July and August are traditionally slow months for acquisition activity. We saw the completion of 8 deals, the same number as realised in 2008. However with the exception of Google’s purchase of ON2 Technologies, at just over $100m, none of the other 8 deals cost more than $20m, whilst in 2008 the value of deals was at least an order of magnitude higher. Google’s purchase of codec specialist ON2 Technologies does not herald its entry into the video surveillance market but confirms its intention to support video, so it is not of particular significance to the security industry. All the other transactions were related to either completing full ownership of companies, filling gaps in product or service offerings and increasing geographic scope. Surprisingly at least 80% of the deals were cash transactions and our prediction that merger would be a dominant feature in 2009 has just not happened yet. The logic here was that the […]