Articles about Mergers and Acquisitions

One of the largest independent software companies in the world, CA Technologies, has announced it is acquiring enterprise automation company Automic. The parties signed a definitive acquisition agreement last Thursday, for a transaction that’s worth approximately €600 million (roughly £507m).

The deal has been unanimously approved by both boards of directors, and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of CA’s fiscal 2017. Automic is an enterprise automation company selling ONE -- it’s automation platform.

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SUSE has announced that it will acquire OpenStack and Cloud Foundry from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in a move to accelerate the company's growth and entry into new markets.

The German company will integrate the assets of OpenStack infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) into its own SUSE OpenStack Cloud. SUSE will use Cloud Foundry and its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) assets to help it bring a certified, enterprise-ready solution to market for all of the customers and partners currently using its ecosystem.

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Oracle is showing no desire to slow down it's spending spree after announcing the acquisition of DNS provider Dyn for an undisclosed sum.

The timing of the deal has raised a few eyebrows as, although Dyn powers some of the biggest sites in the world such as Netflix, Twitter and Spotify, in October it was hit by a DDoS attack which took several of its big-name clients offline.

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Google has announced that it has acquired Qwiklabs in order to train developers how to use its cloud services.

Qwiklabs is designed as a way to give developers and IT professionals a hands-on learning platform from which they can gain experience with cloud platforms and the way in which they operate. The company launched in 2012 and its primary focus is teaching its customers how to use the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

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Security firm Symantec is buying US identity theft protection services company LifeLock, Reuters has reported. The deal is worth $2.3 billion (£1.87bn), and it is claimed that this is Symantec’s way of amping up sales at its Norton cybersecurity unit.

According to the report, Norton is still profitable, but its sales are in decline for one simple reason -- mobile. Norton comes preloaded on a large number of traditional computers, but people are turning more towards mobile devices.

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According to the European Commission, Microsoft has made commitments to appease EU antitrust regulators regarding its $26 billion acquisition of the professional social networking site LinkedIn.

The company announced its plan to acquire the site in June for $26 billion, in its largest acquisition to date. The deal would allow Microsoft access to LinkedIn's large user base and would give it an edge in providing cloud-based services -- such as Office 365 -- to businesses.

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In an effort to expand into the auto market, Samsung has announced that it will purchase Harman for $8 billion to gain access to both its automotive and audio offerings.

The American company Harman is best known for its audio equipment, though it also has a large presence in the automotive market. Last year, the company earned over $7 billion, of which its connected car devices and audio systems accounted for 65 percent of the total sales.

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Qulacomm has announced that it will be acquiring NXP Semiconductors in order to fast track its way into the automotive industry as it tries to expand beyond the smartphone market.

The deal is valued at around $47 billion with Qualcomm agreeing to pay $110 a share for NXP. The company will be paying with a mixture of cash on hand and new debt at a price per share that is 11 percent higher than what semiconductor company's shares were trading for when the market closed on Wednesday.

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In one of the biggest media acquisitions of all time, AT&T wants to buy Time Warner, in what is an $85 billion deal. This will enable the carrier to expand beyond being a telecommunications company and allow it to offer the media company's wealth of content to its customers, as it is currently the parent company of CNN, TNT, HBO and Warner Bros.

AT&T will pay $107.50 per share of Time Warner's stock, which is a large premium compared to what the stock was trading for the previous week. Overall, the deal is valued at $109 billion, when the media company's debt is taken into account.

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In an attempt to improve its financial capabilities, IBM will acquire the Promontory Financial Group which will be integrated with its global business and will aid in training its Watson artificial intelligence (AI) platform. The company announced the acquisition on Thursday but it did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.

Promontory was founded by Eugene A. Ludwig, who is a former top banking regulator and a friend of of former President Bill Clinton from law school. The Washington firm became one of the leading financial organizations following the 2008 financial crisis. Promontory's current employees include many former financial regulators from across the globe, and it has advised numerous banks on regulatory matters.

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In an effort to better compete against Apple Music and other music streaming services, Spotify may be considering purchasing SoundCloud. Apparently the two companies are in "advanced talks", that could result in Spotify acquiring its rival that has been valued at $700 million.

Recently, Spotify has faced a great deal of competition from other subscription-based music streaming services, including Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Prime and Deezer.

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SAP has officially announced that it has acquired the startup Altiscale, which offers cloud based versions of the Hadoop and Spark open source software for storing, processing and analyzing many different kinds of data.

Rumors of the acquisition began to circulate a month ago when it was believed that SAP intended to purchase the company for over $125 million. Neither company though would confirm or deny the rumors, but during the course of the next few weeks, SAP executives began to comment on the deal.

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Last week it came to light that Salesforce was considering a takeover of Twitter. Now it appears though that Walt Disney is also interested in placing a bid on the social network which could be used to help deliver its content to even more consumers.

So far it seems that Disney is interested in Twitter's ability to distribute video streaming to a large global audience. If the deal were to go through, it would give the company a new channel to distribute its content, as well as content from both ABC and ESPN which it owns. Now that consumers are watching less television, Twitter could be the perfect means for Disney to provide sports, news and entertainment to its customers.

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Salesforce is reportedly considering purchasing Twitter in a move that would give the software company access to the huge amount of data generated by the social network and could help fuel its push to develop artificial intelligence.

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, has grown his 17-year-old company to compete against Microsoft, Oracle and other big players in the field. Lately, the company has acquired a number of startups working in e-commerce and artificial intelligence. Talks between Twitter and Salesforce are said to be at an early stage but an acquisition could end up helping both companies.

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Apple is on a mission to buy virtually every machine learning start-up it stumbles upon. The latest "victim" in its shopping spree is an Indian-US company called TupleJump. The news was first broken by TechCrunch, and even though Apple is yet to confirm the acquisition there are signals out there to back such an event.

First things first. Apple did give a statement, and a pretty vague one that is arguably open for interpretation. "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans".

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