Salesforce M&A, Google Cloud Data Center, Pureport Hire Top Cloud News

The final week of February is wrapping up with some important nuggets of cloud news. Of course, there’s more out there, including the impact of cloud on earnings at Dell and VMware. This roundup takes a closer look at some announcements that emerged this week from Pureport, Salesforce and Google Cloud.

Pureport Hires Red Hat Distinguished Engineer as CTO

Pureport, the cloud tech firm that interconnects sites and vendors without physical infrastructure, has lured a top engineer away from Red Hat, which IBM bought in late 2019.

Pureport’s Peter Sprygada

Peter Sprygada, who holds extensive expertise in cloud networking and open-source programming, has joined as the startup’s chief technology officer. He succeeds Doug Mittendorf, who now is a lead software engineer at Salesforce.

“Peter’s ability to transform network operations through automation, orchestration and seamless customer experiences will help us drive new standards in this market, and continue to position our platform,” Rich Lee, Pureport CEO, said.

Sprygada comes to Pureport from Red Hat, where for the past four years he held the role of distinguished engineer and served as the chief architect of the Ansible automation platform. Partners also may know Sprygada from his time at Arista and Cisco, among other companies.

At Pureport, Sprygada is tasked with leading the engineering and product management teams. He will oversee all product strategy and engineering, as well as the technical delivery of Pureport’s multicloud fabric platform. Sprygada’s efforts will directly benefit the managed services providers, VARs and other partners who team with Pureport.

“Channel partners are working daily with organizations faced with the challenge of how to effectively deliver today’s multicloud mandates across a seamless network infrastructure,” Sprygada told Channel Futures. “I’m eager to work closely with our partners to deliver cloud-like automation and orchestration to their hybrid and multicloud networking requirements.”

Pureport’s technology so far works with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud. Last September, Pureport achieved AWS Delivery Partner Status for AWS Direct Connect, supporting connections ranging from 50 Mbps to 10 Gbps.

Pureport helps channel partners with technical integration and provides them with training and education, co-branded marketing materials and more.

Sprygada has earned multiple patents that cover areas including network service discovery and automated network device configuration.

Salesforce Snaps Up Vlocity, Says That’s the Last Buy for Now

Salesforce has made another big acquisition but says its buying spree is nearing an end — at least for a while.

During its earnings call earlier this week, Salesforce said it has purchased Vlocity, a cloud and mobile software provider built on the Salesforce platform, for $1.3 billion. Nonetheless, Mark Hawkins, president and CFO of Salesforce, told investors and analysts the company doesn’t see “huge opportunity” to undergo more deals in the near future, according to multiple reports.

“It’s not what we’re working on,” he said.

Last year, Salesforce snapped up Tableau for $15.7 billion and Clicksoftware for $1.4 billion; in 2018, it also bought MuleSoft for $6.5 billion. Despite all that spending, the finance pros over at Motley Fool see no downsides — insight that partners can use as guidance as they consider their Salesforce strategies.

“Getting so many different disparate pieces to work together is no small task,” Nicholas Rossolillo wrote of the many deals, “but Salesforce is more than just making it work. Its legacy sales and service clouds are still growing by respectable percentages, and the newer marketing platform clouds are doing some serious heavy lifting. It’s clear that this cloud platform has become an integral part of many organizations’ software investment and operational strategy.”

To that point, Vlocity adds vertical market expertise in …