15 Dec What Microsoft Bought and Why in Its Busiest M&A Year Since 2008
Microsoft was busier on the merger-and-acquisition front in 2015 than it has been in any year since 2008.
With two weeks still to go, Microsoft has acquired 14 companies in a calendar year that has seen a ton of M&A activity across the industry.
“It’s white-hot,” said Mike Harvath, CEO of Revenue Rocket Consulting Group, the Minneapolis-based firm that does a lot of M&A consulting in the channel, of the overall acquisition environment in 2015. Industry deal volume growth is expected to be up by double digits in 2015 with more of the same coming next year. “The bigs like Microsoft are buying around SMAC and the small guys are consolidating,” Harvath said, using an abbreviation for social, mobile, analytics and cloud.
Many of the companies that industry giants like Microsoft are snapping up got investments right after the downturn and founders and owners are looking to monetize, Harvath said. “We’ve got some bubble and frothiness on the low end of the market due to this pressure to transform, and there’s a bubble at the top end, primarily led by SMAC.”
To be clear, there are different metrics for M&A activity. This year is clearly busy, although some of the years with fewer deals had some blockbusters. Case in point, 2014, when Microsoft completed only 11 acquisitions, but one of them was the $2.5 billion deal for Minecraft developer Mojang.