Content delivery specialist Akamai has acquired Blaze Software, which has technology to optimise web page rendering.

New Zealand-listed accounting software vendor, Xero, has raised a further $15.5 million from existing strategic investors in the company to support its future growth in Australia and globally, at the same time as it announced the acquisition of practice management company, Max Solutions, the developer of job, time and invoice management solution WorkflowMax.

Seagate shipped around 47 million disk drives in the second quarter of the current financial year, also posting better than expected results for the December quarter with preliminary revenues of between $3.1 and $3.2 billion.

Australian crowdsourcing website, DesignCrowd, has acquired its US-based rival, Brandstack.com for an undisclosed price, and has followed up the acquisition by launching BrandCrowd.com, which will combine the Brandstack service with the existing DesignCrowd community.

Brisbane-based specialist business software provider, Markinson, has been acquired by international software and services group, Constellation Software, part of the Friedman group of companies.

Salesforce.com is set to acquire web-based social performance management software provider Rypple and plans to relaunch its product as Successforce.

International services provider Dimension Data has completed its acquisition of BlueFire.

TomTom continues to expand and consolidate its Asian regional buisiness, and has now taken full control of its Thailand joint venture, increasing its stake from 80 percent to 100 percent.

AVG Technologies has acquired Bsecure, a provider of cloud-based web filtering aimed largely at the home market.

Global digital security software vendor, Clearswift, has been acquired by mid-market growth investor Lyceum Capital, in a deal that will see increased focus on Clearswift’s content-aware security products as the newly cashed-up company pursues further market growth.