At the start of 2018, two new deals of interest have occurred. The first is that Apple has acquired Canada-based Buddybuild, which is a cloud service for building, testing, and deploying mobile apps. Buddybuild had previously raised $8.8 million in total disclosed funding from investors. Second is with Microsoft who purchased cloud solutions and data platform Avere Systems. The company, previously valued at $146 million.
Both of these acquisitions represent further forays into cloud computing services by these two major technology companies, signaling the primacy of the cloud as the means to access business and entertainment services.
The so-called ‘big five’ technology companies Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google are increasingly buying up new technology startups in order to innovate, through offering new services, and in the continuing drive to remain competitive. In terms of mergers and acquisitions, Google is number one, according to TechCrunch, followed by Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.
Amazon is ahead of Apple in terms of the amount spent on buying other companies, but further behind in terms of the number of companies purchased. This reflects Amazon’s 2017 purchase of the grocery chain Whole Foods.
With the different mergers, Google has taken over 94 different companies, most of them small startups, since 2013. Microsoft have taken over 55 concerns, just ahead of Apple. Artificial intelligence companies remain the dominant type of company being acquired, Business Insider reports.
These patterns could shift too, given Apple’s strategy to relocate more manufacturing to the U.S., this could lead to more deals being made with U.S. startups. The last three purchases by Apple in 2017 were: init.ai, a messaging assistant; PowerbyProxi, a wireless charging technology; and Shazam, a service for music and image recognition.
