We have a few more predictions to go for 2017. Next up is Google and CloudFlare. We predict that Google will acquire CloudFlare in 2017 for $1.5B to $3B. CloudFlare has raised a total of $182M and Google was an investor in the last round of financing. As of 9/30/16, Google had $83B in cash and short term investments, so $3B isn’t out of the realm of possibilities. The reason we believe this will occur is because Google needs CloudFlare to compete against AWS and Azure.
As of today, Google is in 3rd place in content delivery, behind AWS and Azure. On top of that, Google and Azure have no Edge Security story, which is the fastest growing segment in the CDN industry. AWS has an Edge Security story, but they’re still in the crawling phase. By acquiring CloudFlare, Google will leapfrog AWS and Azure in CDN services and Edge Security. There is no other CDN in the world that can help Google fight the competitive cloud wars better than CloudFlare. Google might not even know it, but they will eventually come around and see the value in CloudFlare.