By Peter Burrows and Johseph Galante

A Field Guide to Silicon Valley Takeover Bait

Cisco (CSCO), Dell (DELL), HP (HPQ), IBM (IBM), and Oracle (ORCL) are all racing to catch the next tech megatrend: cloud computing. They’re also sitting on a combined $100 billion in cash. So M&A speculation runs wild. Midsize companies such as McAfee (MFE) and 3Par (PAR) have already been snapped up at lofty valuations. We spoke with analysts and executives to see who might be acquired next and by whom.