History 2004: Who Bought Whom in 2003?

2003 seemed much more active in terms of acquisitions than previous years.

In fact, however, there were hardly more than last year, and fewer than in 2000 and 2001.

This impression of more activity is probably attributable to EMC’s dramatic acquisitions of Documentum and Legato, in particular, not to mention VMware.

Officially, the acquisition of IBM’s HDD business by Hitachi was dated January 1, 2003, but we included it in our 2002 end-of-year round-up, since as of December of that year, the deal had been entirely completed.

In 2003, there’s no question EMC went on the biggest binge, with 4 acquisitions, 2 of which were the only transactions last year to post over the billion dollar mark.

Its new rival (at least in software), Veritas, came next with 3 acquisitions. This should come as no surprise, since software was the most volatile business in terms of acquisitions, accounting for 40% of last year’s total. Consolidation had to come eventually.

After software, the 2 other leading business areas for acquired companies was, at 11 %, switches and directors, followed by the acquisition of one distributor by another.

Just under 1/3 of the acquired companies were start-ups, all of them American.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 192 on January 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.