The more things change...

...the more they stay the same. Not sure who originated this phrase, but if they got a nickel for every time it was used, they'd be wealthy.

I've noticed the constant acquisitions and rumors of even more acquisitions in the IT Services industry are continuing, and in many cases, resulting in dissatisfied customers who have no recourse other than to complain with their feet... and in some cases, they are so deeply invested THIS isn't even an option.

Two biggies- one in the not too distant past- Oracle's acquisition of Stellent and a very recent one, Iron Mountain's acquisition of Mimosa Systems. Clients of the two product lines will be impacted in different ways.

Stellent, a vendor whose primary product was a Content Management System (CMS) had clients who manage varying sizes of repositories of information in multiple formats, supported by an index and descriptive meta data related to each asset. The organizations using the products would have two options. One, to continue using it "as-is" (because Oracle has elected to no longer support the product) or to engage the services of a former Stellent employee as a Consultant to assist in providing whatever "life support" you may need. The other option is to agree to converting over to an Oracle product offering similar features, such as Universal Records Manager (URM) and either buying or negotiating terms for licensing, and then buying contracts for support of the new product.

The second option may be the best long term, but it is not without issues. While the systems offer similar features and functions, they are far from identical in structure. In fact, there are extensive efforts required to "normalize" data structures within the Stellent repositories prior to transferring them into the Oracle repositories, not to mention the need to build tables, rules, features, and more prior to things being similar. And there are different APIs and a look and feel that users will have to become familiar with... so training will have to be developed, delivered, and maintained for users.

Many of these efforts can involve high costs and few organizations knew at budget time in 2009 to plan for this in 2010 (and potentially into 2011)- and this is an impact vendors fail to consider or realize when they make these moves. If you have a system that meets your needs, and you've paid for license and support costs for a full year... how do you even consider migration and new costs?

The acquisition of Mimosa Systems, an e-mail management software application (NO, I will not call it an @rchiving $olution!)I think will prove to be an even greater concern for those currently using it. The firm who acquired them is offering XaaS hosting of e-mail on their servers offsite, and the move is thought to have been made primarily to strengthen this service offering.

But what happens to the tens of thousands of organizations who independently purchased, configured, and are running Mimosa in-house to assist in managing their e-mail repositories? What happens if like in so many other cases, they simply decide to crack open the shell of Mimosa and suck out all the tasty bits they wanted to strengthen their services and then leave the remainder of the product in the dirt? And even if they do keep the product complete, who will be offering support for the users? I don't see the motivation for the new owner to continue offering support for a service they'd rather sell to these same users...

Eventually, this trip down the rabbit hole of mergers, acquisitions and takeovers in the IT industry will stop... hopefully it will be long before we reach a state similar to that in Wall-E where Buy n Large (BnL) owns everything!