Contact: Brenon Daly
Before we flip the final page on the 2013 calendar, we have one unfinished item of business for this year: handing out the annual Golden Tombstone. The award is chosen each year by corporate development executives who look around at the handiwork of their peers in the tech industry, and then vote in our survey for whichever transaction they think had the biggest impact during the year. (It’s like an Oscar in the film industry, except Golden Tombstone isn’t trademarked, yet.)
Our past winners have come from a number of varied and, for the most part, relatively well-established tech sectors. That’s not necessarily the case for this year’s winner. For the first time ever, a cloud deal took top honors: IBM’s mid-2013 acquisition of Softlayer.
The acquisition substantially boosts Big Blue’s hosting and cloud services, particularly around IaaS. That’s a key initiative for IBM, which has struggled to find any growth in the past two years, as competition in the cloud infrastructure arena – led by Amazon Web Services – gets increasingly cutthroat. IBM’s purchase of Softlayer received almost twice as many votes as the runner-up, Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s handset business.
And with that, we’ll wrap up 2013. But before we go, we hope all of you enjoy you a healthy and happy holiday season – and wish you nothing but accretive deals in 2014.
Top vote-getter for ‘most significant tech transaction’
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Source: 451 Research Tech Corporate Development Outlook Survey
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