Corporate M&A Buyers

From the AO Venture Summit today (live webcast), with panelists from left to right:

* Dan’l Lewin, Corporate VP, Microsoft
* Claudia Fan Munce, Managing Director, IBM Venture Capital Group
* Brian Moriarty, VP, Corporate Affairs, Sun Microsystems
* David Lawee, VP Corporate Development, Google (buys one company/month)
* Jeff Russakow, VP, Global Strategies & Solutions, Symantec

Question: What areas are you scouting out for 2009 corporate acquisitions?

Microsoft: We do not comment on future plans.

IBM: Do your homework on what you can do for a big company.

Sun: Cloud computing. We have been enamored with grid computing for years. There are two opportunities for us. First, it’s a demanding environment for systems. Second, we will launch a cloud service ourselves in the coming months. We are interested in more power sensitive data centers as well.

Google: Many exciting areas. Instead of 90-day product push cycles, a slower market allows for more fully baked products. We are looking at audio, video codecs, SaaS. One million businesses on our cloud. It’s addicting.

Symantec: SaaS, virtualization, cloud-based services based on the consumer, how to repurpose and make existing apps digestible in this new model. Security, malware, keeping good in and bad out. Backup. 6x explosion of data over next three years, and the mix moves from 25% unstructured data to 63%. 75% of corporate IP is in the email inbox. It has become the file system. Greater opportunity there than virtualization. How to backup and store things that are not virtualized? Make it work through the ecosystem. Seachange: cloud and SaaS, proliferation of endpoints, and the endpoint is access point, not the computing center. Challenge for Symantec: how to I protect the data, not the laptop? Many hot trends around that. Archive and backup converge. De-dup, storage and retrieval in the cloud.