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The merger is the culmination of a five-year partnership, according to Mortgage Technology. Recently, Axacore has developed new platforms and technologies to support Scrypt's growth, so a merger appears to be a natural progression from casual collaboration to formal absorption. The merged company will retain the Scrypt name, with restructuring and consolidation initiatives to begin early this year. 

One of the benefits of providing solutions as a third party is that if a partnership is successful enough, the question of acquisition may be raised down the road. For software developers, this means implementing the most impressive and efficient solutions possible for a larger company in need of assistance.

Many are accustomed to thinking of "spring cleaning" as a set of chores to tidy up a home or office. However, tech companies seeking to merge, acquire or be acquired in 2015 might want to conduct a spring cleaning of their brand presentation.

For a company as big as Apple, a single app has many channels of development. This week, it was revealed that Apple acquired Ottocat, a search engine company that has helped to develop the "explore" tab in Apple's app store application. In an unusual twist, it turns out that Apple purchased Ottocat years ago, as early as May 2013.

Fossil Group, a worldwide-recognized marketing and distribution company for lifestyle and fashion accessories, recently confirmed that it will be acquiring Misfit, a manufacturer of connected wearable products, for $260 million.

According to a company press release, this deal will allow Fossil Group to broaden its market through Misfit's scalable app platform, highly recognizable brand and innovative product & hardware engineering team. This acquisition will also help Fossil Group solve its current problem with the battery longevity of its wearable, and allow it to market to new brands and gain new partnerships in the fitness, healthcare, digital and music industries.

The deal was struck for a number of reasons. First, it provides Marriott much better leverage in negotiations with online travel sites. A recent example of the company struggling to gain leverage with sites was when it negotiated its deal with TripAdvisor. Many analysts saw the deal as a way for Marriott to better position itself when it eventually sat down in contract negotiations with Expedia.

Comcast has been identified as the least popular company in America by a number of surveys. Because cable users have felt dissatisfied with the service and pricing structure of Comcast's services, convincing the country that this deal would improve user experiences was a tough sell.

There may be nothing wrong with a particular system of operation or communication. It just might not make sense when IT decision makers scale it to a bigger, more diverse application. Part of remaining open to possibilities is acknowledging that some ways of doing business need to fall by the wayside.

This week, it was announced that Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) will acquire a majority stake in iStreamPlanet, a streaming video tech company. The terms of the deal were not disclosed but it's not challenging to predict how TBS will leverage its purchase.

Dropbox, a service many people use to store files, announced this week that it will acquire Clementine, a company that provides communication services to enterprises. Many of Clemetine's existing services will be transitioned into Dropbox applications.

In addition to its individual usership, TechCrunch reports that 100,000 businesses have built Dropbox into their operations. As such purchasing a communications solutions provider improves the company's ability to accommodate a variety of business needs like conference calls and chat services.

On the surface, a company like Spotify looks like a glossy entertainment enterprise. From collaborations with popular artists to partnerships with music festivals, from the customer perspective, the focus is on music and access to streaming songs.

It's a scene that could go comically awry in a movie. Just as showtime nears, your small shop proves it's not ready for primetime. Employees roll into the office late and disheveled, none of the presentation technology works and your well-rehearsed elevator pitch escapes you at the last minute. Mergers and acquisitions are full of moments that seem like defining turning points in the negotiation process, when you can either win over or put off your potential buyer. 

It was recently announced that AOL has acquired Millennial Media, a mobile ad network that places advertisements on tablet and smartphone screens. As AOL continues its progress from mail and browsing platform of the early internet into a fully-fledged content producer, the ability to effectively place ads is critical to expansion.

Machine learning is a cornerstone of tech development but sometimes training machines to absorb information can take time. Whetlab is a company that has pioneered systems to accelerate that process, reducing the amount of time it requires to get new machine learning systems off the ground.

One challenge is that talent-poaching can deplete a team of its key members before, during or following an M&A deal. For this reason, it's important for both the buying company and the acquired firm to iron out contracts and facilitate discussions that keep important players in place. If the architect of an integral strategy is courted to another company, suddenly the value of a merger or acquisition plummets with that person's departure.

In the mergers-and-acquisitions romantic comedy Working Girl, the dramatic climax comes when protagonist Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) proves her M&A bona fides to an executive in an elevator. It's unclear where the trope of an "elevator pitch" began, but culturally, we fantasize about that critical moment when we win a client or partner over in under a minute.

One of the ways smaller firms can make themselves most attractive to companies looking to buy is harnessing the power of strong branding. Brands represent not just the identity of a company, but symbolize a contract with consumers and business partners that requires great consistency and uniqueness.

"EMC is a behemoth of a corporate IT business," he writes. "It is among the largest providers of storage hardware in the world. It also makes servers and owns security company RSA, which is known for its hard-to-crack SecurID tokens. And its most prized possession is its 81% stake in VMware - the company that rules the world of virtualization software that allows businesses to run various operating systems on their devices."