Platinum Head Foresees Reign of Software Giants

Platinum Technology CEO Andrew Filipowski has predicted only six software companies will be left at the turn of the century following massive consolidation within the industry.

In his keynote speech at Uniforum, Filipowski said software companies follow similar life cycles to products ? they have an idea, market it and then update it. But if they cannot keep moving along the cycle, they go out of business or are acquired.

?Every medium-sized and smaller software company is doomed to extinction,? he said. Filipowski predicted that there would be a significant number of acquisitions in the next few years.

Filipowski, who led Platinum to acquire 10 companies in five months during 1995, said customers need confidence that their supplier will survive. He believed Platinum would be one of the six organisations still in existence in 2000, mainly by developing comprehensive security software within two years.

?We can provide enough security to prevent attacks on some of the easier targets, but we can?t plug every hole every time,? he said.

He claimed security was still in its infancy in the industry, and compared the situation to the one that Wordstar found itself in when wordprocessors were first introduced.