2005: Year of consolidation

Oracle —PeopleSoft, Siebel



Old habits die hard, at least for Oracle Chief, Larry Ellison. Continuing with his almost insatiable shopping spree, he bought no less than 14 companies this year. Some of these include a stake in Indian core banking software firm i-flex Solutions, ProfitLogic, Retek and Oblix. The ones that stood out however, were Oracle's buy-out of Siebel ($5.8 billion) and the completion of its $10.3 billion PeopleSoft takeover. 

With the addition of these 14 to Oracle's ever-growing software bouquet, the company is gung-ho about taking on enterprise software leader SAP head-on.



Seagate — Maxtor



The storage industry seems to be heading toward consolidation. Seagate swallowed its rival hard disk drive (HDD) vendor Maxtor for $1.9 billion. This marriage of storage companies means that Seagate can grab a bigger piece of the storage turf leaving others like Hitachi and Western Digital behind in the storage market. Another plus for Seagate is that it can now bank on Maxtor's manufacturing presence in South East Asia and make better in-roads into China.



Adobe — Macromedia



What happens when PDF-maker merges with Flash creator? A successful bundling of both Adobe and Macromedia products is what Adobe is hoping for. Adobe completed its $3.4 billion deal with Macromedia in December. 

Market watchers expect this deal to cause a major turn in the multimedia publishing and online graphics software market. The Adobe-Macromedia match would prove good competition for software major Microsoft.



Sun — StorageTek



Sun Microsystems's intentions to become a key player in the storage market became evident with its $4.1 billion StorageTek buyout. With StorageTek, Sun gets an extensive spread of storage solutions like disk arrays, tape libraries and storage management software. Since Sun already had an OEM arrangement with StorageTek, its close knowledge of its storage products would be a big plus. 



SBC -AT&T



The biggest telecom marriage of the year was the whopping $16 billion deal that sealed the union of American telecom carrier giants SBC and AT &T. This match portends well for the future of telecom and VoIP. 



Cisco-Scientific Atlanta



In a move that took the industry by surprise networking major Cisco bought over cable set-top box maker Scientific Atlanta for an all-cash deal worth $6.9 billion. Cisco CEO and president John Chambers explained the reasoning that went into the deal in a press statement. "Video is emerging as the key strategic application in the service provider triple play bundle of consumer entertainment, communication and online services. The addition of Scientific-Atlanta further extends Cisco's commitment to and leadership in the service provider market." 

Besides this mega deal, Cisco also bought eleven other niche tech companies including the likes of NetSift, Nemo Systems, Airespace, and Topspin Communications. 



eBay—Skype



Online auction site eBay bought over Internet telephone company Skype Technologies in a $2.6 billion deal. Skype's popular software allows computers to talk to each other for free. "Communications is at the heart of e-commerce and community," said eBay CEO, Meg Whitman.