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Tech Company Buys: The Top 15 Acquisitions of 2010 So Far
By Ericka Chickowski on 2010-07-30



Already more than halfway into 2010, it is clear that mergers and acquisitions activity among technology vendors has certainly picked up significantly. As market values have dropped, creating bargains for value shoppers, and smaller companies have experienced more difficulty obtaining financing, the market for technology mergers and acquisitions has accelerated. Technology vendors have put together several multi-billion dollar deals so far this year as the economy comes out of what many believe is the worst recession since the 1920s. Indeed, there have been more than a handful of deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars as the technology vendor marketplace has experienced consolidation through mergers and acquisitions in 2010. With companies such as Apple, Avnet, Symantec, and VMware among the acquiring companies, the action this year has been relentless among big technology companies and their targets. Channel Insider takes a look at 15 of the biggest acquisitions, all of them close to $100 million or more.
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Purchasing Company: AppleAcquisition Target: QuattroAnnounced: JanuaryPrice: $275 millionIs it a case of monkey-see, monkey-do? Apple bought mobile advertising company Quattro not long after Google's big buy of AdMob in 2009. Many speculate it is a case of Jobs keeping up with the Brins and Pages.

Purchasing Company: VMWareAcquisition Target: ZimbraAnnounced: JanuaryPrice: $100 millionVery early on in the year VMWare bought open source email and collaboration developer Zimbra from Yahoo for about $250 million less than the consumer-centric company paid for it two years prior. VMWare brass say the buy will help it broaden its portfolio offerings for vCloud customers.

Purchasing Company: Iron MountainAcquisition Target: MimosaAnnounced: FebruaryPrice: $112 millionIron Mountain's purchase of Mimosa helps it round out its electronic archiving options. Mimosa's enterprise-class archiving solution will give Iron Mountain the ability to offer customers on-premises archiving of e-mail, SharePoint data and other files.

Purchasing Company: CAAcquisition Target: NimsoftAnnounced: MarchPrice: $350 millionIn a big play to capture more share within the managed services market, CA picked up IT monitoring company Nimsoft, which makes performance and availability solutions targeted squarely at MSPs and emerging enterprises.

Purchasing Company: AvnetAcquisition Target: Bell MicroAnnounced: MarchPrice: $594 millionThe big-time distributor Avnet is continuing on its path of market consolidation with its purchase of Bell Micro, a storage distributor once valued at $3 billion, for a net of around $250 million plus debt.

Purchasing Company: HPAcquisition Target: PalmAnnounced: AprilPrice: $1.2 billionHP's firesale purchase of Palm stemmed the mobile device company's downward slide from its once-mighty reign atop the PDA pedestal. Rumors abound that HP has big plans to leverage Palm's webOS platform to launch a new line of tablet devices to compete with the iPad.

Purchasing Company: Juniper NetworksAcquisition Target: AkeenaAnnounced: AprilPrice: $100 millionJuniper will try to beef up its back-end support of a heterogeneous device ecosystem with the purchase of Akeena, a new media infrastructure company that focuses on smooth rich media streaming regardless of network performance.

Purchasing Company: Symantec Acquisition Target: PGPAnnounced: AprilPrice: $300 millionAnnounced in conjunction with its $70 million acquisition of encryption vendor GuardianEdge, Symantec's purchase of PGP puts it in possession of an extremely powerful and mature encryption key management platform.

Purchasing Company: OracleAcquisition Target: PhaseForwardAnnounced: AprilPrice: $685 millionOracle's diving deep into the lucrative life sciences and healthcare market with the acquisition of PhaseForward, a developer of a SaaS-based solution that helps organizations in this vertical manage clinical research and development from start to finish.

Purchasing Company: IBMAcquisition Target: Sterling CommerceAnnounced: MayPrice: $1.4 billionIBM beefed up its WebSphere portfolio by purchasing supply chain management company Sterling Commerce from AT&T. A well established and successful firm, Sterling is reported to do business with 80 percent of the Fortune 500.

Purchasing Company: CiscoAcquisition Target: Core OpticsAnnounced: MayPrice: $99 millionIn an effort to give its infrastructure engines a little nitrous, Cisco bought CoreOptics, a designer of digital signal processing solutions for high-speed optical networking applications. Cisco reports the acquisition will help it offer service providers with advanced 100 Gbps transmission technology that will be the backbone of today's video hungry internet networks.

Purchasing Company: SAPAcquisition Target: SybaseAnnounced: MayPrice: $5.8 billionIn a play for Sybase's in-memory database technology, mobile technology expertise and business analytics capabilities, SAP put forward a huge chunk of change to expand its capabilities.

Purchasing Company: SymantecAcquisition Target: Verisign Security DivisionAnnounced: MayPrice: $1.28 billionThis acquisition is so big that Symantec even adjusted its logo to include the tell-tale Verisign check mark. Company leaders say the purchase was made primarily for VeriSign's certificate and authentication business.

Purchasing Company: IBMAcquisition Target: Big FixAnnounced: JulyPrice: $400 million (rumored)Big Fix gives IBM a stronger footing with customers seeking endpoint protection, systems lifecycle management, security configuration and vulnerability management, as well as IT compliance coverage.

Purchasing Company: GoogleAcquisition Target: ITA SoftwareAnnounced: JulyPrice: $700 millionGoogle's buy of travel giant ITA Software is causing quite a ruckus in the travel industry, which depends on ITA's solutions to organize flight data and will be used by Google to offer consumers better ways to search flight information.

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