Who's buying? Significant VoIP M&A shoppers of 2008

You shouldn't be surprised to hear these names when it comes to snapping up smaller companies or even engineering larger deals. 

Cisco 

Notable acquisitions this year: Jabber, PostPath, Pure Networks; investment in ip.access. 

Why do in-house R&D (the ASR 9000 zettabyte router being a notable exception) when you can just let someone else do the hard work of building a product, working out the bugs and establishing market viability?   

Or, if you wake up feeling particularly Fierce, take some of that $26 billion in cold cash and go buy somebody, big, really, really Big. Cisco has been cranking cash flow at a clip of around $2 billion a quarter. Even if that slows down due to a sluggish economy, there's still a nice happy money stream to do whatever it pleases.

This year Cisco bought Jabber and PostPath to beef up its collaboration portfolio. Jabber brings presence and messaging software expertise for embedding those attributes "in the network," including WebEx Connect and Cisco UC offerings. PostPath will enhance the existing email and calendaring capabilities of WebEx Connect.

We'll toss in brownie points for investing in ip.access (Femtocells) and picking up Pure Networks (Home network management software that will likely have a VoIP hook to it in the near future).

Dialogic

Notable acquisitions this year: Open Media Labs, NMS Communications 

Love the Nick Jensen. 

Dialogic's CEO tells you what he is going to do, then goes out and does it. Jensen was practically rubbing his hands together in glee as the credit markets started to tighten up this spring, driving down valuations. He wants to buy good assets at the best price he can get, so long as they fit into his master plan of A) Adding more revenue and profit to the bottom line, and/or B) strategically building his technology and customer base. 

At an analyst/press meeting last year, Jensen said the future is video. This year, Jensen showed up with Open Media Labs in tow and said he was interested in acquiring SBC and DPI technology. We suspect he took a pass on obvious buy NextPoint because the price tag was too high for what was there, and instead worked a deal with NMS Communications to open up Dialogic's reach into the mobile/wireless space. 

EXFO 

Notable acquisitions this year:  Brix Networks, Navtel Communications 

By purchasing Brix and Navtel, EXFO has gone "up stack" from hardware to networking and applications testing and service assurance solutions. Navtel brought on board IMS, VoIP and GMPLS test solutions, while Brix had a broader story (and more key customers) in the business of VoIP and IPTV data services. Brix also had a great story with the end-user QoS/QoE experience. 

GENBAND 

Notable acquisitions this year: NextPoint networks 

We sang praises for GENBAND in the Fierce 15. This was a slow year for GENBAND buying, as compared to 2007, but when it bought, it bought what it needed. Acquiring NextPoint gives deep packet inspection (DPI) and session border control (SBC) technology to the company to implement on its boxes. Adding new security capability on existing GENBAND open standards-based hardware should be a simple code load. 

Oracle 

Notable acquisitions this year: BEA Systems.

After devouring BEA for $7.2 billion (net) early this year, Oracle has been pretty quiet on the acquisition front.  Among BEA's assets are the WebLogic communications platform family, so there's a lot of nice middleware that can snuggle up to an Oracle database, including presence, virtual PBX, call management, routing and the all-important billing functions.