March 2026 M&A Recap: SAP, Eaton Headline Month’s Deals

At the end of the first quarter of 2026, the channel saw several key acquisitions in March.

Significant players in the channel have made these moves to help provide their customers with improved services, stronger solutions, and expanded expertise. Dive into the acquisitions from the month and don’t forget to catch up on February’s M&As, if you missed out on those.

SAP acquires Reltio for enterprise AI data push

SAP has recently acquired Reltio Inc., a master data management (MDM) software provider, which will help their customers make their SAP and non-SAP enterprise data AI-ready.

SAP customers will be able to rely on trusted, high-quality data across SAP and non-SAP sources that Joule and Joule Agents use to deliver faster time-to-value for business AI.

“Reltio is a natural fit with SAP,” said Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product & Engineering. “Acquiring them will further improve our position as a leading business AI provider, combining SAP and non-SAP data to deliver data context that business AI requires. AI cannot reach its full potential when data is fragmented across business units, platforms, and domains without connection or context.”

Reltio’s data cleansing, unification capabilities, and agent-driven workflows will work alongside SAP Business Suite applications after this acquisition is completed, improving decisions, reducing integration complexity, and delivering trusted, consistent data for successful business processes and AI use cases. 

Reltio also offers prebuilt, industry-specific “velocity packs” that include data models, rules, matching logic and integrations, and solutions for sectors like life sciences, healthcare, and financial services.

Eaton acquires Boyd Thermal

Eaton has completed the acquisition of liquid-cooling solutions provider Boyd Thermal, boosting the company’s position as an end-to-end solutions provider to data center customers worldwide.

Boyd Thermal provides thermal components, systems, and ruggedized solutions for data centers, aerospace, and other end markets. Their engineering and customer-driven development expertise will further enable Eaton to support rapid, reliable deployments, along with their capabilities in aerospace thermal management technology being able to augment Eaton’s solutions.

“Boyd Thermal’s expertise in liquid cooling will enable us to continue to meet soaring AI-driven demand. We’ll deliver integrated solutions from grid to chip that boost reliability, speed deployments, and create greater value for customers worldwide,” said Paulo Ruiz, Eaton CEO. “We’re excited to welcome the Boyd Thermal team to Eaton and work together to meet the growing needs of our data center customers.”

EchoStor set to acquire Pennant Networks

EchoStor Technologies acquired Pennant Networks to enhance EchoStor’s managed services capabilities and to give the company an immediate and credible presence in the sector.

Pennant Networks primarily provides solutions and managed services to the Life Sciences vertical, including research- and clinical-phase companies, biotech-focused venture capital firms, global pharmaceuticals, Contract Biomanufacturers, and scientific research organizations. 

“This acquisition represents a strategic step forward as we expand into highly specialized, high-value markets,” said Mike Johnson, CEO, EchoStor. 

“Life Sciences demands more than technical expertise; it requires a partner who understands complex regulatory frameworks, data integrity, security, and the operational discipline that defines the industry. Pennant’s team brings immediate credibility and proven services capabilities to leading Life Sciences organizations. This positions EchoStor for sustained growth in Life Sciences and advances our long-term vision of building a market-leading platform purpose-built for complex, regulated industries.”

Pennant Networks will continue to serve its customers through the same teams and service approach, while gaining access to EchoStor’s broad technical bench, specialty practices, expanded manufacturer partnerships, and delivery capabilities. 

Coframe acquires HaystacksAI

Coframe has acquired HaystacksAI, an AI-powered growth and sales intelligence startup, and has installed Haystacks’ Founder and CEO, Bo Mohazzabi, as their new vice president of go-to-market.

The acquisition accelerates Coframe’s development of the Coframe Autonomous Growth Agent and marks the launch of an AI-native growth engine built for the era of agentic transformation.

According to Coframe, the technical DNA between HaystacksAI and Coframe is a natural fit. By applying LLM-driven behavioral analysis. HaystacksAI’s AI agents analyzed millions of open-source profiles, along with issues and comments, to generate technical outreach.

“Bo is a rare find. He doesn’t just bring sales leadership. He brings a founder’s perspective on how to build AI GTM systems that scale,” said Josh Payne, CEO and Founder of Coframe. “By building this AI-native GTM engine, we’re moving away from throwing headcount at the revenue problem. That efficiency goes straight to offering the best products and pricing possible to our customers.”

MariaDB to acquire GridGain

MariaDB has announced the acquisition of GridGain Systems, Inc., a provider of in-memory computing and the creator of the open-source Apache Ignite.

MariaDB’s reliability, combined with GridGain’s in-memory speed, enables MariaDB to design a new high-velocity, real-time category to address the AI Latency Gap, which is becoming a significant issue for enterprises in the age of rising agentic workloads.

“The rise of agentic workloads has placed unprecedented demands on enterprise infrastructure, causing requirements to explode and requiring a level of scale and sub-millisecond latency that traditional systems simply weren’t built to handle,” said Rohit de Souza, CEO of MariaDB. “By uniting our platform with GridGain’s in-memory data grid, we are entering a new weight class. This enables us to provide a high-performance, scalable, open alternative to the rigid lock-in of Oracle and the fragmented complexity of hyperscalers.”

Further, the integration of GridGain with MariaDB will replace fragmentation with a unified, hybrid-cloud platform capable of handling transactional, analytical, and AI use cases in a single, high-velocity system backed by reliable, enterprise support from a single company.

Arctiq acquires Shadow-Soft

Provider of professional IT solutions and managed services, Arctiq, has acquired Shadow-Soft, a technology services firm with deep expertise in observability, automation, and modern platform operations.

Shadow-Soft’s experience includes expertise with Dynatrace and Red Hat, and they join Arctiq while continuing to support customers, while contributing their expertise to Arctiq’s broader engineering and services organization across North America.

“Shadow-Soft adds exceptional technical depth to our team and strengthens our delivery capabilities globally,” said Paul Kerr, CEO of Arctiq. “As organizations adopt AI-driven applications and operate more complex digital environments, visibility, and automation across infrastructure, applications, and security become essential. The expertise this team brings in observability and platform operations will help our customers run more resilient, intelligent environments at scale.”

Shadow-Soft Founder & CEO James Chinn added: “Joining Arctiq allows us to bring that engineering capability to a much broader customer base while giving our clients access to a larger global services platform and expanded innovation across infrastructure, security, and AI-driven operations.”

Mindjoin announces Solteir acquisition

Mindjoin has made the strategic acquisition of Solteir to expand its energy and AI infrastructure platform.

Solteir is an infrastructure company that originally focused on power development and hosting for Bitcoin mining and other high-performance compute applications.

Through the acquisition, Solteir’s technology, energy infrastructure platform, and development pipeline were integrated into Mindjoin’s expanded AI compute strategy.

Together, the combined company will focus on deploying scalable energy-backed compute facilities capable of supporting next-generation AI systems.

Further, Mindjoin is committing significant new capital to accelerate the development of the infrastructure platform originally built by Solteir. It will support the expansion of power capacity, electrical infrastructure, and large-scale compute deployment.

Signal AI acquires Memo

Signal AI, an AI-driven reputation and risk intelligence organization, is acquiring Memo, a platform providing readership data directly from publishers.

Memo’s real readership metrics will integrate into Signal AI’s reputation and risk intelligence platform and services. This integration will give Chief Communications Officers (CCOs) and reputation management teams a clear, holistic view of how their stories perform, what’s shaping their reputation, and which narratives pose a genuine threat to their brand.

Among the benefits of the acquisition for Signal AI customers are the elimination of vanity metrics, the enablement of impact-based crisis intelligence, and C-suite-ready PR measurement.

“Our core mission at Signal AI is to serve today’s modern communications leaders and help them protect brand value and build trust,” said David Benigson, CEO & founder of Signal AI. “The future with Memo means a more powerful way to measure reputation for today’s leading organizations, accelerating Signal AI’s mission towards helping leaders see clearly, decide confidently, and act boldly.”

GlobalData acquires Cambridge Healthcare Research

GlobalData Plc has announced the completion of GlobalData Healthcare’s acquisition of Cambridge Healthcare Research (CHR), a competitive intelligence (CI) solutions business serving the global pharma, biotech, medical device, and wider life-sciences sectors.

Through this acquisition, GlobalData Healthcare’s CI capability will be deepened alongside Deallus – an acquisition from 2025 – and extend the Group’s reach to more clients and stakeholders.

It will combine shared CI heritage, leading brands, and experienced teams, enabling GlobalData to create a differentiated offering that unleashes the full potential of a CI function for life sciences organizations.

“Bringing Cambridge Healthcare Research, Deallus, and GlobalData together strengthens our competitive intelligence and decision support offering at every level – from analytical CI coverage of an indication of interest to custom consulting coverage for their highest priority assets,” said Mike Danson, CEO of GlobalData.