VMware’s ravenous appetite for smaller companies continued in 2020 with the software giant announcing seven acquisitions (so far) this year. And we wouldn’t put it past the company to ink another deal or two before the ball drops on New Year’s Eve.

No judgement, VMware. Many of us, including yours truly, survived the COVID-19 lockdown by indulging in (online) retail therapy. Unfortunately for the rest of us, our pockets aren’t as deep as VMware’s, and CEO Pat Gelsinger has indicated that the company’s not going to slow its spending on mergers and acquisitions. “Some of them are going to be great bargain-basement buys for us to do acquisitions,” he said at an investor conference earlier this year. And during a question and answer session at VMworld in October, Gelsinger said cloud and developer-focused software companies top the list of M&A targets.

Here’s a look back at VMware’s biggest buys of 2020.

VMware kicked off 2020 announcing its intent to acquire Nyansa in January. Nyansa provides artificial intelligence (AI)-based network analytics, and VMware said the technology will improve its network visibility, monitoring, and remediation for its VeloCloud SD-WAN platform. This should make it easier for customers to operate and troubleshoot network disruptions or application performance challenges. It also gives VMware’s secure access service edge (SASE) platform an AI boost as the vendor works to differentiate its SASE from just about every other SD-WAN and security vendor that has since jumped into that crowded field. The Nyansa deal closed in February.

Security and Kubernetes have been two, ahem, pivotal acquisition targets for VMware over the past couple years, and its Octarine purchase in May combined both. Octarine developed a cloud-native security platform for applications running on Kubernetes, and it also integrates into the DevOps process to analyze container security risks at time of build, before they are deployed into production. VMware folded Octarine into its Carbon Black security business, and it plans to further integrate the technology with vSphere, NSX, VMware Cloud Foundation, and its newer Kubernetes-focused Tanzu platform.

VMware added another security startup to the hold a month after Octarine with Lastline, a network detection and response (NDR) and provider. The burgeoning security vendor plans to use Lastline to boost NDR and network threat analysis spanning its SD-WAN and NSX networking and security platforms, and it’s combining Lastline’s and VMware’s threat hunting teams as part of its emerging extended detection and response (XDR) strategy.

In July, VMware completed its acquisition of Blue Medora’s True Visibility Suite business unit. True Visibility Suite provides IT monitoring integrations via management packs, and the technology will allow VMware can expand vRealize Operations’ self-driving management scope and provide granular visibility into packaged applications, middleware, data center infrastructure, and public clouds.

Also in July, VMware bought its long-time partner Datrium, which provides cloud-based disaster recovery. Before the acquisition, Datrium offered disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) with VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This service provides incremental backups that are encrypted, deduplicated, and stored in AWS S3. After the deal closed, VMware started integrating Datrium’s technology into its VMware Cloud portfolio to boost its Site Recovery disaster recovery service, said John Gilmartin, SVP and GM of VMware’s Cloud Platform business unit, in a blog post at the time.

VMware spent a good part of 2020 touting its 5G telco cloud and operator wins including Dish Network and its ongoing work with Vodafone. In September the software company acquired the technology and team behind Mode.net to boost its VMware Telco Cloud Platform. “These new team members have been working on unifying legacy telco networks with a multi-cloud architecture and helps expand our existing bench of talent, bringing additional engineering expertise and innovative ideas that will help us accelerate our delivery,” wrote Shekar Ayyar, EVP and GM of VMware’s Telco and Edge Cloud business unit, in a blog post.

Finally, in its last 2020 acquisition (we think — there are still a few days left in the year), VMware closed its SaltStack acquisition in October. SaltStack, an open source-based automation software provider, fits into several key growth areas for VMware including DevOps and automation, cloud, and security. This acquisition will expand VMware’s automation capabilities including software configuration management, network automation, and infrastructure automation. CEO Pat Gelsinger announced the purchase during his VMworld keynote, and during a later press question and answer session he said that automation technology like SaltStack simplifies customers’ hybrid environments, “and that’s the mantra.”

He also hinted at future related M&A targets. “I don’t think we’re ever done in the management and automation area for either organic or inorganic innovation,” he said. We’re bringing in more and more of those use cases for security, end-user computing, and workload and application management into a complete automated solution stack from VMware.”