Martin Veitch

It’s not surprising that stories about IT mergers and acquisitions tend to do well on the business pages. Outside of that thing you used to do before marriage and kids, and maybe football, there’s nothing like cash for raising the interest of the reader. The question is: do these deals do any good for buyers?

Ten years ago, the situation was simpler. Apart from very small acquisitions, there was a consensus that M&A activity in business generally had a low chance of success. In IT, that rule of thumb was seen as particularly apposite, and a common discussion centred on whether there had ever been any successful large deals at all.

There were no end of duff deals to serve as a warning. Novell had bought WordPerfect for a king’s ransom and then sold it to Corel for a pittance. HP’s purchase of Apollo came just before a fall that saw the firm lay off thousands of staff. A buoyant Borland nabbed its old rival Ashton-Tate and suddenly became less than buoyant.

To a certain extent, you can blame the current spate of mergers on two firms that showed that you could buy well. Symantec’s purchase of Peter Norton Computing gave it the powerful Norton brand that is still going strong today, and encouraged the company to embark on a strategy of growth through acquisition. CA was also a serial acquirer and, critics would contend, helped found the brutal principle of “buy then get rid of whatever isn’t absolutely necessary”.

The world of auctions, hostile bids, poison pills, executive ego battles and multibillion-pound transactions is undoubtedly attractive but the benefit of all this hoopla to IT buyers is debatable.

Some vendors insist that customers are actually demanding that rationalisation occurs because they don’t want to deal with hundreds of suppliers and prefer that unusual object of desire, “one throat to choke”.

I find this last point particularly questionable. Dealing with large numbers of IT suppliers is a fact of life for companies with healthy IT strategies, at least those that depend on IT for differentiation. Young companies have new ideas and the joy of being able to start with a blank sheet of paper. As long as there is IT, there will be small entrants that succeed because they are nimble and have managed to build a better mousetrap than their bigger rivals.

Many companies can choose independence if they wish, by not floating on the public markets, by being satisfied to build organically or to be content with answering a particular need that is overlooked by the giants.

“Get big, get niche or get out”, as the old saying goes, and it’s still true today.