2018 has been a year of notable acquisitions for major IT companies

Throughout much of 2018, numerous legacy tech companies have been reaching deals to acquire smaller cloud and software providers.

• SAP acquired Qualtrics in November, paying $8 billion for the survey software company.
• IBM bought Red Hat for $34 billion in late October, accounting for the third-largest tech merger ever, as well as IBM’s largest acquisition.
• Adobe acquired Marketo, a marketing software provider, for $4.75 billion in September.
• Cisco bought Duo Security for $2.35 billion in August, making it Cisco’s second-largest security-related acquisition.
• Broadcom acquired enterprise software company CA Technologies in July for $18.9 billion.
• Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock in June in an effort to move beyond Windows and other products toward cloud and online service offerings.
• Salesforce acquired Mulesoft in a $6.5 billion deal. Mulesoft makes software that stitches together a variety of cloud services, and Salesforce can use this technology to help customers sync data cross apps.

With the prevalence of giants like Amazon Web Services and Google having strong presences in the Cloud market, as well as young start-ups, these older tech companies need to stay relevant in this market. Acquisitions like these provide a foot in the door for the cloud market offering opportunity beyond the traditional software products these companies have provided in the past. It will be interesting to watch for acquisitions such as these in the coming years, and see what effects this will have on vendors in these markets.

Source: CNBC