Acquiring the channel facts

Acquisitions are a bit like buses; ­ you wait ages for one and then several come along at once.

Yirrell: Latest acquisitory flurry is a start of something

It was an action-packed week of mergers and acquisitions last week, with two significant deals taking place ­ Daisy Communications buying ATC and Eurotel, and Systemax snapping up WStore.

After conversations with a number of different channel figures recently, the overwhelming impression is that consolidation has definitely not happened at the pace expected this year.

Most agree it is well below the level we were all envisioning. I even said so myself. But if you pause to actually look back over the year so far, the story is quite surprising.

Over the past few months, deals have been particularly active in the reseller bracket with Anix, Repton and Integralis snapped up, and the distie world has seen names such as Rocom, Arc and IQSys fall to buyers.

Vendor consolidation has been happening at a steady pace as well all year ­ most notably Sun and Oracle. Looking back it is amazing how many acquisitions there have been this year.

Part of me always thinks it is a shame when consolidation happens ­ purely because it is another well-known name swallowed up, but this is a fact of business life.

We at CRN are speaking more and more to up-and-coming new channel companies that are seeing tremendous growth ­ so there is still new blood coming in to replace the old ones. I wonder who will be next?

Sara Yirrell is editor of CRN ­ [email protected]