Rampant Acquisitions

These days acquisitions are on a rampant. Every company is trying to improve its solidarity by acquiring in vertical or horizontal way.

The bigger players try for vertical acquisitions so that they spread their risks and also provide one point solution to the customer. For example: Symantec acquired Veritas. Symantec, a high profile in Antivirus software wanted a "solid" platform to increase its market share. Veritas, being a very big player in Storage and backup services was a good hit. Now, Symantec can directly sell its Antivirus to the corporate with Backup, Email servers etc.

* Sun's now marketing hardware with OS (Solaris) package.
* RedHat will sell Linux with Application Server
* IBM will promote WebSphere Application Server with Bowstreet Portal framework

Acquisitions bring many benefits to the corporate like a few mentioned below:
* The client database will increase
* One point for Client Maintenance (Marketing and Sales)
* Products sold as a Stack (License & Support)
* Increased Revenue Generation


Acquisitions also make the world a smaller place. How?
* By making one point entry for all his needs (this might be a little exaggeration)
* His work will be reduced in searching for multiple products sold by different vendors
* One transaction will suffice his multiple needs
* One Company to interact for support and maintenance

Finally, it's going to be one place for the customer, where he can buy all his software/hardware needs. World is asking for it and Corporate is leaving no stones returned in their efforts to help them.

Does it mean that smaller players will be stopped from venturing out? It will never happen. The smaller players will continue to play the part of the game and remain as they are. They will give ways to be acquired by bigger players always.