In a move to broaden its offerings for the growing network intelligence and diagnostics market, telecom equipment manufacturer Net Optics recently announced the acquisition of network analytics software provider nMetric.

Juniper Networks has acquired technology and personnel from BitGravity, the content delivery networking (CDN) subsidiary of Tata Communications.

In retrospect, it's not hard to see why AT&T thought its proposed $39 billion merger with T-Mobile would sail through with relatively few issues.

While the world has been distracted by HP's baffling $10.2 billion purchase of Autonomy and Microsoft's surprising $9 billion buy of Skype, EMC/VMware and Google have been snapping up dozens of software companies throughout 2011.

Check Point Software is buying governance, risk management and compliance vendor Dynasec Ltd., which will add software that can help businesses comply with government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and health insurance portability and accountability act (HIPAA).

If at first you don't succeed ...

A.S.K’s learning management systems and eLearning developers will be absorbed into the technology and team behind iAsset.

Red Hat announced Tuesday that it is acquiring Gluster, which makes open-source software that clusters commodity SATA drives and NAS systems into massively scalable pools of storage, in a cash deal valued at about $136 million. Gluster is also a contributor to the OpenStack cloud project and Red Hat is promising this involvement will continue. Indeed, Red Hat is now uncharacteristically saying its support of OpenStack will grow even beyond Gluster to the next release of Fedora.

M&A industry veteran Paul Deninger, a vice chairman at Jefferies & Co., has made a living advising companies on mergers, acquisitions, IPOs and the like. But even he acknowledges that too much industry consolidation isn't a good thing for technology innovation. I spoke with Deninger this week about the state of the M&A market and what’s likely ahead.