If the question was asked, ‘who is the king of acquisitions?’, most would answer Oracle. It maximises its media visibility for each deal and especially so for deals with more substantial values. The recent multi-billion dollar buy-out of Sun Microsystems is a typical example.

With some 85 acquisitions since the turn of this decade, it seems Cisco Systems is really the ‘King’. Unlike Oracle, however, most of its deals were comparatively small and few received significant visibility in the media.