En medio del coronavirus, 2020 fue impredecible en más formas de las que nadie podría haber imaginado. Pero una cosa que se ha mantenido bastante constante fue el flujo constante de fusiones y adquisiciones (M&A) en la industria tecnológica.
Global technology M&A deals last year totaled €634 billion, up 91,8% year-over-year, according to GlobalData. Among a late wave of big deals were Advanced Micro Devices' €35bn acquisition of Xilinx and Salesforce's €27,7bn acquisition of Slack. As for whether 2021 will keep pace with last year, if January is anything to go by, there won't be a slowdown in big deals in the industry, silicon innovations and collaboration software taking hold. Here are the biggest enterprise technology acquisitions of 2021 to date, in reverse chronological order:
January 28: Workday to acquire Peakon for € 700 million
Finance and human resources software specialist Workday has announced plans to buy Peakon's employee feedback platform for €700 million in cash. Founded in Denmark in 2014, Peakon had raised €68 million in funding to date. It offers organizations a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool to regularly track employee sentiment and other tools to measure workforce happiness, making it a highly complementary addition to HR tools. .HH.Workday SaaS. “Adding Peakon to the Workday family will be very attractive to our customers, especially after an extraordinary past year that has amplified the importance of having a consistent drive in employee sentiment to keep people engaged and productive,” Aneel Bhusri , co-founder and co-named CEO of Workday in a statement.
January 27: SAP acquires Signavio
German software company SAP has announced the acquisition of fellow German Signavio, which specializes in cloud-native business process management and intelligence for an undisclosed amount. Signavio was last valued at €400 million after a €177 million funding round in July 2019. The announcement was made alongside a new SAP product called Rise, a suite of existing SAP software and services aimed at provide clients with “business transformation as a service”. SAP will aim to use Signavio's expertise in business process intelligence to help more clients optimize these processes as they become more digital. “I cannot stress enough how important it is for companies to be able to design, benchmark, improve and transform business processes across the enterprise to support new capabilities and new business models,” said Luka. Mucic, CFO and member of the board of directors of SAP. statement.
January 20: Citrix to acquire Wrike for € 2.250 billion
Virtualization specialist Citrix announced the planned acquisition of collaboration software maker Wrike for $2.250 billion in cash. Citrix already has a digital workplace platform called Workspace and will look to integrate Wrike's equipment and technology into this product. "Together, Citrix and Wrike will deliver the solutions needed to power a digital workspace experience in the cloud that empowers teams to securely access the resources and tools they need to collaborate and work as efficiently as possible anywhere. channel, device or location.” David Henshall, Citrix president and CEO, said in a statement.
January 14: Cisco acquires Acacia for € 4.5 billion
Cisco began the year by buying the optical technology company Acacia for €4.5 billion. Originally announced in July 2019, there has been much back and forth about the deal, with Cisco paying an additional $1.900 billion to secure the purchase across the line. Massachusetts-based Acacia specializes in high-speed optical systems such as digital signal processing, photonic integrated circuit modules, and transceivers for use in data center and network products, a set of technologies that Cisco clearly considers a an integral part of future networks connecting data. hubs, cloud and service providers. "Together, we will initiate our strategy to transform the optical world as we know it with innovative solutions to increase network capacity inside and outside of the data center," said Bill Gartner, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Optical Systems and Optics Group. . . in a report. Acacia CEO Raj Shanmugaraj and company employees will join Cisco's optics business following the deal.
January 13: Qualcomm to acquire Nuvia for $ 1.400 billion
Following a semiconductor consolidation explosion in late 2020, Qualcomm announced the acquisition of Nuvia for around €1.4 billion. The two-year-old Santa Clara-based company was founded by a team of Apple engineers and makes high-performance CPU chips. “The Nuvia team is a recognized innovator and, like Qualcomm, has a strong heritage in creating cutting-edge technologies and products…. Together, we are uniquely positioned to redefine IT and enable our ecosystem of partners to drive innovation and deliver a new class of products and experiences for the 5G era," said Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm president and CEO-elect in a statement. .
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