Virtually Insane?

• ATOS
• CSC
• Fujitsu
• Cap Gemini
• Computacenter
• Logica
• Steria

It is amazing how much consolidation is occuring and how quickly in the industry today and its quite alarming what the big powerhouses are prepared to do to jump onto the IT services bandwagon, Especially when you hear about Outsourcing pricing being whittled down to bare minimal profit margin with customers demanding much more out of there contracts.

Now if you were Xerox or Dell why would you buy an IT services integrator and provider? Many thoughts come to mind such as;

• Entry into the IaaS space
• Build a portfolio of offerings which will be ready for the economic upturn
• Improve indirect sale, they will claim to remain agnostic but the longer term goal is to adopt customers to there platforms/solutions
• Quash competition, namely IBM, Oracle and now HP after EDS

Future Predictions

Oracle buy FJS or even possibly CSC, and why do I think this? They both have credible history and large customers within the Government and Public sector, provide further international coverage with multiple continental reach (especially FJS) and lastly a possible for consideration for purchasing Fujitsu is it builds the current SPARC chips and Oracle has commited to staying in the Hardware business so I expect will want control on the production line.

Another is Cisco are a possible to buy Accenture, they work together on current engagements apparently (how cute) and I see them probably being closely matched in regards to target audience. Accenture is very expensive and has a large price tag but Cisco is one of the few orgs who are capable of buying them HP/EDS stylie. Cisco might even go for an Indian Outfit like TCS or HCL, they are into emerging markets and they probably have large outsourced operations over there already so maybe a good cheaper mix?

Whatever the next acquisition is it will raise an eyebrow, with emerging countries making the world a smaller place and price of companies being at a lower value due to the economy it is bound to happen.

# posted by Daniel Eason : 19:59