Akamai is a perfect company to get acquired by Cisco, particularly after the recent acquisition of WebEx, which provides IP-based video conferencing for the enterprise. When the Internet was just blossoming, it was simply enough to get your info from your computer out into the world beyond. And that is what Cisco was great at with their first major product, their routers. But now with the audience fully matured and demanding video (e.g., WebEx), the companies that speed up the last mile of transmission of Web content will become increasingly valuable. Akamai is the leader in this.

What!? A declining old school dialup internet service provider? Most people don’t realize that United Online has quietly been building one of the largest social networks out there, classmates.com. All of UNTD’s profit growth comes from classmates.com. Also, UNTD’s cash flows are immense. Lets look at the basic numbers: A $932mm market cap and $162mm cash in the bank with no debt, giving it an enterprise value of $770mm. With EBITDA of $154mm, UNTD trades at just five times cash flows. The situation reminds me of Ask Jeeves which was trading for seven times cash flows right before Interactive Corp (IACI) bought it for a 20% premium. The Classmates.com asset is too huge to ignore with traffic doubling every year. Consequently, UNTD’s content and media division posted revenues up 33% when compared to the prior year during the last quarter. Additionally, UNTD pays out a 6% dividend, making it the highest yielding tech company that I track.

INTU, through their Quickbooks software and their various Tax packages, provides financial management and tax solutions to small business, consumers, and accountants. This would be a perfect latch-on for Oracle since ORCL is primarily in large businesses but is starting to face competition on the small business front from MySql. INTU would be a great foot in the door for ORCL to get in the small business. Not to mention there’s been many times through the years that MSFT has been rumored to buy out INTU.

JCOM is also an interesting play here. JCOM provides internet faxing (they used to be called JFax), conference calling, and other CRM services. A combination WEBX/JCOM would be a true unified communications platform for the enterprise. Similar to AKAM above, and WEBX, JCOM trades at 15 times cash flows. They have $156mm cash in the bank with no debt so the balance sheet is pristine. Last year they had EBITDA of$78mm and 21% revenue growth. This year, analysts are estimating revenues to grow from $181mm to $222mm. Substantial growth for a company that is trading at only a slightly above average P/E compared to the market-at-large.

Brocade is in the front line in providing sophisticated storage solutions into the corporation. They provide the software, the switches, the bandwidth,the hardware know how to build clusters, mirroring, backups, etc. CSCO has been building out its storage with its latest acquisition of neopath but I think a buy of BRCD would make it game over. BRCD trades at 17 times cash flows but they will probably double those cash flows over the next year,making an acquisition quickly accretive. Analysts expect revenues to grow from 1.3bb this year to $1.6bb next.

Avaya is a direct competitor with CSCO in the entprise. CSCO can buy them, scoop up their customers, and the acquisition will be immediately accretive. AV trades at just 6x cash flows, in part, because CSCO cominates them across the industry. With $900mm cash in the bank, $650mm in cash flows, and only a $4bb enterprise value this is just chump change for CSCO and cheap.

If CSCO is routing the data around, storing it, etc then it makes sense they will want to secure it. MFE provides solutions for both companies and consumers to build firewalls, seek out and destroy intrusions, protect against viruses, etc. With $1.2bb cash in the bank, $300mm in ebitda, and an enterprise value of $3.45bb, this acquisition would be immediately accretive to CSCO.

Writes software for application development management and general IT governance issues. Their software attempts to improve productivity throughout the IT departments of large companies and organizations. They are a perfect fit for Oracle because as their software sits atop of the management and development of all software systems within an IT department. It would be easier for Oracle applications to get introduced into companies that have CPWR as a vendor. The company has a pristine balance sheet with $500mm in cash and no debt on the balance sheet. With a $3bb market cap that means 1/6 of that market cap is in cash. Additionally, with $231mm in EBITDA, the company is cheap at just 10.6 times cash flows (versus ORCL's 13) making the acquisition accretive immediately.