The holiday season offers no rest for the deal making weary.
Networking rock star Juniper Networks (News 
- Alert) spent $60 million to buy WANDL, and the deal is reportedly already paying dividends. After the WANDL deal went through Juniper immediately rose.
WANDL, short for Wide Area Network Design Laboratory, has been in business for 27 years. Its software is meant to plan, design and run IP, MPLS, and optical networks. The company tucked its 200 service provider customers into the Juniper fold. According to Zacks Equity Research, Juniper has a nice cash position (close to $3 billion) and is making some smart moves in software-defined networking.
Also earlier this year Juniper was the lead in a round of funding for Gainspeed, a company that helps centralize data central control and at the same time move processing to the edge of the network. And almost exactly a year ago, Juniper bought Contrail Systems. This led to the September release of SDN tool Juniper Networks Contrail, that was vetted by more than 40 test customers.
ConnectWise (News - Alert) spent the better part of 2013 forging partnership after partnership, and most recently snared Soonr, which will integrate its file share and collaboration services with the ConnectWise service management and automation toolset.
Like ConnectWise, ConnectWise partner Soonr is now in the heated process of attracting partners, including MSPs. The company recently announced a new channel program, the Soonr Success Partner Program, that hopes to attract VARs, distributors, solution providers and of course the all mighty MSPs.
Apple acquisitions aren’t always publicized, which makes many of us think Apple (News - Alert) doesn’t buy a lot of companies. But it does – Apple bought 15 companies in 2013 alone.
ValueWalk reporting shows Apple only announced 10 of these deals. A little investigation, however, seems to reveal that two of the undisclosed deals were for BroadMap, a mapmaking company BroadMap (probably there to help bail Apple out of its mobile maps disaster) and note taking company Catch.
BroadMap isn’t Apple’s first mapping purchase, but these other deals focused on transit and indoor mapping where BroadMap aims at analyzing mapping information. Catch, which has been compared to Evernote (News - Alert), is strong in syncing notes between devices and the cloud.
Finally
Xerox bought Ivoco Holding GmbH, a German company aimed at customer care. This follows on the heels of Xerox’s buyout of Unamic, another customer care company.
