Acquisitions

Well, it seems silly-season is back with us again with yet another acquisition announced to the world this morning.

After last weeks announcement that Microsoft was pulling the pin on its acquisition of Yahoo (and the resultant bouncing around of the stock prices) HP confirmed the worst-kept-secret, this weeks anyway, that it is in advanced negotiations with EDS. What does this mean to the market and the IT industry in general? Well, it would give HP a large service-delivery team that is currently independent, sort-of, of major IT vendors link Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, EMC etc.

What does this mean for these organisations who currently leverage partnerships with EDS - will anything change, will HPEDS purely focus on their own in-house technologies? Personally, having looked at HP's current product offerings there are some obvious gaps in their portfolio including relational-database, desktop OS, Office-tools, enterprise-storage etc. etc. etc.

HP has been striving to become more that just a mash-up of two large organisations for many years now and with the recent acquisition of Tower - you can see where they are wanting to head (little-IBM anyone?). Rumours of an EDS take-over by quite a few organisations have been floating around for a few years. HP's announcement followed a report in the Wall Street Journal and was met with mixed reactions. Some said that there was little synergy between HP and EDS and they were uncertain of why the acquisition would happen whilst others said that it made sense for HP to enter the global-services market and expand on their current limited offerings with the weight of the EDS brand and staff-numbers behind them.

A New Acquisition in the ECM Space

As predicted in one of my earlier posts..

...I think that we will see more acquisitions and/or mergers happening during 2008-2009. There are a number of tier-2 players in the ECM space that are ripe for acquisition and there are a number of hardware vendors that might look to expand their footprint within their own customer base through new initiatives around ECM and the intelligence these products bring to the storage or server environments. Vignette, Interwoven et al. fit firmly into this arena - potential suitors may include HP, Dell or Sun.

..today saw the announcement that HP has made a move to acquire Tower Software, a Canberra based supplier of ECM (records predominately) software - TRIM.

I still predict that we will see 1 or 2 more acquisitions in the ECM space during the course of 2008, HDS have yet to make a move for example. I wish Martin and the guys at Tower all the best and good luck with the future under the HP umbrella.

Paul