Managing M&A Mayhem

These are busy times on the M&A merry-go-round. Earlier this week, for example, Betrusted Holdings and TruSecure Corp. joined forces to form CyberTrust, the worlds largest private information company (see Betrusted, TruSecure Form CyberTrust). At the same time, Oracle Corp.’s (Nasdaq: ORCL) relentless pursuit of PeopleSoft Inc. (Nasdaq: PSFT) continues apace (see Oracle Prevails in Antitrust Lawsuit).

But what about the impact on end users?

Well, analyst firm Gartner Inc. estimates that by 2007, the number of suppliers in the software market will be slashed by 50 percent thanks to a combination of mergers, acquisitions, and firms either moving to a different market or simply going out of business.

Although Gartner does not have a specific figure for how many data center vendors will disappear as part of this trend, Alan Mac Neela, a Gartner vice president, warns that there will be “significant consolidation” in the market for data center products.

Certainly, barely a month seems to go by without one of the major players such as Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) or IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) snapping up a smaller, specialist IT vendor (see Cisco Nabs NetSolve, Cisco Acts on Actona, and IBM Vouches for Venetica).