As we wind down the first month of 2012, I thought I’d take the pulse of some of the bigger technology companies around town. In addition to tracking startups and entrepreneurship, this is an important measure of the health and well-being of the Boston tech community.

So here’s a list of 10 well-known public companies, their stock price (as of Friday’s close), most recent financials, and other tidbits. Not comprehensive, of course. But of these firms, you might be surprised whose stock is the highest right now.

Most of these companies will announce their end-of-year financials in the next two weeks…

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM)
Stock price: $32.01
2011 stats: Q3 profit of $63M on $282M in revenue; coming off $1B+ revenue in 2010.
Recent news: The company has acquired rival Cotendo and is positioning itself as a platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud.
Big question: Why doesn’t Akamai own the cloud (like Amazon)?

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB)
Stock price: $10.30
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $15.9M (net loss of $7.4M); will announce full-year stats on Feb. 9.
Recent news: Coming off its IPO in August, Carbonite is adjusting to life as a public company.
Big question: Is online backup a big enough growth market?

Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT)
Stock price: $25.11
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $54.3M ($5.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 2.
Recent news: Constant Contact is moving into mobile/social rewards programs with its acquisitions of CardStar and Bantam Networks.
Big question: Can it make a full transition from e-mail to broader online marketing?

EMC (NYSE: EMC)
Stock price: $25.83
2011 stats: Full-year revenue of $20B ($3.4B profit), showing record growth.
Recent news: CEO and chairman Joe Tucci isn’t stepping down this year as planned. (Pat Gelsinger is rumored to be his successor.)
Big question: What is the ultimate future of EMC? In storage, big data, and cloud computing, as EMC goes, so will Massachusetts.

iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT)
Stock price: $32.88
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $120.4M ($14.1M profit)
Recent news: iRobot laid off 8 percent of its staff in October but continues to grow.
Big question: Will consumer robotics ever really take off?

LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM)
Stock price: $41.51
2011 stats: Q3 revenues of $31M ($4.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 15.
Recent news: LogMeIn has been expanding to new devices, markets, and geographies.
Big question: Is this still a lifestyle business?

Monster.com (NYSE: MWW)
Stock price: $7.35
2011 stats: $46M profit on roughly $1B revenue, compared to a $9M loss in 2010.
Recent news: Monster Worldwide had layoffs and is restructuring as it continues to expand globally and move into social/mobile technologies.
Big question: Is there a better job site out there?

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN)
Stock price: $27.91
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $400M, and $1.4B revenue for the fiscal year ($38.2M profit).
Recent news: Nuance acquired rival Vlingo in mobile speech recognition; mobile/consumer and healthcare continue to be its biggest markets.
Big question: Can it compete with the big boys (Apple, Google)?

TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP)
Stock price: $31.24
2011 stats: $3B+ market cap. Year-end stats coming Feb. 8. (2010 revenue of $486M.)
Recent news: After spinning out of Expedia last month, TripAdvisor is New England’s biggest consumer Web company.
Big question: Will it outcompete Google and others in travel search and content?

Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP)
Stock price: $16.14
2011 stats: Small profit in Q3 on $68M revenue. Full-year revenue expected to be 240M+ with net loss in $10M range (tune in Feb. 14).
Recent news: Coming off its IPO last spring, Zipcar has been expanding carefully in Europe and on U.S. college campuses.
Big question: Can it reduce costs enough to make a real profit?

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Some interesting developments in ad distribution and video this week. Needham, MA-based Extreme Reach, the maker of a video-ad platform for TV and Web, has secured more money for its growth and has made an important acquisition.

Extreme Reach said today it has closed a $9 million credit facility with TD Bank. The company also has acquired Spotlight Business Affairs, a commercial talent rights management and payment firm, for an undisclosed sum. The details sound kind of gnarly, but basically the deal means the company’s ad distribution system will be in compliance with existing talent and rights agreements.

The idea behind Extreme Reach, which started in 2008, is to help video advertisers and agencies distribute ads to TV stations, cable networks, and Web publishers—all with cutting-edge cloud-based storage and processing technology. Last September, I reported that Extreme Reach was growing fast and looking to raise a big financing round. Chief executive John Roland said at the time that the company was very profitable and had grown from 17 employees to about 90 in the previous two years, with 20 more hires and geographic expansion imminent.

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Actifio is growing like a weed—just like the data it tries to help companies tame—and it has just raised one of the bigger Boston-area tech financing rounds of the year.

The Waltham, MA-based data management startup said today it has closed $33.5 million in Series C funding led by new investor Andreessen Horowitz. Previous investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, and Advanced Technology Ventures also participated in the round. The company says the money will be used to expand operations globally and increase awareness and sales of its products. The addition of a West Coast investor like Andreessen Horowitz indicates the startup is pretty serious about going big; whether it will succeed remains to be seen.

Actifio has been roughly doubling the size of its investment rounds over the past couple of years. It closed an $8 million A round in early 2010 and followed that up with a $16 million B round later that year. The startup has grown to about 100 employees, up from 50 in July 2010.

The big idea behind the startup is to virtualize data management—starting with backup, protection, and recovery services—for big companies. That means doing for data storage and protection what VMware, Cisco, and other giants have done for computing power and networking, via a unified software platform. “Virtualization” refers to the important IT trend of separating software from hardware—and applications from operating systems—in big, messy computer systems.

“This financing further empowers our team and clients to completely shift the way we think about traditional, legacy IT solutions and virtualizing the management of data-–-including eliminating backup software,” says Actifio founder and CEO Ash Ashutosh (a veteran of HP and AppIQ), in a statement. “This is a similar paradigm shift ushered in by VMware, Microsoft, Oracle and others, via server virtualization.”

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His last name means “forest” in Norwegian. Which is appropriate, because this guy sees the forest for the trees.

David Skok of Matrix Partners is one of the most talked-about venture capitalists in town, among young entrepreneurs and experienced ones alike. He is best known for his investments in JBoss, the open source middleware company (acquired by Red Hat for $420 million in 2006); AppIQ, the network and storage management firm (bought by HP in 2005); Diligent Technologies, a data protection company (bought by IBM in 2008); and CloudSwitch, a cloud infrastructure startup (acquired by Verizon this year). He currently serves on the boards of tech companies such as HubSpot, CloudBees, Digium, Enservio, and Solidworks.

Critics say he hasn’t had a big exit in a while. Supporters say he has a real knack for building companies and getting them acquired for good prices—and that what he touches often turns to gold.

Whatever you think of him, Skok has carved out a reputation as a hard-working investor with both technical expertise in business software and a deep understanding of sales and marketing from a customer’s perspective. For the past decade, he has been a general partner with Matrix. But when I sat down with him recently, I was more interested to hear about his previous life as an entrepreneur and five-time CEO, and how that shaped who he is today—both the decisions he makes as a VC, and the kind of mentorship he provides to startups.

It’s not quite Batman Begins or Casino Royale, but here is the David Skok origin story—and its lessons—in three parts.

Act I: A New Hope (Software)

The story opens in Johannesburg, South Africa, where Skok was born to an English mother and Norwegian father. His parents didn’t want him to grow up with apartheid, so they sent him to school in England, where he lived from age 8 to 20, in London. From there he went to college at University of Sussex, where he was part of the first class of graduates in England to be awarded computer science degrees. That was 1976.

His father made him come back and join the blue-collar family business, which involved machining equipment. He went to apprentice training school and survived his first week when all the tough guys tried to haze him. By the end of the course, he knew how to use a new tool for machining parts that followed a program stored on punched paper tape. The problem was, if there was a tiny error in the tape, the part would be ruined and “you’d have a huge wreck on your hands,” he says.

So Skok wrote a piece of software to get around this. “If you designed the part on the computer, you’d be able to do the machining without worrying about the geometry,” he says. That led him to start his first company, Skok Systems, which became a computer-aided design (CAD) firm.

“I’m accidentally an entrepreneur,” Skok says. “I didn’t plan to be an entrepreneur, I didn’t have any training in it, I didn’t have any mentors to turn to to teach me how to be an entrepreneur. I’m trying to figure out all the sales and marketing stuff that’s going on.”

The company went through a few shifts, but the pivotal moment happened in … Next Page »

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Mobile technologies were the topic of the week as the wireless industry’s big enterprise & applications conference came to town. But we also had some interesting economic new, and our Xconomy week in review begins now.

—The number of wireless-connected devices around the world will double by 2010, from roughly 12 billion to about 24 billion, according to a study released by the London-based GSMA industry group on the first day of the CTIA Enterprise & Applications Conference in San Diego. About half of the 24 million devices are expected to be machine-to-machine connections, with personal mobile devices making up the other 12 billion.

—A TechCrunch report that Hewlett-Packard was laying off “around 500″ employees and rolling up its entire San Diego Software unit set off a scramble last week among local media, which knocked down much of the report. Mike Freeman of The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that HP is eliminating about 50 jobs at its suburban campus related to help desk and analytics products, which came from HP’s $425 million acquisition of Peregrine Systems in 2005.

—The Ford Motor Co. demonstrated a voice-activated system that could someday help motorists monitor their own health and chronic illnesses on the road. Ford’s prototype uses voice-recognition software to help diabetic motorists who use wireless glucose measurement technology to monitor their blood glucose while driving. K. Venkatesh Prasad, a senior technical leader at Ford Research & Innovation, told the Wireless Health 2011 technical conference that Ford’s in-car health and wellness technology is part of a broader effort to expand the capabilities of Ford’s SYNC in-car connectivity system.

—Local technology industries have had a disproportionate effect in boosting San Diego’s regional economy, according to a study from the National University System Institute for Policy Research. Counting direct, indirect, and induced employment, the study found that San Diego’s 363,000 technology-dependant jobs represent more than 29 percent of all jobs in … Next Page »

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With yesterday’s introduction of a new line of data storage products, San Diego’s Overland Data (NASDAQ: OVRL) has set out to make a name for itself in the same high-tech market where it has been operating for the past 31 years.

Since it began making IBM-compatible 9-track tape drives in 1980, Overland Storage has been a behind-the-scenes manufacturer of tape and disk-based data backup equipment. Its products are used mostly by businesses and other (distributed enterprise) institutions to meet their long-term data archiving and protection requirements. But Overland’s long history as a white-label, original equipment manufacturer (OEM) ended earlier this year, CEO Eric Kelly told me recently.

“We officially announced in our last earnings call [in September] that we had shipped our last OEM product to Hewlett-Packard,” Kelly told me. Today, all of the company’s products are sold under the Overland Storage brand.

In addition to asserting its corporate identity, Kelly contends that Overland has worked over the past year to reinvent itself—a turnaround process that culminated in yesterday’s debut of the company’s new “SnapServer DX” technology. Now it is down to a question of market acceptance for the company with roughly 200 employees.

As I’ve previously reported, Overland’s troubles began in 2005, when Hewlett-Packard said it was significantly reducing its orders for Overland’s data storage products. Kelly said HP accounted for almost 60 percent of Overland’s $235 million in fiscal 2005 revenue. In fiscal 2010, Overland’s total sales plunged to less than $78 million, with HP accounting for 22.5 percent of the total. “Now HP represents four to five percent of our revenue,” Kelly said.

Today, Kelly says losing HP as Overland’s biggest customer was one of the best things that could have happened to the company. Instead of making … Next Page »

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“We’re not social media investors,” says Scott Maxwell. And I like him already.

Maxwell is the founder of OpenView Venture Partners. The Boston-based VC firm is different from a lot of its peers in that it doesn’t typically invest in early-stage startups or late-stage growth companies. Instead it specializes in something in between, what it calls “expansion stage” deals: OpenView’s sweet spot is investing $5-15 million in tech companies that are making $2-20 million in annual sales and are wanting to get to $100 million in revenue, he says.

As Maxwell suggests, OpenView’s sector focus is less on social technologies, and more on the less flashy but highly lucrative fields of business software, cloud computing, and software as a service. The firm does look at consumer technologies, he says, but so far it has invested only in business-to-business companies. “You can invest in aspirin, vitamins, or endorphins,” Maxwell says. “A lot of [social media] is investing in endorphins. We’re much better at aspirin.”

OpenView has been around since 2006 and focuses on companies that are building their customer base in North America. The firm grew out of Maxwell’s experience at Insight Venture Partners, which he joined in 2000. Long before that, he was an MIT PhD in mechanical engineering and an MIT Sloan School MBA. He spent the ‘80s doing technology development at a couple of California startups, and the ‘90s working in financial services.

As he explains with his VC hat on, the expansion stage is the “best risk-return investment. It’s a really good point to invest. The expertise you need is unique compared to early stage or later growth stage.” The great majority of companies OpenView invests in are already “successful, chugging along, and growing nicely,” he says. (It’s still a bit early to talk about the payoff though—more on that below.)

Back in the summer, I talked with Maxwell (see photo, left) in depth about OpenView’s approach to investing in and supporting mid-stage tech companies—a stage that seems sorely lacking in capital, given the glut of seed- and early-stage investments being made out there. We also talked about broader trends in cloud computing, mobile software, and the Boston-area technology ecosystem. I wanted to relay some highlights here that have stayed with me.

But first, let’s address the b-word. When we spoke, in early August, there was a lot of talk about a new tech bubble, especially around early-stage companies. Maxwell was prescient in his response to my query. “I haven’t take a bubble bath in a long time,” he said. “There are lots of [kinds of] formations of bubbles. Sometimes they get bigger and slowly dissipate, or they get really big and pop. I think bubbles pop when everyone is all-in. When all the money is in, it has to come out.”

Maxwell contrasted the market dynamics with the original dot-com bubble. “By the time we got to ’99-2000, everyone who was going to be all-in was all-in,” he said. “My sense is we’re not there yet. We’re in an inflated state, but for me it feels tempered.”

With that in mind, Maxwell said, OpenView’s “philosophy is to keep building the … Next Page »

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Here a merger, there a merger, everywhere a merger merger… Some small, medium, and large acquisition news today around New England.

—Localocracy, a Boston-based online town common and community platform, has been acquired by the Huffington Post Media Group and will join the AOL (NYSE: AOL) content unit. The news was first reported by All Things D, which said the deal price was less than $1 million. Localocracy is a finalist in the MassChallenge startup accelerator program.

—Zettapoint, a database management firm based in Concord, MA, and Israel, has been acquired by Hopkinton, MA-based data storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC) for an undisclosed sum. Israel-based news site Globes, which first reported the deal, puts the price at around $10 million and says Zettapoint’s 15 employees will join EMC Israel. (EMC has an R&D center in Beersheva.) Xconomy reported on EMC’s broader acquisition strategy and plans for growth last fall.

—Atrium Medical, a Hudson, NH-based maker of medical devices for cardiology and radiology, said today it is being acquired by Swedish giant Getinge Group (STO: GETIB) for $680 million. Atrium says it will operate as an independent business unit of Maquet Cardiovascular, a Getinge subsidiary, and will be led by current Atrium president Trevor Carlton. The deal is expected to close later this quarter. Atrium was founded in 1981 and has made a name for itself in healthcare device areas such as catheters, artificial heart components, and soft tissue repair.

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TwinStrata, a Natick, MA-based provider of cloud data storage for businesses, has pinned down $5.7 million of an equity offering that could hit $8.7 million, an SEC filing shows. The funding came from 27 investors, according to the document, which lists Braden Bohrmann and Rich Levandov of Avalon Ventures as TwinStrata directors. Levandov will be participating in an Xconomy chat this September on cloud and consumer trends in Internet startups and innovation.

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This week’s New England deals list includes a mix of life sciences and IT companies.

—Lexington, MA-based T2 Biosystems, a developer of a system for identifying biological substances such as proteins, small molecules, viruses, and DNA more cheaply and quickly than existing methods, took in $23 million in Series D financing. New T2 investor Aisling Capital led the round, which also included return backers Flagship Ventures, Polaris Venture Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners, Physic Ventures, Partners Healthcare, Arcus Ventures, RA Capital, Camros Capital, and WS Investments.

—Boston-based online data storage firm Carbonite raised $62.5 million in an initial public offering, selling 6.25 million shares at $10 per share. That was the bottom end of a range ($10 to $11) that Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB) had already lowered earlier on the day it priced. Late last month it had said it expected to price the shares at $15 to $17 each.

—My colleague Greg wrote about how Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development is looking to raise another fund of $20 to $30 million, up from its $10 million “Accelerator Fund,” created to help the school’s scientists commercialize their inventions.

—Amesbury, MA-based Fluidnet, a maker of electronic infusion pumps for administering IV fluids, raised $19.8 million of an offering that could hit $25 million, according to an SEC filing.

—Proteon Therapeutics, a Waltham, MA-based kidney and vascular drug developer, nabbed $15.2 million from 19 investors, an SEC filing showed.

—Lexington-based Pulmatrix raised $14 million in Series B financing, to bring its total funding raised to $60 million. The investment came … Next Page »

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[Updated 8/10/11 5:50 pm. See below.] What’s happening with Carbonite’s IPO?

The Boston-based online data backup firm is dealing with an extremely volatile stock market this week—as are a bunch of other U.S. companies trying to go public. But it’s looking like Carbonite’s initial public offering could go through tomorrow at a much reduced price, with pricing of shares expected tonight, according to Renaissance Capital. At the same time, some of the company’s venture investors are taking the opportunity to buy a bigger slice of the pie.

Carbonite priced its offering of 6.25 million shares at $10 per share, raising $62.5 million, Reuters reported late today [Sentence added to update news of Carbonite's pricing]. According to an SEC filing today, Carbonite’s expected price per share was between $10 and $11, down by about a third from the figure of $15 to $17 proposed last month. That means the stock offering (7,187,500 shares) was expected to be worth a maximum of about $79 million, down from the $122.2 million expected previously—and down from the $100 million stated in the firm’s original S-1 filing back in May.

Carbonite’s venture investors don’t seem too worried. In fact, Menlo Ventures, the company’s largest stakeholder (31.7 percent as of June 30), wants to buy up to 800,000 additional shares, and Crosslink Capital (5.7 percent) wants to buy up to 1.2 million more shares, according to today’s filing. That would seem to suggest they have good confidence in the deal. Another data point from the filing is that Institutional Venture Partners bought 863,832 shares of Carbonite common stock at $12 per share back in January.

It’s a tough time for any company to be going public. But Carbonite has a solid track record of technology and products, and its business has been growing although it is not yet profitable. While the market conditions are troubling—and maybe because of that—the company’s leadership seems to think the time is now to go out, get the deal done, and go from there.

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A local tech startup that has been toiling away for four years saw its first partnership with a big company come to fruition last week—and it could be a sign of bigger things to come.

Back in February, Cambridge, MA-based OfficeDrop, a digital filing software company, inked a deal with Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), the speech and imaging tech firm in Burlington, MA. OfficeDrop provided the software and expertise for Nuance’s new cloud-based scanning and document-managing service, called PaperPort Anywhere, which rolled out last week.

It’s a big deal for OfficeDrop, which stands to get about $1 million in revenue from Nuance in the first year of the partnership, says Prasad Thammineni, the co-founder and CEO of OfficeDrop. Nuance’s scale could help the startup reach millions of new users—so it’s a distribution model that Thammineni is looking to replicate with other big companies in the next year or so.

OfficeDrop lets people (primarily in small businesses) organize, index, and share their digital data, and look at their documents instead of a list of files, for example. “We take visual elements of paper and replicate it,” Thammineni says. “And we bring search to the table.”

The startup sits somewhere in the middle of a swirling ecosystem of companies, many with Boston roots, offering cloud-based services like data storage (EMC), online backup (Carbonite, Backupify), paper digitizing and document management (Iron Mountain), personal file management and search (Evernote), and file hosting and sharing (Microsoft SharePoint, Box.net, and Dropbox, the astronomically-valued startup du jour).

OfficeDrop (formerly called Pixily) started in 2007 as a service to help people scan in and digitally organize their paper documents. It has evolved to include collaborative features and mobile apps, so people can scan documents and access their files from their iPhone, iPad, or Android device. The company has 20 employees, split about equally between the Boston area and Brazil, where most of its software developers are.

Interestingly, although the three founders are Indian, OfficeDrop has no employees in India. Thammineni says that’s because most software developers in India have a big-company mentality that doesn’t mesh well with a startup. Brazil, on the other hand, has a lot of “out of the box” talent that fits with the OfficeDrop culture. “They challenge you at every turn,” he says.

Thammineni’s company, his fifth so far, was self-funded in its early days. It raised a small financing round in 2009, followed by a $1 million angel round this spring—and it will be looking to raise more money this fall, he says. But for now, OfficeDrop’s main focus is on “making the product better and better,” Thammineni says. And on squaring away its next big-company deal.

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Boston-based Carbonite, the online data backup firm, said yesterday in a regulatory filing that it expects to offer 6.25 million shares, plus 937,500 additional shares for underwriters (as an option), at $15 to $17 per share in its planned IPO. That bumps its maximum offering price to $122.2 million, up from the $100 million first stated in May. The company expects its shares to trade on the Nasdaq market under the symbol CARB.

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If there is anything constant about Constant Contact, it is change. The online marketing company (NASDAQ: CTCT), based in the Boston area, is announcing today it has opened a new office in New York City. That by itself isn’t big news, but it’s part of a larger strategic shift in the firm’s technology approach—what is being called the biggest evolution in its 13-year history.

Constant Contact’s New York office, a 2,850-square-foot space in Tribeca, is expected to house more than 10 employees within the next year. For now there is a small team of five, brought over in the firm’s $15 million acquisition of Bantam Live, announced in February. Bantam focused on “social CRM”—social media technologies for helping businesses do things like add new customers, retain them, and better understand what they want, especially in online communities. The New York office, which is currently hiring engineers, apparently will be the hub for integrating social CRM into all of Constant Contact’s marketing tools and services. (The company, with more than 800 employees, also has offices in California, Colorado, and Florida.)

Indeed, the firm’s newest space is symbolic of bigger changes happening under the covers. It’s all part of the broad innovation strategy that CEO Gail Goodman laid out for me last month, as Constant Contact transitions from being known mostly as an e-mail marketing company to being known as a more diversified software-as-a-service firm.

That sounds kind of abstract, but here’s one concrete aspect. Bantam Live uses Ruby on Rails, a popular Web programming framework, for its software development. Constant Contact uses mostly Java, which is older and more established (especially for large-scale backend stuff), for its software and database systems. It’s a challenge—albeit not a unique one—to integrate the two. The goal is to make it so that Bantam’s social software for managing sales contacts, for instance, can talk to Constant Contact’s account management, security, and e-mail and social media marketing systems. As newer social features permeate older technology stacks, this issue is bound to become more widespread.

For Constant Contact, the integration (and a lot more) falls under the domain of Stefan Piesche, the firm’s chief technology officer. Piesche, who joined the company two years ago from Cobalt, oversees an engineering team of about 150, roughly half of them software engineers. “The company is changing its tune vertically and horizontally,” he says. “This requires a different approach on the technology side. But we’re not rewriting everything.”

Rather, newer pieces of code written in Ruby are being embedded, rather cleverly, into existing Java applications so as to maintain a “very cohesive user experience” where “customers don’t see the difference,” he says. The end result: the user sees one unified product, even though it’s made up of multiple sets of products and new features.

Imagine performing this integration on the scale of 450,000 business customers and 8,000 partners (including hundreds in the New York area), and you start to get a feel for the … Next Page »

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Carlsbad, CA-based BeyondTrust said today it has acquired software from Likewise Software of Bellevue, WA, that helps businesses bridge Linux, Unix, and Mac environments to Microsoft Active Directory. Financial terms of the deal for Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise were not disclosed.

Likewise, an open source company that provides a platform for identity, security, and data storage, says it’s using the proceeds to accelerate its investment in its storage software business. In a statement from Likewise, CEO Barry Crist says the Bellevue software developer is “doubling down on our commitment to building out our next-generation storage platform.”

As we reported last year, BeyondTrust specializes in providing IT security for Windows-based networks by managing the access privileges granted to both system administrators and users. The company says the acquisition expands its portfolio of “inside perimeter” security capabilities for Windows and Unix-based systems to include authentication and auditing management for cross-platform and cloud environments.

BeyondTrust says it plans to re-brand and launch the products as part of a new platform, called PowerBroker Identity Services that will integrate Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix systems with Microsoft Active Directory.

BeyondTrust plans to provide continuing technical support for existing Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise customers.

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Big Blue celebrated 100 years of success in the tech industry earlier this month. It’s a rare feat in an industry where companies are often rendered obsolete in a decade, oftentimes sooner. In fact, IBM has managed to stay relevant while literally thousands of tech companies have come and gone. So, what’s its secret recipe? One reason for its success is its aggressive attitude toward buying companies with great technology that integrate well into its portfolio.

As an ERP (enterprise resource planning) market analyst at Software Advice, I was intrigued by all the fanfare that’s been showered upon IBM this month. I also wanted to know more about its mergers and acquisitions strategy and which companies it might buy next. So, to predict the future, I rolled up my sleeves and went digging into the past. Since IBM is an acquisition machine, I limited my search to the last decade of deals.

After I culled the data, it became obvious that there are three markets that IBM likes to go shopping: professional services, middleware, and business analytics. For anyone familiar with IBM’s company profile, this isn’t really a shocker, but the sheer volume of purchases is surprising. In the past decade, IBM bought 14 companies in services, 13 companies in middleware, and made a couple of multi-billion-dollar deals in business analytics.

The Massachusetts Connection

There’s one more trend that I noticed in its purchasing history: IBM loves to buy companies in Massachusetts. Since 2003, it has picked up some 18 companies in the Massachusetts area (these 17 plus Netezza). Massachusetts is an obvious place to shop, with world-class tech universities; it’s a hotbed of technology innovation; and there are dozens of successful companies. In thinking about the Massachusetts connection, there is one company in particular that I couldn’t help but think about IBM buying: EMC.

EMC is the Holy Grail of Massachusetts technology. Its data storage and warehousing business is a multi-billion-dollar operation, and it has one of the most successful virtualization companies on the market (VMware). IBM is already involved in data storage—and is a competitor of EMC—but it has yet to make an aggressive move into the virtualization market. An IBM-EMC combination would create an utterly dominant force in the data storage industry.

IBM’s strategy in the virtualization market has been to play it safe on the sidelines and funnel money and support into things like the Linux KVM hypervisor, hoping that it could compete with VMware. It hasn’t worked. Instead VMware has become the go-to name for all things related to virtualization technology. But that’s exactly what makes buying EMC such an enticing proposition.

Would IBM Buy EMC?

So, what would IBM have to give up? The short answer is: a heckuva lot. IBM’s market cap hovers right at $207 billion, and EMC’s sits at a comparatively modest $55 billion. That means that IBM would have to give up about 20 percent of its company and then some to land EMC. It’s a massive sum of money, but IBM is one of the tech companies that can actually pull off an EMC purchase. While it’s a huge investment, there are massive revenues to realize from a deal of this magnitude. In 2010, EMC brought in $17 billion. If you throw in IBM’s scale on top of that, there’s no telling what kind of revenue they could do together after a deal.

Personally, I think IBM could make it happen. But the move may be a bit too bold for a company that prides itself on focus and on being fairly conservative. On top of that, IBM has already said that it intends to spend “only” $20 billion on mergers and acquisitions in the next five years. An EMC purchase would tear through that and then some. In some respects, however, it’s a deal that might be too good, and pricey, to make happen.

But that’s just my opinion. What’s yours? I’m currently hosting a poll on my blog at Software Advice. Come vote and make your voice heard at: IBM Mergers & Acquisitions: Who’s Next? For reference, EMC is currently in third place. I look forward to hearing from you.

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Santa Clara, CA-based StorSimple announced it has closed a $10.5 million Series C financing round led by Ignition Partners, based in the Seattle area. The company’s other previous investors, including Index Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and Redpoint Ventures, also participated in the round. StorSimple, which has raised a total of $31.5 million to date, focuses on cloud-based data storage software for big companies using Microsoft Windows and VMware systems. The startup began in 2009 and is led by co-founder and CEO Ursheet Parikh, a veteran of Cisco.

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We saw a mix of funding and acquisition news for New England’s tech and life sciences startups this week.

—Carbonite, a Boston-based online data backup firm, revealed it was planning to go public. The company, which has raised more than $67 million in venture capital, didn’t yet say how many shares it will be offering or how much it will be pricing them at, but it aims to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol CARB.

—Waltham, MA-based Augmenix nabbed a $15 million equity investment from Varian Medical Systems of Palo Alto, CA, giving the latter firm a minority stake in Augmenix, a developer of radiation technology for treating cancer patients. Varian (NYSE: VAR) is also getting an exclusive option to acquire Augmenix if certain milestones are met.

—MoMelan Technologies, a Cambridge, MA-based maker of a device to treat skin disorders by expanding the surface area of skin grafts, brought in $3.5 million in funding. It added KLP Enterprises and Life Science Angels to its existing list of investors, which includes LaunchCapital and Mass Medical Angels.

—Cambridge-based Typesafe, an IT startup focused on the Scala programming language, raised $3 million in a Series A financing led by Greylock Partners. The deal also included individual investors hailing from firms such as Facebook, VMWare, Oracle, and Google.

—Massachusetts tech and life sciences startups inked $306 million in investments in April, according to data provided by CB Insights. A $77 million Series G financing for Merrimack Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge helped plump up that total.

—Boston-based data management and protection company Iron Mountain (NYSE: IRM) said it is selling three of its businesses for a total of $380 million to Autonomy, based in the U.K. and San Francisco. The company is shedding its online backup and recovery, digital archiving, and eDiscovery units.

—PerkinElmer, the Waltham, MA-based provider of life sciences products, bought Ontario-based Labtronics, a provider of electronic notebook technology for laboratory analysis. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

—Boston-based SciFluor Life Sciences, a maker of technology for enhancing drugs and commercial chemicals with fluorine, snapped up $5 million in funding from Allied Minds.

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Boston-based Iron Mountain, the data management and protection company, said today it is selling its online backup and recovery, digital archiving, and eDiscovery businesses to San Francisco- and Cambridge, U.K.-based Autonomy for $380 million in cash. The deal is expected to close within 45 to 60 days.

Iron Mountain (NYSE: IRM), founded in 1951, is a stalwart of the Boston-area data storage ecosystem. The company lost money in 2010 (it was profitable in 2009), despite revenues of more than $3 billion. Last month, former CEO Bob Brennan resigned and was replaced by Richard Reese, the company’s chairman (and former CEO from 1981 to 2008).

Autonomy (LSE: AU.L) is a growing business software firm that is increasingly focused on helping companies manage stacks of e-mails, phone calls, and documents in the Internet cloud. The firm, which was founded in the U.K. and also has a Boston office, posted revenues of $870 million in 2010 and has been profitable.

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Han Solo was once frozen in “carbonite.” Now Boston’s namesake tech company is emerging from a different kind of deep freeze.

When we last spoke this winter, David Friend said his online data backup firm, Carbonite, was in the late stages of filing for an IPO. The man is true to his word.

Boston-based Carbonite has indeed filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC and is officially planning to go public as of today. According to the form, the proposed maximum offering is $100 million, but that doesn’t mean much right now. The company isn’t saying yet how many shares it will offer, or the price range for the offering, but if all goes well, its stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol CARB.

The tech IPO market appears to be thawing in New England after a nearly two-year freeze. In recent months, Connecticut-based travel firm Kayak has filed to go public, and Cambridge, MA-based Zipcar held its initial public offering last month. (Meanwhile, e-mail software firm SMTP took a much less conventional route to its IPO a couple weeks ago.)

But back to Carbonite. The company, led by Friend the CEO, has raised more than $67 million in venture capital to date. It first rolled out its data-backup service for consumers in 2006, and more recently has increased its focus on business customers, who Friend said account for between one-third and one-half of Carbonite’s total revenue. Its main competitor over the years has been Mozy (now part of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC). As of January, Carbonite had about 160 employees in Boston, plus some 200 additional full-time equivalents.

More recently, as of April 30, Carbonite had more than 1 million subscribers (both consumers and business users) in more than 100 countries, according to its SEC filing. The company says it has backed up more than 100 billion files since 2005, restoring 7 billion-plus that might have been lost forever. It currently backs up more than 200 million files a day worldwide.

Carbonite is not yet profitable, but its business is growing. The company had revenues of $38.6 million in 2010 (up from $19.1 million in 2009), and $12.8 million in the first three months of 2011. It incurred a net loss of $25.8 million last year, and $5.3 million in the first quarter of this year. The company says the losses are primarily because of large investments in advertising to acquire customers.

A few other strategic nuggets from the SEC filing: Beyond the U.S., Carbonite plans to roll out a data-backup product for businesses in China over the next year. And it plans to start marketing in Europe in 2012. Another big potential growth area is backing up smartphones and tablet computers. The risks to Carbonite’s business, according to the form, include not bringing in enough new customers, not retaining customers, not gaining widespread adoption on mobile devices and with business users, and data security issues.

If the IPO goes through, a number of investors and company execs stand to gain from it. Menlo Ventures, led by managing director Pravin Vazirani, is the lead investor and owns 31.7 percent of the company. Performance Direct Investments owns 5.8 percent, Crosslink Venture Partners owns 5.7 percent, and First Plaza Group Trust is next in line with 5.4 percent. Among executive officers, CEO David Friend and chief architect Jeff Flowers are tops with 9.7 percent and 8.3 percent of the stock, respectively.

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