Need a clue about economic recovery? When the big ones start eating the little ones, companies that is, things are getting better.

Oracle, always egotistical and often hungry, decided buying Seibel gave them CRM market impact for less money than earning market share the hard way. Less enterprise networking-related mergers of note include eBay buying Skype, the peer-to-peer Internet Telephony company.

Take an afternoon and organize your hardware and software vendors. Check all your service agreements to verify a change of ownership won't negate your contract and ongoing service. If there's a question, talk to your vendor and change the terms so you won't get screwed if they get bought.

Anyone here who got considerably better service on their Compaq systems after they were devoured by HP raise their hands. I see maybe one person, way in the back, and they probably misunderstood the question.

Mergers among your primary suppliers cost you time and money through lowered service and support levels and higher maintenance fees. You can't do anything about stopping the mergers, but you can talk to your critical vendors and nail down details about SLA continuity. You can negotiate a tougher stance with vendors who get play in the rumor mills, because they can't afford any revenue drops and market black eyes during the takeover courtship dance. You can't get any value out of their merger after the fact, so get what you can before the fact.

One last note, for the appreciatively sneaky managers out there. Do your merging vendors have some employees you would like to hire? When you start hearing rumors, start offering jobs. Employees, especially technical service groups, often get painfully shuffled during a merger. If you know a few techs you'd like to have on staff, they will be more responsive just before and just after a merger than they've ever been before.

This is not to say you should take advantage, but if they're going to have to change employers anyway, why not change to you? You get a known good worker, someone you've already worked with, and they get stability no longer available in their newly-merged mess of a company. Everybody wins.

ITworld.com, Enterprise Networking

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