As we noted in the December 23 issue, there were "billions and billions" spent on enterprise IT mergers in 2005. They kept happening right into December, so why should anyone expect them to slow down now? Skeptics would say that there are simply fewer companies left to be bought and that all the industry giants pretty much filled their holes by now. So look for mergers and acquisitions focusing on market share growth (such as the Sun/StorageTek deal) and others focusing on creative diversification (such as the Symantec/Veritas deal). Also look for more international deals (such as IBM/Lenovo) and deals which get one company closer to another's customers (perhaps a partnership such as EMC/Adobe).