Business travel is always the same, more or less, anywhere in the world you go. Security checkpoints, flight delays, and lines at the ticket counter are all a predictable part of what you’re in for when you fly the friendly skies. The only thing that can make flying a bit unpredictable is the weather. I, for one, hate turbulence. I’m not a nervous flier, I just don’t like feeling bumps in the air at 33,000 feet.

The M&A market kind of reminds me of a plane that hit some turbulence (back in 2008 and early 2009), but since then and according to our latest quarterly Deal Flow Indicator the market has regained cruising altitude. Year-over-year results for deal activity are up a healthy 24% for Q1 2011 and 72% from the bottom of the market in Q1 2009. It appears that M&A activity levels have normalized.

Relax.  Don’t freak out. Things in the M&A market are good.  In fact, they’re still very good.  We released our latest quarterly Deal Flow Indicator (DFI) and year end DFI results today.  Overall, 2010 was a big winner, showing a tremendous rebound from the doldrums of late 2008 and early 2009 that were brought on by the global financial crisis. The 2010 deal flow was up 33% from 2009. However, it’s unrealistic to expect that the numbers will continue to go up infinitely at every increment that you measure them. After six quarters of double digit sequential growth, the positive quarterly trends came to an end in Q4 2010. But it is a small correction, a mere three percent down in the M&A deal market that we observed in Q4 as an indicator heading into Q1 2011.

If you were to survey the international community on the current state of Mexico, you would be hard pressed to find someone unaware of the tensions at the borders and ports. In recent history, staggering setbacks suffered by both the Mexican and U.S. governments in their fight against border and drug related violence have dominated media coverage.  Perhaps it’s just a function of the “If it bleeds, it leads” philosophy, but we rarely see positive coverage of our neighbor to the south.

As we move through the early days of 2011, I can’t help but reflect on what happened during December, which is typically a big month for awards. It’s the time of year when I blow the dust off my tuxedo, shine up my shoes and wheel out my annual James Bond impersonation. So, suitably adorned, I attended two award ceremonies last month that celebrated some of the great and the good across the European M&A community.

The first was the European M&A Atlas Awards saluting the top deals, deal-makers and firms from the European mid-market M&A community. The event took place at the Le Méridien Hotel in the heart of London and was attended by the winners and interested observers. Needless to say, IntraLinks was a winner and was awarded ‘M&A Technology Products Firm of the Year’. Obviously, everyone at IntraLinks was ecstatic about winning this award which is recognition of our contribution to assisting dealmakers across the entire M&A process. As my colleague Matt Porzio noted in a previous blog, it’s even more thrilling that we won the same award in Asia and the Americas too, a clean sweep in 2010 (click here to see the related press release).

Hot on the heels of the announcement last month of which advisers will be used by the Russian government in its $60Bln privatization programme, IntraLinks sponsored the inaugural mergermarket Russian M&A Forum at the Marriott Royal Aurora Hotel in Moscow. The event brought together over 200 Russian M&A practitioners and leading industry figures to explore the deal making environment in Russia and discuss the outlook for the next twelve months.

In his opening address the mergermarket bureau chief Rob Hartley suggested that one of the main deal drivers in the coming months would be the government asset sale programme, however he also pointed to distressed M&A, inward Russian investment, rising commodity prices, the return of IPOs and consolidation in the banking industry as key drivers in what looks likely to be a promising year for M&A in the region.