IBM’s Enterprise Software Acquisition Spree

Oracle gets all the media attention, but IBM has been quietly buying up enterprise software companies. They have bought the following software companies in the last 2 years:

Isogon, software asset management solutions.

Micromuse, Ascential & Cyanea, performance management solutions of web-based business apps.

DWL, Customer Data Integration (CDI) Middleware.

Collation, IT service management software.

Bowstreet, portal technologies. Analysis & discussions here.
Datapower, message-aware networking. Read analysis from Burnham’s Beat. This acquisition has more nuances.

CIMS Labs, virtualization of computing resources.

BuildForge, Compliance software.

There are others.

Then, yesterday, it announced the acquisition of Webify, an SOA player. Today, they acquired MRO for $740 Million.
The trend indicates that IBM is building an IT infrastructure software porfolio by acquisition, and while it was avoiding the business application space so far, today’s acquisition of MRO is a vertical application acquisition.

So what is the strategy going forward? More infrastructure software, or diversify into application software as well?