Broadcom's VMware acquisition combined roughly $61 billion of equity value with $8 billion of assumed net debt, then rapidly shifted VMware toward subscription bundles and private-cloud economics.
Cisco's $28 billion Splunk acquisition bought a large recurring software business and a data platform spanning security and observability, accelerating Cisco's shift beyond networking hardware.
Oracle’s $7.4 billion Sun acquisition combined Java, Solaris, MySQL and hardware with Oracle’s database and applications business, creating a vertically integrated stack with mixed long-run results.
Oracle’s roughly $10.3 billion PeopleSoft deal ended an eighteen-month takeover battle and accelerated consolidation in enterprise applications, but at a very high integration price.
Salesforce used early private capital to prove that enterprise software could be sold as an Internet service rather than installed through large on-premises projects.
IBM paid billions for Lotus to accelerate its shift toward software and capture Notes, but Microsoft's integrated collaboration stack limited the long-term payoff.
Red Hat proved investors could build enterprise value around open-source software by selling reliability, support, integration, and trust rather than exclusive code ownership.
SAP financed a costly shift from mainframe software to client-server R/3, using heavy R&D spending and a partner ecosystem to turn enterprise applications into a global platform.
Louis Gerstner rejected plans to break IBM apart and redirected capital toward integrated services, software, and customer solutions, turning a historic crisis into a new business model.
Novell's investment in NetWare, channels, and hardware independence made PC local-area networking an enterprise market before Internet protocols displaced proprietary network stacks.