The nice thing about three of them happening at once is that this makes it a Trend, so instead of addressing each acquisition individually, we can talk about What It All Means.

From the startup side, there’s really only three exit strategies you can have. You can die. You can file an IPO (like Violin also did last week). Or you can get acquired. If either the company isn’t strong enough, or the market isn’t strong enough, an IPO isn’t necessarily a good idea. So that leaves acquisitions. (We’ll assume no startup plans to die.)

Being acquired doesn’t mean giving up or throwing in the towel. Particularly in the case of the company doing the acquiring, it can be a good idea. It’s a quick way to collect a bunch of new people, a new technology, and perhaps some new customers.  ”The vast majority (over 90 percent) of the successful private company exits in 2011 and 2012 have been through company sale or M&A,” writes Jim Price in Business Insider.

The next thing to look at is who’s doing the acquiring. Is it two small companies hoping that together they’ll be strong enough to survive? I don’t want to pick on Carbonite, but given the sort of year they’ve had, that might be a factor. Or is it a big company looking to add an innovative new technology to its portfolio? Certainly in the case of Microsoft and StorSimple, it’s the latter.

As far as what’s next, keep in mind that acquisitions tend to run in clumps. A new technology comes along, a bunch of little companies start up to use it, and then some of them die, some of them merge with each other, and some of them get acquired by larger companies — typically with the strongest players going first and the later ones being picked up by latecomers in the market who are desperate to own a piece of it, in sort of a high-tech version of Musical Chairs. For a big company, it can be a much safer way to innovate than trying to develop a new technology yourself.

We saw something similar a year ago, when Gartner did its first Magic Quadrant on E-Discovery, and predicted that 25% of the companies in it would be acquired by 2014 by major vendors. As it happened, Gartner didn’t even get the report published before the first acquisition happened, and they’ve been falling steadily like little dominoes every since — especially after Gartner conveniently provided a shopping list.

“Probably the prime imperative for Fortune 500 managers is to find areas for revenue and profit growth,” writes Price. “But the challenge is to do so without endangering the existing franchise. Too often, the dilemma from the helm looks like this: You know you need to get into a promising new space, but it’s quite unproven and you suspect running two or three concurrent experiments might bleed cash for years. So in a real sense, you can’t afford – on a quarter-to-quarter income statement basis – to run too many such risky projects. But if you let entrepreneurial startups run the experiments with their energy, time and capital – and let them ring out the technology risk and the market risk – then once a winner appears, you can buy that winner with capital off your balance sheet.”

Certainly Microsoft and StorSimple would qualify.

Since that’s the case, it seems likely that StorSimple competitors like Nasuni and Panzura — which were speaking with a great deal of bravado about the 800-pound gorilla suddenly in their midst — should be expecting to get calls from other large vendors in the next few weeks, and decide which startup exit strategy they plan to follow.

Take Carbonite (NASDAQ:CARB). The company issued a press release a few days ago citing a study finding that many small businesses were using old, unreliable methods such as external hard disks, USB drives, and CD ROMs with which to back up their data. The report noted the following:

• 50% use external hard drives, yet 20% backing up their business data indicated they started to do so because of a hard drive failure
• 42% use USB/flash drives primarily because it is perceived as easy, yet only 6% believe USB/flash drives to actually be reliable
• More than one-third use CDs/DVD drives to back up data, even though 62% feel they are inconvenient or risky
• 21% of small businesses using online backup were using a free product; since free online backup services are typically capped at two gigabytes, small businesses using these methods could be vulnerable to data loss
• 24% of small businesses using this method noted USB/flash drives do not work well for backup specifically because they have limited storage space
• 22% of small businesses surveyed pay for outside tech assistance
• 40% of those who manage the process in-house spend more than an hour per week backing up their company data, with 6% spending more than five hours per week
• Only 24% have backed up their data in the past day, and 24% haven’t backed up their data within the past week

Gosh. Sounds serious.

If one reads further, however, one notes two things. First of all, by an amazing coincidence, Carbonite just happens to sell a service, at what is no doubt a reasonable price, that solves all these problems.

Second of all, there is absolutely no information in the press release about the study itself, other than its name: Carbonite Small Business Data Backup Usage Study, July 2011. Nothing about how many people were surveyed, how they were chosen, or anything. For any vendor survey, this tends to cast suspicion on its results.

Not to mention, July? Really?

If one uses one’s favorite search engine to search for the title of said study, one discovers that Carbonite has in fact referenced the same study in three other press releases, in July, October, and November. It’s in the July one that we learn that the survey itself on which the study was based was actually performed in April. 2011.

That said, several outlets, including no less than eWeek, picked up the survey and ran it as a straight news story.

But Carbonite, which went public last summer, was in the news for something else recently. In response to the Rush Limbaugh lambasting of Sandra Fluke as a “slut” for implying that she actually, gasp, had sex, Carbonite pulled its advertising on March 3 from the conservative radio show — one of some 40 radio talk shows on which it advertises, according to a blog post from the company president.

There have been two results from that. First, Carbonite has been slagged by any number of sites in the right-wing echo chamber, as well as on its own Facebook page, for daring to question Rush — not to mention, as it turns out, because the company CEO had donated money to left-wing candidates and causes. Second, the company’s stock dropped some 10% in a day, from which it is slowly — very slowly — recovering.

So, did the company issue yet another press release on the same July study — now with data nearly a year old — to deflect interest from the Rush flap?