Today’s Deals Extend – Will Tomorrow’s Expand?

By Chris Selland on November 9, 2009

As I (and many others) have been speculating, Tech M&A is most definitely back.

$GOOG is, as expected, very active, acquiring mobile advertising provider AdMob for $750M as well as Voice over IP (VoIP) provider Gizmo5 for $30M. Neither acquisition opens up any new markets for the company, but deepens and doubles down their presence in mobile and IP telephony.

$ERTS also made a move, acquiring ’social gaming’ startup Playfish – again extending presence in their core (gaming) market.

So what’s next? A couple of interesting predictions from enterprise software guru Ray Wang:

$T or $BT acquires $SAP
$CSCO acquires $CRM

Both deals are quite conceivable and would be game-changers for the acquirers (and acquirees – not to mention their customers).

But, for now at least, it looks like the prevalent strategy is ‘expand and deepen’ rather than ‘enter new markets’.

No game-changers. Yet.

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Chris Selland

CMO at Terametric, a provider of social media measurement and optimization solutions, Expert Advisor at Focus Research, and a regular contributor to the StockTwits community. He has held senior Go-To-Market roles with a number of early & growth-stage companies including SoundBite Communications, Constant Contact and most recently Lumigent Technologies which was acquired by BeyondTrust. Earlier in his career Chris was VP of CRM and Internet Research at the Yankee Group, and later founded Reservoir Partners, a customer strategy research firm that merged with Aberdeen Group, where he became VP of Sell-Side Research.