Meet me back here when it’s over

I spent the entire first quarter of this year touring major technology vendors. The point was not to promote myself or InfoWorld, but to get some perspectives on how big and violent the coming IT industry consolidation will be. I started at Apple’s headquarters in January and wound up at Hewlett-Packard's Enterprise Systems Group in March. Those bookends were arranged by chance, but I might not have survived the tour without them. Apple and HP are uncharacteristically frank, sanguine, and positive about the coming tumult. I got the same take from AMD, from some inside Sun Microsystems, and from very few others willing to go on record about the subject.

For now, most vendors are steadfast in their efforts to downplay the likelihood of radical change. The marching orders for most large technology PR firms and marketing departments is “business as usual.”

Yet it was obvious in all of my discussions that there are influential people employed by most IT organizations and vendors who see the cliff, the waterfall, the asteroid, the flood, or the famine. I heard many metaphors and lots of philosophizing about when it would happen and how severe it would be. With few exceptions, this reality was not expressed in conference rooms with a tape recorder running. I got most of my perspective after hours in hotel lounges and in follow-up calls and e-mails. I use whatever venue and whatever conditions are conducive to openness.

If gathering so much knowledge off the record seems at odds with my job as a journalist, understand that there is not yet any other way to research IT industry consolidation. When I’m on the record, the timbre of the discussion shifts dramatically. We’re hopeful, we’re confident, we’re staying the course, we’re relying on our traditional strengths, we’re sticking with our message, we’re poised for growth. We’re going to retain every customer and win share away from competitors. Consolidation? Oh yes, Sun and AMD and Apple are all going out of business because they’re out of step with their customers. But we will thrive, and those that share our philosophy (our platform, our chips, or our what-have-you) will, too. We project that for those of us who share this right idea -- and only for us -- the recovery will create a bigger pie. On this slide, we have listed for you all the IT companies that will still be around in five years. On the next page we have a list of completely independent analysts who inexplicably refer to the same list.

After about half of those meetings broke up and the PowerPoint slides were put away, someone would catch me in the hallway or call after me on my way to my car. Can I talk sometime, completely off the record, about this whole consolidation thing? They were so relieved that someone “connected” thought a massive paring down was coming, and that I saw it as a good thing. A necessary thing. We gave each other solace that we’re not crazy or paranoid, and that we’re not ghouls for being excited about a process that, for many or most, will be painful. It will also be fascinating to observe, even from the inside.