Acquire to Aspire....
Steve Ballmer discussed Microsoft’s acquisition plans at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week. The sound bite was “Microsoft will acquire 20 companies a year for the next several years”. This is true. In fact, we have been acquiring 20 companies a year for the past several years. This was news to some and has been widely reported in the press this week.
We are acquiring companies in many different market segments. To give you a flavour for the kinds of companies we have been acquiring here is a list of the 13 companies acquired so far this year:
· Jellyfish.com October 2007 - Online discount shopping site.
· Parlano August 2007 - maker of MindAlign - enterprise group chat
· AdEcn July 2007 - Advertising Exchange Platform
· Stratature June 2007 - Unified Master Data Management Solution
· Dundas June 2007 - Charting controls for SQL Server
· Engyro June 2007 - Interoperability software for Systems Center
· aQuantive, Inc May 2007 - Advertising network and agency
· SoftArtisans OfficeWriter May 2007 -Reporting authoring in Microsoft Office. People and technology acquisition, but not the whole company.
· ScreenTonic SA, May 2007 - Mobile advertising solutions
· devBiz Business Solutions, March 2007 Web interface for Microsoft Team Foundation Server
· Tellme Networks, Inc., March 2007 - Voice recognition, IVR services
· Medstory, Inc, February 2007 - Health care search technology
· Secured Dimensions, January 2007 - Secured Software Provisioning
