Tech M&As 2008: All the top deals

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Nokia surprised the industry with a deal to buy out the remaining shareholders of handset software firm Symbian.

Symbian's software is used in two-thirds of smartphones and six per cent of all mobile phones, but new platforms such as Android from Google and Apple’s iPhone, as well as Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, are challenging its dominance. Nokia plans to unite the various Symbian-based platforms into a single OS and make it open source.

The move, if successful, will increase adoption of Symbian by handset makers and allow it to compete in the crowded smartphone software market.

Consolidation in the networking space as Brocade snapped up fellow enterprise and carrier-grade switch vendor Foundry Networks for around $3 billion (£2 billion). The deal was a classic example of IT hardware consolidation as well as signalling the need to get big in order to compete with Cisco, the 800 pound gorilla of the networking sector.

Having dabbled for years with large scale acquisition plans in the professional and IT services sectors, HP finally executed a successful bid, landing EDS for $12.6 billion (£8.4 billion).

As one of the pioneers of the outsourcing of managed computer services, EDS has been at the forefront of IT services on both sides of the Atlantic for the past two decades. It has had a hand in both successful and failed public sector IT projects.

The deal would ultimately deliver a sting in the tail after HP announced a record 25,000 redundancies worldwide as a result of combining the workforces of the two companies.

In a busy year for acquisitions at HP, it splashed out another $360 million (£204 million) to acquire storage virtualisation and iSCSI SAN specialist LeftHand Networks.

HP’s storage business is one of its strongest enterprise computing units and the addition of LeftHand adds intelligent cloning technology to HP’s product portfolio that can reduce disk space requirements in certain virtualised scenarios by as much as 97 per cent. HP also hopes to beef up its midrange iSCSI portfolio.

In an effort to curb debt and compete more effectively with arch rival Intel, chip maker AMD announced a break-up and sell off plan that will transform it into a chip design and developer.

The crux of the deal involved selling off its manufacturing facilities to a new company called Foundry Company, backed with cash from the Middle East. The new company will make chips for AMD, as well as taking on chip manufacturing contracts from other companies, including those that compete directly with AMD.

The new venture will assume all $1.2 billion (£666 millon) of debt associated with AMD’s manufacturing operations, investing at least $5.7 billion (£3.16 billion) to buy the manufacturing facilities.

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