As technology industries continue to move toward the new millennium, partnerships, mergers and acquisitions will occur an at ever-increasing pace as firms look for greater economies of scale and synergistic relationships.

Here in Utah there have been five notable acquisitions of technology concerns that have taken place within the past 60 days. Three were publicly announced (two with dollar figures attached). The value of other two deals has been kept under wraps by the parties involved.The most prominent deal was announced in late February and involved the acquisition of U.S. Robotics by 3Com.

USR is the company that acquired Salt Lake City-based Megahertz (the PC card modem manufacturer) roughly 18 months ago. Since then, the Megahertz operation has become the mobile computing division of USR.

Based upon the closing price of 3Com stock on February 25, the deal was valued at $246.6 billion, making it, according to a joint news release, the largest merger in data networking history.

However, when the deal is done, the new firm will be known as 3Com, and the new board of directors will comprise a majority of former 3Com board members. (Sounds like an acquisition to me.)

In retrospect, however, there are two very interesting things about this deal.

First, there was little if any advance warning that such an arrangement might occur. That's unusual, particularly for two publicly held concerns.

Second, the product lines of the two entities do seem to fit quite nicely together, with little overlap among their offerings.

For example, 3Com is primarily known as a developer and manufacturer of computer networking hardware: from network interface cards, or NICs, to network bridges and routers, which help connect disparate (and often distant) computers and networks.

And although it's an oversimplification, USR is primarily in the modem business, and modems are devices that allow one computer to communicate with another.

In the end, this should be a pretty successful marriage.

On the other end of the scale, Provo-based Folio announced two days before the USR/3Com deal that it would be sold to Open Market of Cambridge, Mass.

Folio was initially sold several years ago to Mead Corp., the paper products giant. A few years later, Mead sold Folio and several other technology assets (including the Lexis-Nexis database) to European media giant Reed Elsevier.

For whatever reason, the Folio/Reed deal never seemed to gel, so the February announcement that Folio would be sold was not a total surprise.

That Folio would be sold to Open Market did come as somewhat of a surprise to this writer since the two firms are not an obvious fit. And, for that matter, the purchase price (a combination of cash and stock) seems to me to be lower than I would have expected.

At the same time, however, one of the big challenges Folio has had since its beginning is crafting and marketing a targeted and easy-to-understand message as to what Folio does and how its products benefit users.

(In simple English, Folio's main product allows users to create and retrieve multimedia databases while allowing users to assign and create relationships between objects in those databases. Sorry, that's as simple as I can make it.) Interestingly, Open Market says it intends to use Folio products to allow organizations to sell products over the Internet for prices down to "micro-pennies," or fractions of a cent.

An example of this might be that I could decide to post copies of my column on the Internet where surfers could purchase my past columns for fractions of a penny.

Today, there is no easy mechanism for maintaining and computing smaller electronic sales such as these. With Folio in its fold, Open Market claims it will be able to make this concept into a reality.

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Sounds interesting and worth watching to see if they can, in fact, turn their idea into real money.

Of the three other deals, two apparently involve local, privately held software firms that have been sold for what I was told was "a lot of money" to two Asian companies. In both instances, all of the involved firms want to maintain anonymity.

The final deal is still in progress and involves a Utah County firm (that is a client and on whose board I serve) that is being sold to another firm in a stock transaction.

The interesting point is that all five of these deals have been announced or consummated within the past 60 days. To me this is just another sign that the high-tech industry is a robust and still-healthy arena.

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