I have been in this consulting industry for more than three years… Time & again I have been thinking about this for quite sometime… ‘The ONE company to watch out for in IT industry…Is it Google??? Yahoo??? Microsoft??? Computer Associates??? Symantec???
Ahem…now its “THE TWO” companies to look out for...Its IBM & Oracle!!!
coz I got a shock when I read Oracle bought Sun Micro for $7.4 Billion while IBM had quoted $6.85 billion
Something tickled me to do some research on these companies’ M&A Strategies…did some research...n was amazed to see the results...Here we go...
IBM (International Business Machine)
IBM's history dates back decades before the development of electronic computers. It originated as the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896.
Computing Tabulating Recording (CTR) Corporation was formed through a merger of four different companies: the Tabulating Machine Company, the International Time Recording Company, the Computing Scale Corporation, and the Bundy Manufacturing Company. This was incorporated on June 16, 1911. CTR was renamed International Business Machines corporation in 1924 (oh my god!!! It’s almost 85 years)
In the past 85 years, they have acquired more than 95 companies across business like Software development, consulting, business intelligence, content management etc…
To my surprise, out of 95, more than 45 companies had been acquired during the period 2004-2009 (still counting)
Some of the notable acquisitions of IBM since 1995:
Lotus Corporation – 1995 – Desktop & Personal computers
Tivoli Systems Inc – 1996 – Service Management, security, Storage Software Products
Informix Corporation – 2001 - Database
PriceWaterhouseCoopers – 2002 – Business Consulting
Rational Software Corporation – 2003 – Software development Products
Daksh e-Services – 2004 – BPO Services
Ascential Software Corporation – 2005 – Datawarehousing & Business Intelligence
Network Solutions – 2005 – IT Services
Filenet Corporation – 2006 – Content Management
Internet Security Systems (ISS) – 2006 – IT Security
Vallent Corporation – 2007 - Telecommunications
DataMirror Corporation – 2007 – Data Integration
Cognos – 2008 – Business Intelligence
Outblaze's E-Mail Service Assets – 2009 – Email Service alert for Lotus Products
Now comes the Head-on competitor - Oracle
Oracle, founded in 1977, specializes in developing & marketing DBMS Products. Through its organic growth & a number of high profile acquisitions, they became one of the head-on competitors for IBM.
They are in an acquisition spree since 2005 & they have acquired around 50 companies
Some of their major acquisitions:
i-Flex Solutions – 2005 – Financial Software Product Development
Retek – 2005 – Retail Management System
Oblix – 2005 – Security Product
Peoplesoft – 2005 – Enterprise Software
Siebel Systems – 2006 – CRM Product development
Metasolv – 2006 – OSS Software
Hyperion Corporation – 2007 – Enterprise Performance Management
Agile Software Corporation – 2007 – PLM
BEA Systems – 2008 – Enterprise Software
Sun Microsystems – 2009 – Hardware, Software, IT Services
Though the list of acquisition is less, the value of the organizations is high…
Competing Products in the market
Websphere - Weblogic
Oracle DBMS - DB2 & Informix
Cognos - Hyperion
IBM MDM - Oracle MDM
IBM Infosphere- Oracle Fusion Middleware
Tivoli - Oracle Oblix, Sun IDM, Sun IAM
IBM SDK - Java JDK (Sun)
AIX - Solaris (Sun)
IBM Servers - Sun Server
IBM HPC - Sun HPC
IBM WMQ - SeeBeyond
IBM Chip Designing- Sun Chip designing (Montalvo Systems)
Next possible Acquisitions either by IBM or Oracle:
Computer Associates ($ 4.5 Billion) – Leading Enterprise IT management product Development Company which is a near competitor for IBM Tivoli products…So there are high possibilities that Oracle can buy CA in near future because Oblix & Sun IDM & IAM alone will not be able to compete with Tivoli range of products.
Vignette Corporation ($ 170 Million) – Leading content management product development company. The only way for Oracle to compete with IBM’s Filenet product is to buy Vignette Corporation. I think they will do in near future
Informatica ($ 450 Million) – Leading Data warehousing Product Development Company…hmm…I donno…survival of the fittest…Lets see is it gonna be IBM or Oracle or someone else
SAP Labs ($ 10 Billion) – Leading ERP software product Development Company which is one of the major competitor of Oracle. So let’s wait n watch what IBM is gonna do…
Apart from these, so many companies might come under their radar like Tibco, Webmethods, Symantec, McAfee, Pega Systems, BMC, NCR corporation...
Lets wait n watch who is gonna be the next big fish in their net...
