The most active IT companies in the market for fusion and acquisitions

Between 2000 and 2009 Cisco has bought 48 companies who request financing, followed by IBM with 35, Microsoft 30, CME-25 and Oracle 23.
Data were drawn up by Dow Jones VentureSource and published in the newspaper earlier this week economic Wall Street Journal.
Although the numbers are impressive, they do not reflect the purchasing power of these companies over the last decade because they include companies need financing, especially start-ups. Cisco closed transactions worth several billion U.S. dollars, including WebEx acquisition, valued at 3.2 billion U.S. dollars and that of Scientific-Atlanta for 6.9 billion U.S. dollars, which was not included in the Dow Jones.
According to Dow Jones, Cisco's largest acquisition of a company with financing needs for the past 10 years was a transaction worth 830 million U.S. dollars: acquisition of IronPort Systems, a company secure mail.
The highest price paid by Microsoft for a startup was 800 million U.S. dollars for Tellme Networks in 2007, an Internet phone service provider. The biggest acquisition of EMC is taking a VMware in 2004 for 625 million U.S. dollars, while if it comes to buying IBM security provider data Guardium for 225 million U.S. dollars.
Top of the most active companies in mergers and acquisitions market has been filled by Broadcom, Symantec and HP each 18 acquisitions each, Google with 17 and Sun Microsystem 16. The transactions include the acquisition of YouTube by Google for 1.65 billion U.S. dollars, the acquisition of MySQL by Sun for one billion U.S. dollars and that of LeftHand Networks by HP for 360 million U.S. dollars.
Also, Sun has agreed to be bought by Oracle for more than 7 billion U.S. dollars, but the transaction was not contained in the statistics because of problems with regulators in Europe. Also, Oracle was the company that made acquisitions in 2009 most (5), followed by EMC with four such acquisitions.
2009 was a fairly slow procurement of IT, but experts believe that market activity in mergers and acquisitions will increase in 2010.