The biggest enterprise technology M&A deals of 2023

Antitrust regulators in the US and Europe are proving increasingly willing to hold technology giants to account, delaying proposed acquisitions and enforcing commitments they made to secure past deals. It took Broadcom 59 weeks spanning three fiscal years to get approvals from around the world for its $69 billion acquisition of VMware, while the FTC is still fighting a rearguard action against Microsoft’s acquisition of games studio Activision, almost two years after the deal was first announced.

Gartner forecasts this regulatory oversight will have a chilling effect on large M&A deals, and could encourage buyers to consider multiple smaller acquisitions instead, it says in a new report, Top Trends in M&A for 2024.

At the same time, economic uncertainty is depressing the value of small technology startups, making them more attractive. CIOs of well-capitalized enterprises needing those startups’ technologies should consider acquiring them rather than becoming customers, Gartner says. It expects to see more of what it calls “techquisitions” like this.

AI, in particular, could make for a good techquisition, as it represents an easy way for enterprises lacking the skills or time to build their own AI capabilities to buy their way in. Gartner expects such deals to lead to a wave of AI acquisitions in 2024.

But AI isn’t just an acquisition target; it can also be a tool to facilitate mergers, Gartner says. Enterprises should consider using it to analyze and negotiate letters of intent, contracts, and transition services agreements (TSAs).

Financial services consultancy WTW also expects a move toward smaller deals with a focus on AI in 2024. “Deal success will depend on the buyer’s ability to build a culture that supports innovation with AI, and its power to enhance the employee experience,” says Jana Mercereau, WTW’s head of corporate M&A consulting, Great Britain.

For CIOs, mergers and acquisitions can disrupt strategic rollouts, spell a need to pivot to a new solution, signal sunsetting of essential technology, provide new opportunities to leverage newly synergized systems, and be a bellwether of further shifts to come in the IT landscape. Keeping on top of activity in this area can help your company make the most of emerging opportunities and steer clear of issues that often arise when vendors combine.

Here, CIO.com rounds up of some of the most significant tech M&As of 2023.

December 2023

Two investment funds buy Alteryx

Analytics cloud platform Alteryx is going private. It’s agreed to be acquired by Clearlake Capital and Insight Partners in a deal valued at $4.4 billion. Alteryx CEO Mark Anderson said the deal will provide his company with increased working capital and access to industry expertise to grow. Clearlake already owns stakes in a number of enterprise technology firms, including Kofax, Metricstream, Perforce, and Precisely. Insight’s portfolio includes Augury, Camunda, Docker, and Veeam.

Silver Lake sells parts of Software AG to IBM

IBM has agreed to buy the StreamSets and webMethods integration-platform-as-a-service enterprise technology platforms from Software AG for $2.13 billion. It’s an odd move for Software AG — its CEO recently put the “super iPaaS” at the very heart of his strategy — but great news for shareholder Silver Lake, which bought a majority stake in July in a deal valuing the whole company at $2.4 billion. The sale will leave Software AG with four main product lines: Aris for business process mining; Alfabet for managing IT transformation; Cumulocity for IoT; and Adabas & Natural, its legacy mainframe modernization programming languages.

Salesforce buys Spiff to spiff up compensation tracking capabilities

Salesforce has agreed to buy Spiff, a developer of software that tracks sales commissions. It plans to integrate it into its Sales Cloud platform to enhance its performance management functionality. The majority of Spiff’s customers use Salesforce as their CRM, and its software is sold through Salesforce’s AppExchange. 

ServiceNow expands process mining with Ultimate acquisition

ServiceNow has bought another company — and despite its name, it surely won’t be the last — to expand the process mining capabilities of its Now Platform. UltimateSuite’s task mining software analyzes keystrokes and mouse clicks to identify automation opportunities and streamline repetitive work.

Cognizant buys Thirdera to boost its ServiceNow capabilities

IT outsourcer Cognizant has snapped up Thirdera, a ServiceNow partner based in Colorado, and added almost 1,000 employees to its workforce of almost 350,000. Of particular interest was Thirdera’s in-house online training platform, Thirdera University, which Cognizant plans to use to train up its own staff.

Inetum buys another ServiceNow partner, Unifii

There’s more consolidation in the ServiceNow ecosystem. French IT services company Inetum has snapped up Unifii, a ServiceNow partner operating in the UK and Ireland, giving it a total of around 500 ServiceNow experts in Europe.

Nintex buys Skuid to add low-code to its process automation tool

Process intelligence and automation specialist Nintex has agreed to buy Skuid, developer of a low-code tool used by 600 companies to build business applications. It plans to combine Skuid’s platform with its own.

FTC takes its case against Microsoft’s $68.7 billion bid for Activision Blizzard to appeals court

The US Federal Trade Commission is still trying to reverse Microsoft’s acquisition of games developer Activision Blizzard. On December 6, it asked an appeals court in California to overturn a lower court decision allowing the deal to go ahead. Meanwhile, in October, Microsoft announced it closed the deal after obtaining approval from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, the only other regulatory hold-out.

Activision Blizzard’s apps are not typically authorized on enterprise networks, but when the deal was first announced, it seemed there was a chance its technology to create and animate virtual worlds could make it into the workplace. Back then, Microsoft said the acquisition would give it the building blocks for the metaverse. However, since then, Microsoft has laid off 100 staff in its industrial metaverse unit, essentially closing it down.

Insight acquires Google Cloud partner SADA

IT services company Insight Enterprises has expanded its multicloud capabilities with the acquisition of cloud consultant SADA. The deal adds 850 Google Cloud experts to Insight’s 14,000-strong workforce. Insight already works with Microsoft Azure and AWS.

November 2023

OpenText sells part of its Micro Focus acquisition to Rocket Software

OpenText swallowed Micro Focus in a $5.8 billion deal that closed in January 2023 — but it couldn’t digest a big chunk of it: the application modernization and connectivity (AMC) business that accounted for 18% of Micro Focus revenue in 2022. Now it’s passed the AMC business on to Rocket Software, a specialist in mainframe modernization, for $2.28 billion. Rocket has already made a couple of smaller acquisitions this year, and in July lost a bidding war for Software AG, which has a substantial application modernization portfolio of its own.

Cisco’s $28 billion acquisition of Splunk could close sooner than expected

Enterprise and cloud protection company Splunk could be part of Cisco a year from now, following a $28 billion bid from the networking equipment vendor. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins sees the acquisition as a way for the company to expand its existing security products into a full-stack observability platform. He initially expected to close the deal by October 2024, but it could happen far sooner since Splunk says the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust act has expired with no action by the Federal Trade Commission, removing one obstacle to closing.

Broadcom closes VMware acquisition

Broadcom secured the last remaining approval needed for its $69 billion acquisition of VMware from Chinese regulators, a month after its self-imposed deadline of October 30, the end of its fiscal year. It celebrated by laying off 1,200 VMware employees and ditching the company’s end-user computing and security businesses to focus on creating private and hybrid cloud environments for large enterprises.

Blackstone buys Civica for $2.5B

Blackstone has acquired UK software developer Civica from Partners Group for $2.5 billion. (Blackstone also owns CIO.com’s publisher, Foundry.) Civica develops applications for state and local governments including analytics, workflow automation, and workforce and financial management.

Mainline Information Systems joins HIG

Investment fund HIG Capital has picked up Tallahassee-based IT services company Mainline Information Systems. The fund already holds stakes in dozens of other tech companies, including other IT services specialists such as Boston-based ECI or General DataTech in Dallas, and ecosystem integration software vendor Cleo.

KPMG adds Salesforce expertise in Europe

KPMG is growing its enterprise software footprint in France. It’s acquired French Salesforce specialist iCom Cloud, adding 100 consultants to its workforce. It’s also just closed its acquisition of Censio Karamba! with 200 SAP consultants, and last year bought SilverProd, a specialist in Microsoft Dynamics.

Aptean buys another transportation software company

Aptean, a provider of niche enterprise applications for vertical markets, has added another transportation management application to its portfolio, acquiring UK-based 3T Logistics & Technology Group.

PagerDuty calls on Jeli for help with incident management

Operations management specialist PagerDuty is expanding its cloud-based services with its acquisition of the Jeli.io platform. It plans to integrate it with the rest of the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to provide additional analysis and learning capabilities around incident management.

Exterro buys Divebell for data discovery

Legal governance, risk and compliance software developer Exterro has acquired Divebell, provider of a data discovery service. Exterro plans to combine its existing services with Divebell’s as a single platform.

ISG buys Ventana Research

Information Services Group, a technology advisory firm, has acquired Ventana Research and its database, which tracks more than 2,000 software vendors. The companies provide tools to help CIOs evaluate software and SaaS suppliers.

October 2023

Oracle acquires field service management add-on for NetSuite

Oracle has bought Next Technik, the developer of a field-service management application, and plans to incorporate the add-on into NetSuite, its mid-market cloud ERP suite. It’s rebranding the product as Field Service Management by NetSuite, and will soon begin selling the product directly. For now, it’s available through Next Technik in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada.

Atlassian pays almost $1 billion for Loom

Atlassian, the developer of work management tools such as Jira, Confluence, and Trello, has agreed to acquire video messaging platform Loom for $975 million in stock and cash. It’s betting big that workers will prefer to send one another asynchronous video messages rather than text.

AMD plans to acquire AI software company Nod.ai

Chipmaker AMD is taking a leaf out of rival Nvidia’s playbook with a plan to buy AI software developer Nod.ai for an undisclosed sum. Nvidia has turned itself into a trillion-dollar company by building a full stack of generative AI models, tools to create them, and hardware to run them. In contrast to Nvidia’s proprietary software approach, AMD is pinning its hopes on an open-source strategy to drive demand for its hardware.

September 2023

Cisco closes acquisition of Accedian

Accedian, the developer of the Skylight performance analytics platform to monitor multi-cloud, multi-vendor networks, is now part of Cisco. For the last six years, it’s been majority-owned by Bridge Growth Partners, which also holds stakes in enterprise data management company Syniti and event broker vendor Solace.

SAP adds LeanIX to its software portfolio

SAP is adding enterprise architecture management specialist LeanIX to its software stable. SAP hopes LeanIX’s AI-powered tool can help customers move off its legacy ERP system and onto S/4HANA in the cloud. But recent research by LeanIX showed that only 12% of SAP customers have completed their move to the cloud, eight years after S/4HANA was released and just four years before SAP ends mainstream support for its predecessor, ECC6.

Akeneo buys Unifai to clean up product catalogs

Product information management (PIM) specialist Akeneo has acquired Unifai, which uses AI for data collection, cleansing, and categorization. Akeneo plans to roll Unifai’s tools into its Product Cloud offering, where it’ll help with supplier data onboarding and pricing integration.

Rocket Software integrates tcVision developer BOS

Rocket Software, the company that lost out in July’s bidding war for Software AG, has landed on another acquisition target. On September 7, it bought BOS, a German developer of data integration tools, including tcVision, which has been renamed Rocket Data Replicate and Sync. The deal will help Rocket round out its portfolio of mainframe modernization tools.

August 2023

IFS buys Falkonry to boost its ERP asset management services

IFS has agreed to acquire Falkonry, developer of an AI-based time-series data analytics tool. IFS plans to incorporate it into its ERP platform to boost its enterprise asset management (EAM) services capabilities.

Adobe-Figma deal runs into regulatory trouble

Adobe’s plan to buy one of the largest rivals to its online design tool Creative Cloud is having less luck with competition regulators. On August 7, the European Commission called in Adobe’s September 2022 agreement to buy Figma for $20 billion for a full investigation, while the UK Competition and Markets Authority said in late June it would oppose the deal unless Adobe made undertakings to avoid the deal resulting in a substantial lessening of competition. The US Department of Justice is also said to be considering an antitrust lawsuit to block the deal. Figma is more often seen in the art department than in IT, but with Adobe also a big player in customer data platforms, CIOs will be wary of the company getting an even bigger hold on their cloud software spend.

ServiceNow partners in Scandinavia and Germany merge

The Cloud People (TCP), a ServiceNow partner based in Norway, has acquired its German counterpart Nuvolax. The deal nets TCP a delivery center in Brazil, giving it 24-hour service coverage and opening up access to the US market, where it has growth ambitions.

July 2023

Teradata acquires Stemma to enhance analytics

Teradata has bought Stemma, the three-year-old developer of an AI-based data exploration tool, to accelerate its Vantage self-service analytics platform.

ServiceNow agrees to buy retail data platform G2K

ServiceNow is getting ready to sprinkle some more AI magic on its automation of workflows in the retail industry. It’s agreed to buy G2K, the developer of the Parsifal data platform, which the company says can analyze the movement of customers and products around stores.

Silver Lake buys majority stake in Software AG

Software AG, the German maker of tools to manage IoT data, APIs, and legacy mainframe apps, looks set to become part of Silver Lake, which also owns stakes in Airtable, Celonis, Qualtrics, and Splunk. The investment fund secured a 63% stake in the company, valuing it at $2.4 billion, after a bidding war that pitted it against mainframe modernization firm Rocket Software. Prior to the deal, Software AG’s largest shareholder was a foundation, SAGST, created by one of its founders. SAGST’s 30% holding had for years protected the company from takeovers, but in April the foundation agreed to sell most of its stake to Silver Lake. Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO of Software AG since August 2018, said the company will benefit from the stability and certainty provided by a single major shareholder.

June 2023

IBM offers $4.6 billion for Apptio

IBM has agreed to buy cloud cost control specialist Apptio from private equity firm Vista, which has owned it since 2018. IBM plans to roll Apptio’s offering into its IT automation portfolio — AIOps, Instana and Turbonomics, — to help enterprises optimize both application cost and application performance from a single control center. The acquisition will also give IBM access to anonymized data on $450 billion of IT spend it can use to train AI tools for further optimization.

Databricks buys MosaicML for $1.3 billion

Generative AI is a hot commodity these days, and Databricks, for one, can’t get enough of it. In addition to developing its own LLM, Dolly, based on open data, it’s now acquired MosaicML, the creator of two open source models, MPT-7B and MPT-30B. With the acquisition, Databricks hopes to make it easier for enterprises to build LLMs based on their own data.

Silver Lake buys Qualtrics for $12.5 billion

Qualtrics has changed hands again. SAP acquired it for $8 billion in 2018, but the graft didn’t take, and SAP soon sold a minority stake. Now Silver Lake and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board have snapped up the whole company. The deal closed on June 28. SAP will remain a go-to-market partner of Qualtrics and service their joint customers.

Data center operator buys its way to a greener carbon footprint

Data center operator nLighten has bought Euclyde, owner of six data centers in neighboring France. One of nLighten’s goals with the acquisition is to reduce its carbon footprint: in France 70% of electricity comes from nuclear power stations, while in nLighten’s home country, Germany, around one-third of it comes from coal, which has the highest carbon intensity of all electricity sources.

HCM vendor UKG buys payroll provider Immedis

UKG’s cloud-based HCM software already delivers a wide range of functions to some enterprise HR departments. Now it’s adding to those capabilities with Immedis, which helps enterprises and mid-size companies operating in more than one country to manage payroll across borders. UKG plans to integrate the new functionality into its software suite as UKG One View later this year.

IBM buys French cloud services firm Agyla

Looking to improve its offering for French clients, IBM has agreed to buy Agyla, a provider of cloud platform engineering services. It plans to incorporate Agyla into its IBM Consulting division.

May 2023

Survey company Momentive says yes to STG deal

Symphony Technology Group has closed its acquisition of Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey) for $1.5 billion. STG’s portfolio also includes ERP vendor CAI Software and a stake in cybersecurity firm RSA.

Snowflake adds Neeva’s generative AI to its data warehouse platform

Snowflake has acquired Neeva, a small startup that used generative AI to improve the search experience. The deal came just days after Neeva closed its subscription-based, ad-free search engine. While difficult to build a search experience people were willing to pay for, it turned out to be the easy part, according to a farewell blog post from Neeva’s founders: “Convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place.” Now it’s up to Snowflake to convince its customers to change.

IBM to automate cloud data protection with Polar Security acquisition

Data security posture management specialist Polar Security will soon be part of IBM, which plans to integrate the Israeli company into its Guardium range of data security products. There, it’ll help IBM customers pinpoint security risks and compliance violations. IBM didn’t say how much it paid for the company, but Israeli news site Tech12 put the price at $60 million.

Databricks buys Okera to keep tabs on LLMs

Databricks has been encouraging enterprises to experiment with LLMs, offering one of its own, Dolly, as open source. Now it’s offering its customers a way to keep such models under control with LLM governance specialist acquisition, Okera.

April 2023

Ciphr adds diversity with Marshall acquisition

Marshall E-learning, a provider of diversity and inclusion training, is now part of Ciphr, a UK-based HR SaaS platform. Ciphr expects the deal will enable it to expand its existing online learning offering.

March 2023

Vista Equity Partners buys insurance software firm Duck Creek

Vista’s latest acquisition is a $2.6 billion niche play: Duck Creek Technologies, a developer of specialist software for the insurance industry. The companies say the deal will accelerate Duck Creek’s move to the cloud, allowing it to scale up its business.

Quantive buys AuxinOKR consulting firm

Following its acquisition of consulting firm AuxinOKR, strategy execution platform Quantive is rolling out a new consulting division to support enterprises adopting its tools for measuring business results.

Quantexa is loving the Aylien

Quantexa has acquired Aylien, a Dublin-based natural language processing firm specializing in risk management and market insight. It will use Aylien’s NLP skills to enhance its AI-based decision intelligence tools for the finance industry.

Capita lays off employment screening business

Matrix SCM, a British IT staffing agency, has acquired Security Watchdog, a provider of employment screening services, from Capita, the giant IT services business. It’s part of a broader sell-off for Capita, which also let go of three other HR companies in March: Capita Resourcing, HR Solutions, and ThirtyThree. Capita is selling non-core businesses to reduce its debts, and refocus on public sector and customer experience work.

Key secures Rocket

Mainframe software developer Rocket Software has bought mainframe security specialist Key Resources. The deal will enable Rocket to offer additional security-related services to the mainframe users it works with.

February 2023

Thomas Bravo manages $8 billion spend on Coupa Software

Investment firm Thomas Bravo has acquired Coupa Software, a provider of business spend management tools, in an $8 billion deal. Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has taken a minority stake. Thomas Bravo also owns business payments company BottomLine, open finance platform Solifi, data management tool Talend, and a raft of security and identity management software companies.

Arm sells software arm

Processor designer Arm has sold Forge, its suite of software development tools for high-performance computing, to Linaro, which develops and supports a range of other Arm-specific software for enterprises. Arm originally acquired Forge in 2016 to support its entry into the HPC market.

Accenture buys Morphus, adds new South American cybersecurity center

With its acquisition of Brazilian cybersecurity and threat intelligence provider Morphus, Accenture has added a new site from which to supervise its offering of managed security services and advanced analytics. The cyber fusion center in Fortaleza, Brazil, was previously Morphus Labs.

January 2023

OpenText buys Micro Focus for $5.8 billion

OpenText has closed its acquisition of Micro Focus, a vendor of mainframe modernization and application portfolio management tools. OpenText’s first move on completing the deal was to begin laying off staff. It announced an 8% reduction in workforce to realize $400 million in annual cost savings to help finance the $5.8 million purchase, which it first announced in August 2022.

Dell buys Cloudify

After selling off its stake in VMware, Dell is moving back into the cloud software business with the acquisition of Cloudify. The Israeli startup has developed a cloud orchestration platform to help devops teams automate provisioning.

McKinsey buys machine MLops platform Iguazio

McKinsey is adding to its stable of machine learning experts with the acquisition of software developer Iguazio. In time, it plans to integrate it into QuantumBlack, a McKinsey business unit that’s specialized in AI for the last decade. Iguazio is the developer of a commercial MLops platform and two open-source tools: MLRun, for ML pipeline orchestration, and Nuclio, which offers real-time serverless functions to automate application deployment.

HPE buys Pachyderm to automate ML development

Pachyderm, a developer of data pipeline automation tools used to train machine learning models, is now part of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. The company’s software will become part of the HPE Machine Learning Development Environment.

Quantum fusion: IonQ ties up with Entangled Networks

With each of the handful of companies developing quantum computers betting on a different architecture, a cross-platform quantum computing operating system is still way off. That’s why quantum hardware companies like IonQ are developing their own software tools, too. To speed up the process, IonQ has acquired Entangled Networks, a developer of software optimization tools for quantum computers, and is building a new Canadian subsidiary around the software team.

Two ServiceNow partners tie the knot

ServiceNow solutions provider Thirdera has acquired another ServiceNow partner, SilverStorm Solutions, to expand its reach in Europe. Thirdera also operates in South America and, combined, the two ServiceNow Elite-level partners have over 900 employees.

For last year’s mergers and buyouts, see The biggest enterprise technology M&A deals of 2022.