What to do when IT vendors merge
- IT TOPICS:Management
Computerworld had a timely article in Monday's issue that's quite relevant to the Sun/StorageTek news: "When IT Vendors Merge." Lots of advice for IT managers on how to cope with the aftermath. But the first step is to figure out what sort of merger you're dealing with.
If the merger is accretive -- cost-cutting and combining overlapping products -- this can be bad news for customers. If the deal is supposed to be synergistic, this could be good news for users -- in theory. But my view is that synergy from mergers almost never materializes.
As the authors of the book "After the Merger" (Pearson, 2000) put it:
Synergy [is] one of the most mythical, confusing, deluding words in the business world. ...[M]erged companies are rarely successful in capitalizing on the synergies they proclaimed prior to striking the deal.
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