In a slow year for enterprise tech M&A, there were some extraordinary deals

Cisco was the most active company

it’s that time of the year as we look back at the biggest tech M&A deals of the year. Typically by this time, the usual acquisition suspects like Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, SAP Oracle, and Cisco have made at least some major changes. But this year, only Cisco made a big splash and ultimately announced a total of 11 deals.

SAP made a few small deals, but Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle mostly stayed on the sidelines this year. The $61 billion Broadcom-VMware deal announced in May 2022 finally closed last month, and Adobe and Figma this month agreed to close their $20 billion deal, which has been in regulatory limbo since it was announced in September 2022. Stuck.

It is not our imagination that there have been fewer deals with the biggest players. CB Insights reported zero deals from Big Tech in the third quarter this year. Compare that to 2019, when there were 10 such deals in the third quarter, or 2020, when there were eight.

Image Credit: cb insight

Perhaps higher borrowing costs put a damper on the deals we see in 2023. Long gone are the days of 2020 when top deals totaled $165 billion. This year it was just $67.7 billion, which is the lowest we’ve seen since an all-time low of $40 billion in 2019, the second year we’ve compiled these top deals lists.

It’s worth noting that a large number of deals this year have involved private equity firms either buying companies or selling them at good profits.

Maybe smaller AI-related deals make more sense, like Atlassian buying Loom for $975 million; Salesforce acquired Airkit.ai for an undisclosed amount, one of only two small acquisitions this year; Or Snowflake snapping up AI search company Neeva for an undisclosed sum.

Nonetheless, here are the top 10 enterprise deals this year, ranked from cheapest to most expensive: