Indian IT companies set for global takeovers, says Springboard Research

The next couple of years will be buzzing with lot of merger and acquisitions; but this time around it will be Indian companies making large acquisitions rather than the multinational companies dominating the takeover domain.

Springboard Research, an innovator in the IT market research industry, foresees Indian IT firms making bold acquisitions in the next 12-18 months as one of the top 10 trends in enterprise IT.

?Prior to year 2007, the acquisition flow was one way. For example, Oracle with i-Flex, Hewlett-Packard with Digital GlobalSoft, IBM with Daksh, EDS with MphasiS, and Cap Gemini with Kanbay,? notes Bob Hayward, vice-president, Springboard Research.

He also mentioned though the revenues of the top five Indian IT companies are lower than their international counterparts, their market capitalisation is higher than most of them.

Market capitalisation of TCS, Wipro and Infosys is much higher than EDS, Accenture, CSC and Cap Gemini. But on acquisition front also neighbouring China is neck and neck with India in other fields where the two countries are competing.

Hayward said, ?Chinese IT firms are also on the hunt for established global brands to leverage.?

The firm also predicted consumer technology to influence Enterprise IT, web 2.0 hype to continue, software-as-a-service to become broadly accepted, and wireless Internet to drive enterprise mobility solutions in the next two years. Moreover, service-oriented architecture will become mainstream and green IT will become important.

Open source will also be broadly accepted to become business as usual, and strong business intelligence demand will lead to real-time analytics, it said. IT for emerging markets will flow back to the developed world.

?Vendors are entering an interesting era with rampant collaboration and competition and these trends and technologies are helping to drive this. These trends involve accessing, distributing, leveraging, and using information in new ways and that is creating revenue opportunities for vendors that are innovating with their customers,? Hayward added.