We've seen consolidation happen in industry after industry, so there is no reason to believe IT should be exempt. Given the recent mergers and acquisitions as well as rumored upcoming transactions, one has to wonder what the impact of consolidation will be on the consumers of information technology products.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, the behemoth deal (about $7 billion) that has everyone's attention is the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. This transaction marries vendors from software and hardware sides of the house. Oracle has made it clear that it intends to control all phases of an organization's IT operation: They want to sell you all of your gear and software, which should work together seamlessly, since, after all, they come from the same company.

Similarly, Dell acquired Perot Systems late last year for $3.9 billion, marrying a hardware company, Dell, to an IT services company, Perot. Although not a “;control the world”; strategy, merging two companies from largely disparate business models is clearly based on the belief that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Sometimes acquisitions are made to compete with other companies. HP bought 3Com to compete with Cisco. Cisco then divorced itself from dealings with 3Com. Many analysts believe that 3Com wasn't that great a competitor to Cisco anyway, and being part of HP is not going to help.

Brocade is another organization that tried to compete with Cisco through acquisition, buying Foundry Networks in 2008 for $3 billion, a price that probably would be much less in today's economy. Most industry analysts agree that Brocade has probably not executed as well as it could have with this acquisition. Brocade is now rumored to have put itself on the market, and a potential suitor is Juniper Networks, which is—guess what—a competitor to Cisco. The other big rumor regards NetApp, a maker of higher-capacity storage products. Unfortunately for NetApp, it seems that unless Cisco gets into the storage market, no one will want to buy the company.

What does all of this mean for the business person on Bishop Street? Of course, free-market evangelists are wont to dismiss consolidation, claiming that it results in higher prices, less innovation and less competition. Others argue that in this climate it's exactly the opposite: Innovation can't happen if a company goes out of business.

What you should do is approach your own significant technology acquisitions carefully. Although most equipment needs to be replaced in three to five years, that could be a long time if your vendor becomes an afterthought in a much bigger organization.