While 2020 won’t be remembered fondly by many of us for much of anything, it was a blockbuster year for enterprise M&A with the top 10 deals totaling an astounding $165.2 billion.
This is the third straight year I’ve done this compilation. Last year the number was $40 billion. The year prior it was $87 billion. Those numbers pale in comparison to 2020’s result.
Last year’s biggest deal — Salesforce buying Tableau for $15.7 billion — would have only been good for fifth place on this year’s list. And last year’s fourth largest deal, where VMware bought Pivotal for $2.7 billion, wouldn’t have even made this year’s list at all.
The 2020 number was lifted by four chip company deals totaling $106 billion alone. Consider that the largest of these deals at $40 billion matched last year’s entire list. But let’s not forget the software company acquisitions, which accounted for the remainder, three of which were via private equity deals.
It’s worth noting that the $165.2 billion figure doesn’t include the Oracle-TikTok debacle, which remains for now in regulatory limbo and may never emerge from it. Nor does it include two purely fintech deals — Morgan Stanley acquiring E-Trade for $13 billion or Intuit snagging Credit Karma for $7.1 billion — but we did include the $5.3 billion Visa-Plaid deal because as it involved an enterprise-y API company we felt like it fit our criteria.
Keep in mind as you go through this year’s list that it appears to be an outlier year in terms of total deal flow. Most years have maybe one or two megadeals, which I would define as over $10 billion. There were six this year. And there were a host of unlisted deals worth between $1 billion and $3.2 billion, several of which would have made it to the list in quieter years.
Without further adieu, here is this year’s Top 10 deals in M&A organized from smallest to largest:
10. Vista snags Pluralsight for $3.5B
This deal happened just this week as we were writing the story, vaulting into 10th place past the $3.2 billion Twilio-Segment deal. Vista has been active as always and it has added Pluralsight, an online education platform for IT pros with plans to take it private again. At a time when more people are online, this deal seems like a wise move.
9. Clayton Dubilier & Rice acquires Epicor from KKR for $4.7B
This was one of those under-the-radar private equity deals, but one with a bushel of money changing hands. Epicor was previously owned by another private equity firm KKR. Hardly a household name, Epicor is a mature ERP company dating back to the early 1970s. The company has been on a rocky financial road for much of the 21st century. This could be one of those deals where Clayton Dubilier & Rice sees a way to squeeze life from maintenance contracts. Otherwise this one is hard to figure.
8. Insight Partners nabs Veeam for $5B
In yet another private equity deal, Insight acquired Veeam, a cloud data backup and recovery startup based in Switzerland for $5 billion. This one was one of the earliest deals of 2020 and set the tone for the year. The firm had previously invested $500 million into Veeam and apparently liked what it saw and bought the company. Unlike the Epicor deal, Insight probably plans to invest in the company with an end goal of going public or flipping it for a profit at some point.
7. Visa snags Plaid for $5.3B
Visa bought Plaid, a startup focused on APIs to streamline banking for a cool $5.3 billion just a few days after Insight bought Veeam in January. Visa was looking to use its checkbook to modernize and believed Plaid was the way to do it. Unfortunately, the Justice Department is not sure about this one. The deal remains on hold while the DOJ looks into it, and isn’t clear if it will ever pass muster.
6. Marvell acquires Inphi for $10B
The smallest of the four chip company deals to make the list this year, Marvell spent $10 billion to add Inphi. It liked Inphi’s fiber-based chips as a way to complement its copper-based ones and give it a path to more modern workloads like cloud and 5G.
5. Koch Industries buys Infor for $13B
Koch Industries is not a name you see pop up on tech M&A deals every day, but it made a big splash in February when it bought Infor, another cloud ERP company with a long history, this one dating back to 2002. It paid nearly $13 billion for the privilege. As for Infor, it saw big money for its investors and deep pockets from Koch to help continue growing the company.
4. Analog joins forces with Maxim for $21B
This is one of those cases where the companies believe that being bigger is better, and it motivated Analog to pay $21 billion for its chip-making rival. The two companies complement one another and the combined entities are worth an estimated $68 billion, but because of the nature of this deal, it is going to face serious regulatory oversight.
3. Salesforce grabs Slack for $27.7B
This one took us by surprise at the end of last month as rumors began to surface of serious discussions between the two SaaS companies just before Thanksgiving. The $27.7 billion deal came together the following week and was announced at the company’s earnings call. It’s surely a tremendous sum of money, but Salesforce believes that Slack could be the missing link, pulling together all of the pieces of its vast enterprise software ecosystem into an all-encompassing communications layer.
2. AMD acquires Xilink for $35B
When AMD plucked Xilink off the market in September, it was hoping to build a chip powerhouse that can run a broad set of workloads. It’s a ton of money, but once again was part of an overall industry consolidation we saw throughout the year as the deals got bigger and the stakes got higher.
1. Nvidia purchases ARM for $40B
The biggest deal of the year was Nvidia buying ARM for an astonishing $40 billion. For now, this is a highly complex deal with lots of moving parts involving gobs of money. It remains to be seen if the regulators will allow this to go through, and it could be a couple of years before we find out.
Note: Since we published this story, Thoma Bravo announced on 12/21/2020 that it was acquiring RealPage for $10.2 billion, a price that would have put it on this list.