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Apparently tired of being the second-largest U.S. wireless carrier, Verizon Wireless is vaulting past AT&T via this buyout of the nation's fifth-largest wireless carrier. After adding Alltel's 13 million customers to its ranks, Verizon will have the most subscribers in the United States, with around 80 million.

HP boasted in May when it announced the deal that it would double the company's services revenue and put it into the No. 2 spot in the IT business services market behind IBM.

BEA stared down Oracle and got a better deal in January than the original $6.7 billion offer from a few months earlier. Some said at the outset that IBM might also be a winner from this deal by exploiting fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding the middleware vendor's integration into Oracle.

CenturyTel, a local exchange carrier and ISP that is based in Louisiana and that operates in 25 states, says merging with Embarq will give it a combined total of 8 million access lines, 2 million broadband subscribers and roughly 400,000 video subscribers.

The combination of Brocade and Foundry is seen as a direct effort to combat Cisco with a broader data center product collection, exploiting Brocade's strength in storage networking and Foundry's powerful routers.

Microsoft, suggesting that enterprise search has hit a tipping point, announced plans in January to gobble up this Norwegian company. Microsoft's efforts to play catch-up with Google also included a mid-summer buyout of search engine company Powerset for an undisclosed sum.

The deal gives Sun a stronghold in the open source software market, though also pits the company even more directly vs. big companies such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

In purchasing Centennial, a regional provider of wireless communications services, AT&T says it will improve its wireless coverage in several rural areas in both the continental United States and in Puerto Rico.

BMC in March announced plans to acquire the data-center automation vendor in a deal designed to boost its business service management and automation products.

For Symantec, the acquisition gives it an alternative e-mail security offering to BrightMail, the company's antispam and antivirus appliance. MessageLabs offers a hosted spam and Web traffic filtering service.