The long-awaited consolidation of the IT industry may finally have begun. Although the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market as a whole remains firmly in the doldrums, leading to mass redundancies at City banks, the size of the IT M&A sector is still holding up relatively well. There was a raft of big deals last month, including IBM’s $2.1 billion takeover of Rational and CSC’s $950 million takeover of DynCorp. The transactions came just weeks after analysts at Gartner predicted that half of the world’s 50 biggest software companies would either be acquired or go bust by the end of 2004.
