Dell’s Acquisition Of EMC May Have Taken Out One Of The VC Ecosystem’s Top Acquirers

Dell’s $67B acquisition of EMC this week marked the largest-ever M&A deal in the tech industry. But EMC, its subsidiary VMWare, and Dell have also been busy acquiring and investing in tech companies across the ecosystem.

Here’s a brief overview of their investment and M&A trends, which are unlikely to remain the same as they combine into one entity.

Since 2010, Dell, VMWare, and EMC acquired just under 70 companies in aggregate. 2012 marked an M&A deal high for Dell, when it acquired Wyse, Sonicwall, and Quest Software among others. The same year was a high-water mark for EMC, which counted XtremIO, Syncplicity, and Silver Tail Systems among its 2012 acquisitions. VMWare M&A activity by frequency has been on the decline since 2010, as the chart below highlights.

Peeling back investments, EMC has increased its deal pace since 2010. EMC’s most recent investment was in internet security firm Zscaler‘s $100M round at a $1 billion valuation.

Dell, which invests through strategic arm Dell Ventures, saw a five-year high in number of investments in 2014, which included investments across security (Lastline, Cylance, Invincea) and storage (Skyera, Formation Data Systems, Nexenta).

How will Dell’s acquisition of EMC affect the M&A ecosystem for venture-backed companies? It’s still not fully clear whether Dell’s acquisition will result in fewer acquisitions by its newly acquired entities (or by Dell itself after such a large deal for EMC). But VMware and EMC were on their own responsible for seven acquisitions ≥$100M since 2010, including the billion-dollar acquisitions of AirWatch, Nicira Networks, and Virtustream.

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