We took a week off from reporting B2B’s nastiest take overs, gentle bids, quiet appointments and brash launches. Needless to say, Salesforce continued its buying spree while we were vacationing in the living room, exploring valleys in the couch cushions and reviewing the art collection. There are exciting deals to watch as the workweek begins and the watch words are safety and security.

Wednesday’s extremist attack on the US Capitol National did have an impact on B2B. The National Association of Manufacturers was among the first of the sector’s associations to condemn the attack on democracy.

“Throughout this whole disgusting episode, Trump has been cheered on by members of his own party, adding fuel to the distrust that has enflamed violent anger,” said NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons. “This is not law and order. This is chaos. It is mob rule. It is dangerous. This is sedition and should be treated as such.”

Press release: https://www.nam.org/series/news/

Criminals don’t only travel to Washington. While porch pirates continue to plague all of us ordering in, life for other ecommerce criminals just got a little harder. The credit monitoring service Equifax will pay $640 million US to acquire Kount INC. Kount is an e-commerce fraud prevention platform based in Boise, Idaho. “There’s been an explosion in the last three to four years of consumers doing everything online and that’s only accelerated during Covid,” Equifax CEO Mark Begor said in a press release.

Press release: https://kount.com/announcements/equifax-to-tackle-e-commerce-fraud-with-640-million-kount-deal

We’ll be keeping an eye out for more deals consolidating cyber-crime prevention tools and security applications as restrictions on our movement continue during vaccine roll-out.

Oh wait! Here’s another one. Red Hat, Inc. has announced its intent to acquire StackRox, a container and Kubernetes-native security applications provider.  The deal reinforces Red Hat’s strategic to deliver a single platform with capabilities that will enable users to build, deploy and securely run any application across the hybrid cloud.

Press release: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acquire-kubernetes-native-security-leader-stackrox?source=searchresultlisting

The following two tabs change content below.

Kate Baggott is the Managing Editor of B2BNN. Her technology and business journalism has appeared in the Technology Review, the Globe and Mail, Canada Computes, the Vancouver Sun and the Bay Street Bull. She is the author of the short story collections Love from Planet Wine Cooler and Dry Stories. Links to recently published pieces can be found at www.katebaggott.com