The industry is getting much more conservative relative to mergers and acquisitions in light of the economy. But 2008 was a decent year for M&A in the networking space, and the big telcos spent the biggest bucks on acquisitions this year as compared to others in the high-tech industry.
The top deal was a $28.1 billion transaction that had Verizon Wireless buying Alltel, thus catapulting the acquirer into the No. 1 wireless carrier slot (in terms of subscribers).
Significantly smaller, and in the No. 2 spot, was the HP-EDS deal, valued at $13.9 billion. Following that was Oracle’s $8.5 billion purchase of software outfit BEA.
Coming in at No. 4 was CenturyTel, which snapped up Embarq for a cool $5.8 billion.
And, going down the line were the Brocade-Foundry deal at $2.6 billion, the Microsoft-Fast Search and Transfer deal for $1.2 billion, Sun’s $1 billion acquisition of MySQL, and AT&T’s purchase of Centennial for $944 million.
A bit further down the list was Ciena’s purchase of World Wide Packets, which at $290 million, is ranked as the network industry’s No. 15 deal of 2008, according to Network World.
