Contact: Brenon Daly
With 2012 winding down, it’s time to look back over the year to see what stood out in what’s shaping up to be a tough year for tech M&A. As we always do in our annual survey, we asked corporate development executives to cast their vote for the most significant transaction of the year. For 2012, they overwhelmingly tapped VMware’s acquisition of Nicira as the Tech Deal of the Year.
Certainly, the $1.3bn transaction had a number of intriguing aspects. It’s a big price – $1.3bn is about the same amount that VMware has spent on its entire M&A program since being partially spun off from EMC. And it’s a bold move, even at the cost of picking a fight with longtime friend and networking ally Cisco Systems. But if VMware can have even part of the success in virtualizing networking with Nicira that it has already had by virtualizing computing, the acquisition will pay for itself many times over.
All of those elements figured into the corporate dealmakers handing the Golden Tombstone for 2012 to VMware. And, we should note that after two consecutive years of tight races, the voting in 2012 wasn’t even close. Twice as many survey respondents picked VMware-Nicira ahead of this year’s second-place transaction, Facebook’s reach for Instagram.
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