After IBM-Red Hat, Which Open-Source Companies Are Next?

With IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, open-source software—once one of the biggest threats facing traditional enterprise technology companies—has become a hot commodity. It is just a matter of time before more open-source companies are gobbled up.

This year has already seen three other major open-source deals: Salesforce’s $6.5 billion acquisition of Mulesoft in March; Microsoft’s $7.5 billion purchase of GitHub in June; and the $5.2 billion merger between data analytics companies Cloudera and Hortonworks in early October. Future acquisition targets could include the likes of Mesosphere, Confluent, Docker, Elastic and HashiCorp, and the companies that might be on the hunt for open-source acquisitions could include Google, Amazon, Dell and Cisco, say analysts and tech industry executives.