Data center operator buys its way to a greener carbon footprint
Data center operator nLighten has bought Euclyde, owner of six data centers in neighboring France. One of nLighten’s goals with the acquisition is to reduce its carbon footprint: in France 70% of electricity comes from nuclear power stations, while in nLighten’s home country, Germany, around one-third of it comes from coal, which has the highest carbon intensity of all electricity sources.
HCM vendor UKG buys payroll provider Immedis
UKG’s cloud-based HCM software already delivers a wide range of functions to some enterprise HR departments. Now it’s adding to those capabilities with the acquisition of Immedis, which helps enterprises and mid-size companies operating in more than one country to manage payroll across borders. UKG plans to integrate the new functionality into its software suite as UKG One View later this year.
IBM buys French cloud services firm Agyla
Looking to improve its offering for French clients, IBM has agreed to buy Agyla, a provider cloud platform engineering services. It plans to incorporate Agyla into its IBM Consulting division.
May 2023
Survey company Momentive says yes to STG deal
Symphony Technology Group has closed its acquisition of Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey) for $1.5 billion. STG’s portfolio also includes ERP vendor CAI Software and a stake in cybersecurity firm RSA.
Snowflake adds Neeva’s generative AI to its data warehouse platform
Snowflake has acquired Neeva, a small startup that used generative AI to improve the search experience. The deal came just days after Neeva closed its subscription-based, ad-free search engine. Building a search experience people were willing to pay for, while hard, turned out to be the easy part, according to a farewell blog post from Neeva’s founders: “Convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place.” Now it’s up to Snowflake to convince its customers to change.
IBM to automate cloud data protection with Polar Security acquisition
Data security posture management specialist Polar Security will soon be part of IBM, which plans to integrate the Israeli company into its Guardium range of data security products. There, it’ll help IBM customers pinpoint security risks and compliance violations. IBM didn’t say how much it had paid for the company, but Israeli news site Tech12 put the price at $60 million.
Databricks buys Okera to keep tabs on LLMs
Databricks has been encouraging enterprises to experiment with LLMs, offering Dolly as open source. Now it’s offering its customers a way to keep such models under control with the acquisition of LLM governance specialist Okera.
April 2023
Ciphr adds diversity with Marshall acquisition
Marshall E-learning, a provider of diversity and inclusion training, is now part of Ciphr, a UK-based HR SaaS platform. Ciphr expects the deal will enable it to expand its existing online learning offering.
March 2023
Vista buys insurance software firm Duck Creek
Vista’s latest acquisition is a $2.6 billion niche play: Duck Creek, a developer of specialist software for the insurance industry. The companies say the deal will accelerate Duck Creek’s move to the cloud, allowing it to scale up its business.
Quantive buys OKR consulting firm
Following its acquisition of consulting firm AuxinOKR, strategy execution platform Quantive is rolling out a new consulting division to support enterprises adopting its tools for measuring business results.
Quantexa is loving the Aylien
Quantexa has acquired Aylien, a Dublin-based natural language processing firm specializing in risk management and market insight. It will use Aylien’s NLP skills to enhance its AI-based decision intelligence tools for the finance industry.
Capita lays off employment screening business
Matrix SCM, a British IT staffing agency, has acquired Security Watchdog, a provider of employment screening services, from Capita, the giant IT services business. It’s part of a broader sell-off for Capita, which also let go of three other HR companies in March: Capita Resourcing, HR Solutions, and ThirtyThree. Capita is selling non-core businesses to reduce its debts, and refocusing on public sector and customer experience work.
Key secures Rocket
Mainframe software developer Rocket Software has bought mainframe security specialist Key Resources. The deal will enable it to offer additional security-related services to the mainframe users it works with.
February 2023
Thomas Bravo manages $8B spend on Coupa Software
Coupa Software, a provider of business spend management tools, has been acquired by investment firm Thomas Bravo in an $8 billion deal. Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has taken a minority stake. Thomas Bravo also owns business payments company BottomLine, open finance platform Solifi, data management tool Talend and a raft of security and identity management software companies.
Arm sells software arm
Processor designer Arm has sold Forge, its suite of software development tools for high-performance computing, to Linaro, which develops and supports a range of other Arm-specific software for enterprises. Arm originally acquired Forge in 2016 to support its entry into the HPC market.
Accenture buys Morphus, adds new South-American cybersecurity center
With its acquisition of Brazilian cybersecurity and threat intelligence provider Morphus, Accenture has added a new site from which to supervise its offering of managed security services and advanced analytics. The cyber fusion center in Fortaleza, Brazil, was previously Morphus Labs.
Broadcom and VMware kick their merger can further down road
Broadcom first offered to buy VMware in May 2022, and VMware’s shareholders agreed to the deal in November, but still the deal isn’t done. Now the two companies have formally given themselves another three months—until May 2023—to close the acquisition, and Broadcom representatives say the deal will close by the end of the company’s fiscal year on October 30, 2023.
January 2023
OpenText buys Micro Focus for $5.8 billion
OpenText has closed its acquisition of Micro Focus, a vendor of mainframe modernization and application portfolio management tools. OpenText’s first move on completing the deal was to begin laying off staff. It announced an 8% reduction in workforce to realize $400 million in annual cost savings to help finance the $5.8 million purchase, which it first announced in August 2022.
Dell buys Cloudify
After selling off its stake in VMware, Dell is moving back into the cloud software business with the acquisition of Cloudify. The Israeli startup has developed a cloud orchestration platform to help devops teams automate provisioning.
McKinsey buys machine MLops platform Iguazio
McKinsey is adding to its stable of machine learning experts with the acquisition of software developer Iguazio. In time, it plans to integrate it into QuantumBlack, a McKinsey business unit that has specialized in AI for the last decade. Iguazio is the developer of a commercial MLops platform and two open-source tools: MLRun, for ML pipeline orchestration, and Nuclio, which offers real-time serverless functions for automating application deployment.
HPE buys Pachyderm to automate ML development
Pachyderm, a developer of data pipeline automation tools used in training machine learning models, is now part of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. The company’s software will become part of the HPE Machine Learning Development Environment.
Quantum fusion: IonQ ties up with Entangled Networks
With each of the handful of companies developing quantum computers betting on a different architecture, a cross-platform quantum computing operating system is still a way off. That’s why quantum hardware companies like IonQ are developing their own software tools too. To speed up the process, IonQ has acquired Entangled Networks, a developer of software optimization tools for quantum computers, and is building a new Canadian subsidiary around the software team.
Two ServiceNow partners tie the knot
ServiceNow solutions provider Thirdera has acquired another ServiceNow partner, SilverStorm Solutions, to expand its reach in Europe. Thirdera also operates in South America. Combined, the two ServiceNow Elite-level partners have over 900 employees.
December 2022
IBM buys Octo Consulting Group
Appropriately enough for its eighth deal of 2022, IBM’s latest acquisition is called Octo Consulting Group. Not to be confused with Octo Technology, a French consulting company bought by Accenture in 2017, IBM’s Octo is a US company specializing in government IT modernization projects that was until recently owned by Arlington Capital Partners. Its 1,500 staff will join IBM Consulting.
Intercontinental Exchange’s bid for Black Knight in doubt
Another of the biggest software deals of 2022 is also in doubt. In May, Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange and a host of mortgage technology companies, bid $13.1 billion for Black Knight, a mortgage software company.
In late December, though, the Financial Services Committee of the US House of Representatives wrote to the US Federal Trade Commission to express its concern that the deal could result in too much concentration in the mortgage origination market.
Big though the deal is, it’ll have few consequences for CIOs outside the mortgage services industry.
Cognizant buys AustinCSI and assets of OneSource Virtual
IT services giant Cognizant has added 175 digital transformation consultants in Texas with the acquisition of AustinCSI, a company specializing in the design of cloud and automation systems. It has also acquired 400 specialists from another Texas company, Workday partner OneSource Virtual, and bought Houston-based SAP services company Utegration, bringing it close to 350,000 employees worldwide.
LumApps buys chatbot maker Vizir to improve employee experience
French employee experience platform LumApps has snapped up Vizir, developer of a no code chatbot creation platform, to help enterprises deliver more interactive services to employees. Companies building their own tools for natural language understanding like this will face strong headwinds from the likes of ChatGPT, an interactive version of the giant AI language model GPT that can be trained for use in multiple domains.
November 2022
VMware shareholders approve acquisition by Broadcom
After Broadcom made its offer in May, it’s a step closer to closing the $61 billion deal to buy VMware, after that company’s shareholders voted to accept the offer. VMware is looking to expand its virtualization technologies into the 5G edge computing market, where Broadcom’s radio and networking chip business could give it a foothold.
RegScale, GovReady join forces to implement OSCAL governance formats
RegScale, a developer of governance, risk, and compliance software, has acquired compliance-as-code platform GovReady. The two companies are early adopters of NIST’s Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL), used for representing control catalogs and system security plans in machine-readable format.
SAP service providers join forces
Codestone Group is still expanding. After its May acquisition of Clarivos, the company has added data analytics and BI specialist DSCallards to its collection. The purchase will allow it to expand its services capabilities around SAP and Microsoft ERP tools.
Anonos buys Statice to boost data protection
Anonos, a developer of software for pseudonymizing personal data in use, has acquired Statice, creator of a tool for generating synthetic data. With European regulators cranking up fines for breaches of GDPR, tools that allow enterprises to move data between jurisdictions while maintaining protection will only grow in importance.
October 2022
Sage warms to Spherics’ carbon accounting tool
Financial accounting software vendor Sage has acquired carbon accounting software vendor Spherics. Sage will integrate Spherics’ tool with its own software, but also offer it as a standalone solution. Spherics sucks in accounting system data and uses standard emission factors for various activities to estimate a company’s carbon footprint.
RealVNC adds remote management to VNC Connect
With its acquisition of remote management software developer RPort, RealVNC is extending the capabilities of its VNC Connect remote access tool. It expects IT teams and managed service providers will be able to perform bulk updates of Windows desktops up to 60 times faster than with its existing interactive screen sharing technology.
NTT Data adds to chain of analytics acquisitions
With the acquisition of Aspirent, an analytics advisory firm based in Atlanta, Georgia, NTT Data has added 230 data advisors to its payroll, taking its total number of employees over 130,000.
SandboxAQ spreads its bets in quantum communications
Google alum SandboxAQ is still spending, this time taking stakes in startups Qunnect and evolutionQ. Qunnect is designing components for quantum telecommunications systems, while evolutionQ is developing ways to perform quantum key distribution (QKD) over conventional networks.
ServiceNow extends observability with Era Software
Cloud native log management developer Era Software is now part of ServiceNow, which is planning to use its purchase to help customers improve the performance of the tools they build on its platform.
September 2022
Citrix goes private, merges with Tibco to form Cloud Software Group
Investment firms Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital completed their $13 billion acquisition of Citrix Systems on September 30, combining it with Tibco Software, to form Cloud Software Group. For now they will operate as separate business units and retain their original branding. CSG’s CEO is Tom Krause, formerly president of Broadcom Software.
NTT Data buys Mulesoft consulting firm
Integration platform MuleSoft still belongs to Salesforce, but NTT Data is buying itself a bigger slice of the MuleSoft consulting market with the acquisition of Apisero. Around 1,500 of Apisero’s staff are certified on MuleSoft, for which it provides system integration and managed services from offices around the world, although the majority of its staff are in India. Also in September, NTT Data snapped up the much smaller Umvel, a Mexican digital engineering company.
Big Blue buys little Texan firm
IBM has continued a run of small acquisitions in niche markets, this time buying Dialexa, a software product engineering firm with offices in Dallas and Chicago. The company develops software for other companies’ products — anything from robot mowers to energy trading — and will become part of IBM Consulting.
Ricoh enlarges office communications division with Cenero
Ricoh has bought audiovisual services specialist Cenero to expand its IT services offering in North America. Ricoh already offers managed services around Microsoft Teams Rooms, and its acquisition of Cenero will help it add other unified communications capabilities. Ricoh is trying to reinvent itself as a digital services provider, with a target of making over 60% of its revenue from such services by 2025. It has a way to go: in the second quarter of 2022, digital services accounted for only 40% of revenue, with office printing still making up almost half.
SandboxAQ buys another slice of the crypto auditing market
SandboxAQ, an enterprise SaaS company that spun out of Google in March, has bought young French SaaS provider Cryptosense. SandboxAQ’s first product was a tool to help enterprises inventory and audit all the cryptographic systems they use. Cryptosense is in the same business. Both companies want to help enterprises secure their systems against the threat posed to traditional cryptography by quantum computing.
August 2022
Stratus Technologies joins Smart Global Holdings
Edge computing vendor Stratus Technologies is now part of Smart Global Holdings, a memory module maker and owner of the Cree lighting brand and an IoT company called Penguin Solutions. The company sees the $225 million deal as a way to expand the range of enterprise IT services it offers.
Zaloni sells its data governance platform to Truist
Zaloni has sold its Arena data governance platform to US bank Truist Financial. Zaloni’s chief product officer and chief technology officer will also join the bank, which hopes the analytics and metadata management platform will help reduce its IT costs.
Sage marches into workflow automation
Accounting software vendor Sage has acquired Lockstep, a small Seattle company that automates inter-company accounting workflows. The move will help Sage customers exchange financial data not only with other Sage customers, but also businesses using the 40 other accounting platforms that Lockstep works with.
Signal AI extends its trend monitoring reach
Signal AI, the developer of a platform for identifying business trends in news coverage, has acquired Kelp, a reputation monitoring firm. Kelp is a Signal AI customer, using its External Intelligence platform to monitor corporate reputations and the factors that influence them to help enterprises develop data-driven ESG strategies.
DocHub joins airSlate to consolidate workflows
With its acquisition of DocHub, workflow automation company airSlate will be able to expand its e-signature offering for enterprises.
MariaDB buys CubeWerx
MariaDB has bought CubeWerx, a developer of geospatial software. It plans to add the capabilities to its managed cloud database service, MariaDB SkySQL. The company is named for the open-source database MariaDB, which forked from MySQL when Oracle acquired it in 2010.
July 2022
Salesforce rallies Troops with Slack
In July, Salesforce completed its acquisition of Troops.ai, which provides tools for delivering up-to-date revenue information to sales teams. Salesforce will fold Troops into its Slack communications platform.
Infosys builds base in life sciences consulting
Consulting giant Infosys has swallowed a small Danish firm, Base Life Science, to help it expand its offering for European enterprises in the life sciences industry, particularly around clinical trials and drug development.
IBM observes gap in its portfolio, buys Databand.ai
IBM has acquired Israeli data observability specialist Databand.ai to beef up its IT operations performance management portfolio alongside Instana APM and IBM Watson Studio. Since CEO Arvind Krishna took over in April 2020, IBM has been pursuing a strategy of making small acquisitions — over 25 of them so far — to fill gaps in its offerings.
Ensono adds AndPlus to portfolio
Managed solutions provider Ensono has bought AndPlus, a data engineering firm, continuing a run of acquisitions of small cloud consulting companies: In January, it snapped up ExperSolve, which specializes in moving and modernizing mainframe applications, and last year bought Amido. Ensono is owned by KKR, the owner of BMC Software.
IFS adds Ultimo to its EAM offering
IFS has expanded the enterprise asset management (EAM) capabilities of its ERP platform with the acquisition of Dutch software vendor Ultimo. IFS will continue to offer Ultimo’s software as a stand-alone solution.
For last year’s mergers and buyouts, see The biggest enterprise technology M&A deals of 2022.
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