Selling to Facebook
Posted by Ben Kolada on February 7, 2012
Contact: Ben Kolada Rather than buy into Facebook after it debuts on the open market, many companies may consider selling to the social networking giant after its IPO. Facebook is already rich with cash, and is about to become much richer. Meanwhile, its M&A strategy has so far focused on acquiring smaller startups for their [...]
IBM plays small ball in big market
Posted by Ben Kolada on February 2, 2012
Contact: Ben Kolada, Vishal Jain, Chris Hazelton After a streak of batting in the majors, Big Blue recently took a swing in the minor leagues. The company’s recently announced pickup of Worklight is one of the smallest deals it has announced in more than two years. (In fact, Worklight’s $70m price tag is a fraction [...]
Intel: the latest tech giant to buy patents
Posted by Tejas Venkatesh on January 27, 2012
Contact: Thejeswi Venkatesh Intel has announced the acquisition of 190 patents, 170 patent applications and video codec software from RealNetworks for $120m. The transaction comes just eight months after Intel bought SiPort, a Santa Clara, California-based company that made audio-processing semiconductors. We see these moves as an indication that Intel wants to integrate more media [...]
And the Golden Tombstone goes to …
Posted by Brenon Daly on December 23, 2011
Contact: Brenon Daly It’s time to once again hand out our annual award for Tech Deal of the Year, as voted by corporate development executives in our recent survey. For the second straight year, the voting came down to a tight race between two transactions. For 2011, Google’s planned purchase of Motorola Mobility just edged [...]
AT&T’s loss is Verizon’s gain
Posted by Ben Kolada on December 21, 2011
Contact: Ben Kolada In the land of multibillion-dollar telco mergers, sometimes the piecemeal approach is more effective than a one-and-done deal. AT&T attempted to leap over the competition with its proposed $39bn acquisition of T-Mobile USA; however, the world’s largest telecom company fell flat on its face. In failing to secure the T-Mobile takeover, AT&T [...]
A December rebound in tech M&A
Posted by Brenon Daly on December 9, 2011
Contact: Brenon Daly After three months of basically standing on the sidelines, tech dealmakers have stepped back into the market in a big way in December. During just the first week of the final month of 2011, the value of announced transactions across the globe hit $8.6bn, led by SAP’s announcement of the largest-ever SaaS [...]
BMC rumored to be going mobile
Posted by Brenon Daly on December 2, 2011
Contact: Brenon Daly Rumors are swirling that BMC will announce the acquisition of AirWatch, a purchase that would extend the systems management provider’s reach into the fast-growing mobile device market. The deal, which may print next week, would mark the first major move to consolidate the highly fragmented mobile device management (MDM) space, a market [...]
Securing a tweet
Posted by Brenon Daly on November 29, 2011
Contact: Wendy Nather Whisper Systems has announced that it has been acquired by Twitter (appropriately enough, the news was tweeted). Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but given Whisper’s emphasis on Google Android security, we expect that the deal was as much about the brains behind the technology as it was about the tools [...]
A potentially expensive missed call
Posted by Brenon Daly on November 28, 2011
Contact: Brenon Daly With AT&T’s planned purchase of T-Mobile USA now looking increasingly unlikely to close, we may have to take an eraser to our deal totals for 2011 – a very big eraser. Like most other M&A databases, The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase tallies transactions by their date of announcement rather than close. (However, we [...]
What to do with webOS?
Posted by Brenon Daly on November 21, 2011
Contact: Brenon Daly, Chris Hazelton Investors can only hope that Hewlett-Packard doesn’t announce any ‘bold, transformative steps’ this afternoon like it did the last time it discussed its quarterly financial results. Recall that it was just mid-August when the tech giant unveiled a dramatic overhaul of its business: looking to jettison its $40bn PC division [...]
keep looking »