talks are early, and nothing is imminent, and none of the companies involved would comment (understandably), it is a deal that makes sense for Adobe. The company has been trying to build out its digital marketing business for some time, including buying Magento in May for $1.8 billion to help beef up the ecommerce piece.

Assuming that Vista wants to flip Marketo for a profit, a good bet, it would likely need to come in at $2 billion at a minimum and probably more. There are only a few companies out there that could afford the price tag, who would be interested in a property like Marketo: Adobe, Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle.

If Adobe really wanted to go for the digital marketing jugular, it could fork over the cash and buy Marketo. Brent Leary, who covers this industry as the principle at CRM Essentials, says this would be a way for Adobe to grab a chunk of enterprise marketing automation business at a time when the market is getting highly competitive.

&Marketo would give Adobe a leader in the marketing automation space at the enterprise customer level, particularly in the B2B space.& Leary explained.

While nothing is clear yet, Adobe has the resources if it wants to do it. The company currently has $6.3 billion in cash on hand, according to data on Yahoo finance, and has seen its stock price rise significantly in the last year from $156.24 to $269.58 (as of publication today).

Adobe Creative Cloud has always been the primary money maker for Adobe over the years, generating $1.3 billion in the last report(pdf) in June out of $2.2 billion in total revenue. Digital Experience, which includes marketing products, generated $586 million, and although ittrending up, it has so much more potential.

We have been seeing more M-A action in this space as companies try to fill in various parts of the sale-service-marketing triumvirate. Just last week, we saw Zendesk, the company that concentrates on cloud customer service, enter the sales automation and CRM part of the space with the purchase of Base. Earlier this month, Thoma Bravo bought Apttus, a company which covers the quote-to-cash part of the sales cycle.

Adobe finds itself competing with other giant organizations with the previously mentioned companies all lining up for a piece of the digital marketing business. Getting Marketo certainly has the potential to help push that Digital Experience revenue line up further as the fight for marketshare gets ever more intense. Whether that happens remains to be seen, but Marketo is certainly a company that would match up well with Adobe if it wanted to make such a move.

Itworth mentioning that Adobe will be reporting its latest earnings this afternoon.

Facebook has quietly built and deployed an artificial intelligence programming tool called SapFix that scans code, automatically identifies bugs, tests different patches and suggests the best ones that engineers can choose to implement. Revealed today at Facebook@Scale engineering conference, SapFix is already running on Facebookmassive code base and the company plans to eventually share it with the developer community.

&To our knowledge, this marks the first time that a machine-generated fix — with automated end-to-end testing and repair — has been deployed into a codebase of Facebookscale,& writes Facebookdeveloper tool team. &Itan important milestone for AI hybrids and offers further evidence that search-based software engineering can reduce friction in software development.& SapFix can run with or without Sapienz, Facebookprevious automated bug spotter. It uses it in conjunction with SapFix, suggesting solutions to problems Sapienz discovers.

These types of tools could allow smaller teams to build more powerful products, or let big corporations save a ton on wasted engineering time. Thatcritical for Facebook as it has so many other problems to worry about.

Glow AI hardware partners

Meanwhile, Facebook is pressing forward with its strategy of reorienting the computing hardware ecosystem around its own machine learning software. Today it announced that its Glow compiler for machine learning hardware acceleration has signed up the top silicon manufacturers, likeCadence, Esperanto, Intel, Marvell, and Qualcomm, to support Glow. The plan mirrors FacebookOpen Compute Project for open sourcing server designs and Telecom Infra Project for connectivity technology.

Glow works with a wide array of machine learning frameworks and hardware accelerators to speed up how they perform deep learning processes. It was open sourced earlier this year at FacebookF8 conference.

&Hardware accelerators are specialized to solve the task of machine learning execution. They typically contain a large number of execution units, on-chip memory banks, and application-specific circuits that make the execution of ML workloads very efficient,& Facebookteam writes. &To execute machine learning programs on specialized hardware, compilers are used to orchestrate the different parts and make them work together . . .Hardware partners that use Glow can reduce the time it takes to bring their product to market.&

Facebook VP of infrastructure Jason Taylor

Essentially, Facebook needs help in the silicon department. Instead of isolating itself and building its own chips like Apple and Google, iteffectively outsourcing the hardware development to the experts. That means it might forego a competitive advantage from this infrastructure, but it also allows it to save money and focus on its core strengths.

&What I talked about today was the difficulty of predicting what chip will really do well in the market. When you build a piece of silicon, you&re making predictions about where the market is going to be in two years& FacebookVP of infrastructure Jason Taylor tells me. &The big question is if the workload that they design for is the worlflow thatreally important at the time.You&re going to see this fragmentation. At Facebook, wew want to work with all the partners out there so we have good options now and over the next several years.& Essentially, by partnering with all the chip makers instead of building its own, Facebook future-proofs its software against volatility in which chip becomes the standard.

The technologies aside, the Scale conference was evidence that Facebook will keep hacking, policy scandals be damned. There was nary a mention of Cambridge Analytica or election interference as a packed room of engineers chuckled to nerdy jokes during keynotes packed with enough coding jargon to make the unindoctrinated assume it was in another language. If Facebook is burning, you couldn&t tell from here\

Shift Technologies, an online marketplace for used cars, has closed a Series D financing round of more than $140 million in equity and debt.

The round, which consists of about $70 million in debt and $71 million in equity, was led by automotive retailer Lithia Motors. Bryan DeBoer, CEO and president of Lithia, will joinShiftboard of directors.

Previous investors Alliance Ventures, BMW iVentures, DCM, DFJ, G2VP, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners and Highland Capital also participated. This new capital bringsShifttotal financing of equity and debt to $265 million.

Shift, which is based in San Francisco, serves car buyers and sellers. The company, founded in 2013, has built a software platform that lets customers shop for cars, get financing and schedule test drives. Car owners can use the platform to sell their vehicle, as well. Shift says any car it buys must pass a &rigorous& 150+ point inspection.

The company plans to invest in its technology platform and scale its engineering staff from 35 to more than 80 people by the end of 2019, CEO George Arison noted to TechCrunch in an email. Shift employs 380 people. The companyplatform has focused on scaling in California; it covers about 80 percent of that market. But the company has long had its sights set on expanding beyond the Golden State.

Shift is focused on, and is heavily investing in, its peer-to-peer business, in which the company acquires cars from individuals and then sells them. Buying, refurbishing and then selling cars online is a logistics-heavy business pursuit, and one that has seen a number of competitors come and go in the past several years. But Arison says the company has not just survived; it has grown.

Shift didn&t provide revenue numbers. But Arison cited the companymore than 70 percent revenue growth in the past six months as an example of the companysuccess.

The company did have a partnership with rental giant Hertz, but that has since ended.At the time, Shift was going tofeature vehicles from Hertzfleet inventory. It was meant to be a win-win: Hertz getsaccess to a new retail sales channel and Shift benefits from the rental car companyready supply of lightly used cars.

The partnership ended after Hertz opened its own retail stores that competed against Shift