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Computerworld - You don't have to be an IT veteran to have at least one scar that was inflicted by the merger or acquisition of one of your major technology providers. For Rick Omartian, IT chief financial officer at The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America in New York, make that two, going on three. After watching Meta Group get eaten by Gartner Inc. and PeopleSoft get chomped by Oracle Corp., he's now focused uneasily on the CRM market as a customer of the beleaguered Siebel Systems Inc.
Meanwhile, Robert Robinson, business systems supervisor at Durr Industries Inc. in Plymouth, Mich., is one of many former J.D. Edwards customers now experiencing what some might call a "twofer." Now that Oracle has acquired PeopleSoft, which two years ago bought J.D. Edwards, "it's like watching a fish get swallowed by a seal, and then the seal gets swallowed by a whale," he says. "Everyone's aghast at the seal [being swallowed], but no one remembers the fish."
And more merger and acquisition (M&A) activity is forecast. Leaving out top vendors like Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Oracle, SAP AG and IBM, "if you look at the eight-to-10-year life cycle of a major software product, you can assume that 30% to 40% of those companies will be acquired," says Dale Kutnick, director of research at Gartner.
Last year, according to Kutnick, M&As among technology companies reached their highest levels since 2001, and he expects that trend to continue this year. The upshot: IT executives should be poised to anticipate and respond to vendor M&As.
Here are some tips from M&A veterans about how to survive -- and maybe even benefit -- when your IT vendors merge.
Understand the vendor. If your vendor is being acquired, you need to understand the acquirer. According to Lou Mazzucchelli, a fellow at Cutter Consortium in Arlington, Mass., there are two types of acquirer: those interested in milking maintenance revenues from a strong but stagnant installed base, and those intending to grow their customer base by subsuming a competitor.

Image Credit: John Ueland

With the first type, "there's a vested interest in keeping you as part of the installed base," he says.
The second type is more problematic because there's no reason for two competitive products to coexist. "If you're on the wrong side, your application is going away," Mazzucchelli says. "I wouldn't be surprised if they used strong incentives for the customer to switch sooner rather than later." Even if the vendor promises to keep the product alive, don't look for new