I sat next to Don Dodge from the blog Don Dodge On The Next Big Thing and Red Herring publisher Alex Vieux tonight on the Boston Harbor Dinner Cruise that was part of the Red Herring East conference.

We had a good conversation with the table about a post he was working on that will list the top 10 successful internet or software acquisitions that were greater than $1 billion (to follow his worst internet/software acquisitions post that included Mapquest, AskJeeves, Overture, Altavista, Geocities, Netscape, Broadcast.com, Excite, Lycos, and AOL).

After much discussion and thought, the table came up with Navision (Acquired by Microsoft), Great Plains (Acquired by Microsoft), VM Ware (acquired by EMC), Peopesoft (acquired by Oracle), and Tivoli (acquired by IBM).

Don then proceeded to speak with my friend and fellow Durham entrepreneur Ben Weinberger, who announced raising $6 million of funding for his company DigitalSmiths yesterday.

It was also good to catch up with Dhruv Patel and Seth Harward from CED and Justyn Kasierski from Hutchison Law Group.