Continuing the week of strange, analyst-proposed corporate matings, comes news that someone thinks RIM is being eyed up.

The Canadian maker of BlackBerry smartphones could be an inviting target, if only because its shares have jumped 12 percent over the past two days.

Even better for a purchaser, they are down 15 percent compared to a year ago, and down 27 percent from their 52 week peak.

Buddy, spare a tip?

Which all has the rumourmill spining.

Kaufman Bros' Shaw Wu has been leading the charge. According to the Wall Street Journal, he's tagged Cisco Systems and Microsoft as being prime poachers. Less likely, he also painted Oracle and Nokia into the picture.

Cisco certainly makes some sense in terms of RIM stock being potentially undervalued - its market cap is currently around $30 billion - while Cisco has around $40 billion in cash and short term investments.

In comparison, Microsoft has $37 billion sitting in its corporate moneyclip and Google $30 billion.

RIM would also be a good fit in terms of Cisco's enterprise focused business, especially in terms of RIM owning its own mobile infrastructure.

Still, the whole thing feels fairly speculative, in a way only slightly more believable than the 'Apple buys Facebook, Netflix, Disney, Sony, EA' rumours that were whirling around not so very long ago.

[source: Wall Street Journal]