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By Laton McCartney
Whenever a recession hits, there's invariably a surge of mergers and acquisitions with cash strapped companies being devoured by much bigger technology firms. Recently, as an example, IBM has entered into negotiations to buy Sun Microsystems; Deloitte and other technology consulting firms are in the process of buying what's left of bankrupt BearingPoint; scandal-plagued Satyam, the Indian outsourcing firm, is selling 51 percent of its equity to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, a number of other vendors have recently been the subject of takeover rumors. Here's a look at a few of them with an assessment of the likelihood they'll merge or be acquired.
Red Hat. The open-source software company last week was rumored to be at the top of Oracle's "to buy" list and was also named by analysts as an attractive takeover target. But with 4th q earnings that exceeded analysts' expectations, the company, which added about 40,000 new customers in 2008, can remain independent.
EMC. Cisco was rumored to be courting EMC earlier this year with an eye to bolstering its data storage capacity, but the moment passed and no other suitors are presently on the horizon,
VMware, Inc. After Cisco's interest in EMC apparently waned, it has been rumored to be eyeing this virtual solutions provider. The irony is that EMC owns the majority share of VMware.
Yahoo. What else is new?
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