Since the beginning of the year, there has been a spate of acquisitions by companies either in the SOA space, BPM space, Enterprise 2.0 space, or other IT management areas.
Consider just a few of the acquisitions have been announced since January 1st:
- TIBCO Software announced that it has acquired privately-held Foresight Corporation, a leading provider of transaction automation solutions and EDI productivity tools.
- Progress Software announced it was acquiring Savvion, a pioneering and leading provider of Business Process Management (BPM) technology.
- BMC Software said it has acquired Phurnace Software, a leading developer of automation software that significantly reduces the cost, complexity and risk to deploy and configure Java-based applications on physical, virtual and cloud environments.
Oracle announced the acquisition of Silver Creek Systems, a data quality vendor, expected to enhance the vendor's offerings in MDM and data hub, product lifecycle management, supply chain and ERP applications.
EMC Corporation announced that it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Archer Technologies , a provider of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software.
Shopify, a provider of turnkey hosted e-commerce solutions, is acquiring MNDCreative, developers of the StoreSync application which extends Shopify's online store tracking, reporting and management functionality to the Apple iPhone with an integrated mobile interface.
- Jive, a social business software company, announced it is buying Filtrbox, a provider of real-time social media monitoring and engagement software.
- Of course, in the analyst world, there was also Gartner's announcement that it acquired the analyst firm Burton Group.
- And, lest we forget, there's the pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, which will probably go through soon.
This huge surge in acquisition activity may suggest the unleashing of pent-up demand, since many companies hunkered down and braced for the worst during last year's economic tsunami. Now, the money is beginning to fly in all directions as vendors look to recast their suites and services for the coming economic upswing.
History teaches us that in periods following economic downturns, the IT industry deck tends to get reshuffled in big ways, and new leaders emerge with new paradigms. Things are getting interesting.
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