For obvious reasons corporate acquisitions in 2009 stalled a bit as compared to some other years. But, there were some notables out there that did or will happen soon. Let’s run through a few of those.

The one that we talk about the most is Avaya’s purchase of Nortel’s voice and data solutions. This includes the telephone systems along with the switch and router business. Avaya will be rolling out the roadmap for the combined product lines on January 19th. We will post this roadmap information on our blog and website soon. We will also be hosting some educational seminars to everyone understand their options.

As for Nortel’s Metro Ethernet business, a company called Ciena will pay $796 Million for that infrastructure. That’s 248 million more than their initial bid. Cisco grows by gobbling up other companies, so what would any year be without a few fast grabs from the marketing king. This year they added to the portfolio by purchasing Scan Safe, Starent Networks, Tidal Software, Pure Digital Technologies, Richards-Zeta Building Intelligence, and the set-top business of DVN. If you’re like me, you haven’t heard of most of these companies, but they all have their niche. A company that you probably have heard of is Tandberg. After a bit of waffling on the purchase, Cisco did move forward and acquire the video conferencing product.

Silver Lake is heading up a group that wants to purchase Skype. HP plans to purchase 3Com for $2.7 billion. IBM bought SPSS, Intel purchased Wind River Systems and Logitech is purchasing Lifesize, the low end High Def video conferencing solution.

This stuff is enough to make your head spin and 2009 was a down year! I can’t wait to see what happens this year.