I work for a very large international software company. I can definitely say that the synergy that is most sought after by our company is the acquisition of intellectual property with out the expenditure of R&D. We have acquired 19 companies in the past 2 years and all have been to bolster our technical portfolio either through the purchase of a development-only shop to add technology directly to one of our offerings, or through the purchase of a company who has a technology that builds a new element around one of our existing products. This has many inherent challenges around it, especially when it comes to expanding the technical audience that we reach. An example is an acquisition where we expanded our traditional enterprise-based infrastructure business by acquiring a company who develops software to support the software developer fields itself. These two completely separate audiences demanded that we create a synergy between our two products and ways of thinking to find a new, common audience we could both reach out to as new business.
