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Software Companies - Merge or Die?
pillageplunder writes "This article in Businessweek points out that large software companies like Siebel, BMC and Veritas are all warning that 2nd quarter results would be lower, and predicts a shakeout. According to the article, 'Investment bankers say half of the sector's 600 publicly traded companies are likely to be eliminated.' Ouch!"
Funny that Veritas would be one of those mentioned. Their software is overly cumbersome, they have a poor selection of information online, the cost of support has increased every year. Unfortunately, there isn't much in the way of competition- they have a lot of features that nobody else offers.
I keep forgetting my place. Jesus is for losers. Why do I still play to the crowd?
An excellent point. I was part of a vendor selection process for a WMS (Warehouse Management System) a couple years ago, and the largest vendor we met with obviously just expected the business - they did very little preparation for our scripted demo, and showed us all the myriad ways their software could work, instead of demonstrating how we wanted it to work.
By comparison, a smaller player (at the time) did a great job. Their demo showed us how our desired processes would flow, with our data used in the presentations. Any questions we had were researched and demonstrated thoroughly before we left. They, of course, got the bid and did a great job all the way through implementation.
There will always be a market for the small- to medium-sized player in business software, but there's no question that a good number of companies are going to continue to get bought up over the next year or so.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
My old company (a hardware company) just sold off its software division to another software company. Bottom line is that nobody was/is buying, and the budgets for multi-million software deals just aren't materializing.
For the past 4 years companies have been forced to tighten/halt their IT spending, and they may still be saying "if we could last the last 4 years with our current software, perhaps we can last a few more..."
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Boeing
Airbus
Antanov
Dornier
Bombardier
Embraer
Beechcraft
Which 2 did you mean ? All of this list is currently manufacturing aircraft for commercial markets, and most of them are producing passenger jets. I'm sure there's more, these are just off the top of my head. In terms of number of aircraft delivered, Bombardier probably produces as many airframes as all the rest put together, even if we discount the executive jets, and stick just to those built for passenger service. There's probably a dozen more if you include all the manufacturers of executive jets.
The fiasco with product liability insurance in the late 80's certainly killed aircraft manufacturing in the USA, but it's alive and healthy in the rest of the world. This is what happens when the courts award multi million dollar product liability suits on incidents involving 25 year old private aircraft that were not properly maintained in thier lifetime, you kill an entire industry.
How do I know? Here is one source:
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight
Click the link "Exporting America: List of companies exporting jobs".
If you don't trust CNN, just Google for those companies' names together with "offshore" or "outsourcing" and similar words.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
You have to wonder why anyone listens to them at all when any company can drop 33% because it's a few cents off in it's expected earnings.
That only happens when the market is expecting them to beat the official expected earnings figures.
-a