Yes BRCM seems to be a winner, except with all the lawsuits against QCOM, buying it would be going against several friends and family I know.
I've been pretty happy with Intel, Nokia, Yahoo, HP…especially after finding out that they didn't puke on earnings. I've also been happy with BEA, Motorola, and just about everything else Icahn is trying to pump and dump, or slice and dice. Unfortunately, party isn't going to go on forever some I'm unloading some this week.
I'm thinking of getting into enterprise storage tech/failover technology such as NetworkAppliance, EMC. Namely because I'm seeing a lot of demand for some of these products, as more and more software companies start moving to the SAAS business models (software as a service) and grid computing. The storage needs, fault tolerance, failover, etc is reaching beyond anything I've seen before, as companies are hosting and cramming more and more stuff into services. Unfortunately, these storage tech companies i think are already pretty expensive, so I've been patiently waiting (and unfortunately watching these go up and up.) The only two I don't like is Veritas because it's now part of Symantec and VMWave which is ridiculously priced. My company pretty much uses every one of these companies, and my peers in the industry have been seeing similar buying trends. Some of our tech budgets have been going up for awhile.
But what do I know. I'm just fat and lazy 🙂
One funny thing. I've been reading a lot about analysts talking about BEA and how they think there will be a competing offer more than Oracle. I sort of chuckled at some of the potential bidders.
1) IBM: uh, unless they are going to buy BEA to shut them down, I doubt it. IBM has websphere.
2) SUN: uh, they are moving to an open source model and have glassfish. Uh, doubt that.
3) SAP: possible, especially with the weak dollar. Still, don't think SAP wants to move into markets where things are commoditized.
4) HP,CA,EMC,CSCO: doubt it. Doesn't make sense. Software suite is different space.
My opinion, ORCL will be the only suitor. Final answer.