Despite its deep pockets and focus on new product developments, Microsoft hasn’t made a single acquisition this year, according to CB Insights. Although the company sealed some deals in 2010 (Sentillion for example), these were all announced in 2009. As of Sept. 24, Microsoft has yet to announce a single acquisition in 2010. In fact, every other major tech company in the world has acquired at least 3 companies while Microsoft continues to keep a tight hold of its purse strings.
Perhaps Microsoft could learn a trick or two from Google. The Internet giant’s acquisition pace is significantly greater – almost double – of the next most acquisitive tech company, IBM. Google’s mix of acquisitions is quite varied with them doing larger acquisitions ($100 million plus) and also doing smaller talent acquisitions (the popularly coined “acqu-hire”), according to CB Insights. What’s more, Google completed 23 acquisitions year-to-date. As if making up for lost time, this year’s total is equivalent to Google’s cumulative acquisition total from 2007 to 2009.
Acquisition-happy IBM recently announced it will be acquiring Blade Network technologies, a provider of blade and top-of-rack switches as well as network virtualization software for a rumored sum of $400 million.
And then there’s Facebook which, as CB Insights reports, has jumped ahead of industry stalwarts such as Cisco and Oracle. That said, the social networking titan’s acquisitions are considerably more niche than the purchases being made by the likes of industry stalwarts such as Oracle, Dell, Cisco and Apple. Consider, for example, Hewlett Packard which just completed its acquisition of data-storage maker 3Par for $2.35 billion. The deal followed in the footsteps of a bidding war with Dell as HP aims to increase its data storage and cloud computing capabilities.
Edited by
Erin Harrison