Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

2003 Top Ten: Mergers & Acquisitions: Page 2 of 6

In the middle and most expensive of its three 2003 acquisitions, EMC paid around $1.7 billion in a stock swap for content management software company Documentum Inc. The deal moves EMC further up the "information lifecycle management" stack. EMC is operating Documentum as a software division.

No. 2 EMC Gobbles Legato

This $1.3 billion July stock deal for the backup and recovery software vendor kicked off EMC’s second-half shopping spree and painted a bullseye on backup software market leader Veritas. EMC runs Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO) as a software division, expanding its customer base by more than 30,000.

No. 3 EMC Gobbles VMware

At $635 million in cash, VMware was the cheapest and most surprising of the EMC deals. VMware’s virtualization software is a bit of a departure for EMC’s strategy, but EMC sees it as complementary. Like its other two acquisitions, EMC will keep VMware intact and allow it to remain a business partner with EMC’s major rivals (see Storage Makes Strange Bedfellows).