Microsoft agreed to acquire LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in cash, giving it the world’s largest social network for professional contacts.
LinkedIn highlights:
- 19 percent growth year over year (YOY) to more than 433 million members worldwide
- 9 percent growth YOY to more than 105 million unique visiting members per month
- 49 percent growth YOY to 60 percent mobile usage
- 34 percent growth YOY to more than 45 billion quarterly member page views
- 101 percent growth YOY to more than 7 million active job listings
Microsoft said LinkedIn will retain its distinct brand, culture and independence. Jeff Weiner will remain CEO of LinkedIn, reporting to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.
“The LinkedIn team has grown a fantastic business centered on connecting the world’s professionals,” Nadella said. “Together we can accelerate the growth of LinkedIn, as well as Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics as we seek to empower every person and organization on the planet.”
“Just as we have changed the way the world connects to opportunity, this relationship with Microsoft, and the combination of their cloud and LinkedIn’s network, now gives us a chance to also change the way the world works,” Weiner said. “For the last 13 years, we’ve been uniquely positioned to connect professionals to make them more productive and successful, and I’m looking forward to leading our team through the next chapter of our story.”
- LinkedIn’s Project Falco is building a disaggregated switching platform to enable a programmable data center fabric on top of an open network operating system. LinkedIn has said its goal is to move toward “a fully-automated, self-healing, and purpose-built application-centric network that operates on its own. ” https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/06/openswitch
- LinkedIn’s 2015 annual report discussed significant investments in data centers that the company was expecting to make to handle future growth and new services.
The LinkedIn website and related infrastructure are hosted in multiple third-party facilities in multiple cities in the U.S. and in Singapore.
LinkedIn Develops its Own Data Center Switch
LinkedIn’s engineering team has developed its own data center switch to keep up with the rapidly growing traffic demands of its professional, social network.
The new switch, dubbed “Pigeon”, is a 3.2 Tbps switching platform that can be used as a leaf or spine switch. It uses Broadcom’s latest Tomahawk silicon (32X100G) and switch software developed in house.
In a blog post, Zaid Ali Kahn describes why the company decided to take on the difficult task of switching software code development rather than relying on an existing network equipment supplier. Key reason include ongoing bugs, unneeded features, lack of a Linux-based platform support tools such as Chef/Puppet/CFEngine, out-of-date monitoring capabilities, and the high-cost of scaling the software license.
The Pigeon switch will be deployed in LinkedIn’s upcoming data center in Oregon.
