Weekly Poll: 20 Companies That Could Be Acquired in 2011

Today sees another acquisition with Teradata’s plan to purchase Aprimo, the marketing automation software as a service (SaaS). Teradata acquired Aprimo as a way to add more analytics and provide better business intelligence services.

Yesterday, Salesforce.com announced its acquisition of Etacts, the CRM startup for managing email contacts. That’s the second acquisition this month for Salesforce.com, which announced its planned purchase of Heroku for $212 million at its Dreamforce event two weeks ago.

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Cloud computing is starting to see some consolidation. The strength of the cloud computing ecosystem is also a catalyst for more enterprise driven apps to integrate with cloud platforms.

Michal Orbach, a principal with Cascadia Capital, counts 25 potential acquisitions in the Web Engagement Management (WEM) space. He sees 10 that are already in the works. WEM is a market sprouting from the Web content management space and online marketing. Content management is getting pressure to be more than a platform to create and distribute content to the cloud. Customers want CMS environments to integrate with social technologies and analytics platforms. In this regard, another marketing automation SaaS provider such as Marketo or Eloqua could be acquired.

You can see that kind of consolidation in other parts of the cloud computing world:

• Infrastructure environments are starting to resemble platforms.
• SaaS providers are becoming platform providers in their own right. Salesforce.com is taking this approach.
• Virtualization and infrastructure providers are integrating as data centers extend to the cloud.
• Companies that have traditionally provided enterprise software are looking for companies to acquire. For example, Red Hat is showing interest in a virtualization or cloud computing company.
• Cloud management companies are a fit with infrastructure providers. The Rackspace acquisition of Cloudkick is a case in point.

Based on this premise, we’ve picked 20 companies that could be acquired. What do you think?

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