Predictions for the next few months, Riverbed and Nortel get purchased plus more
Yes, I said it and this is what I am thinking. Juniper is looking at Nortel as a buy, buy, buy (as Kramer would put it) to compete with Cisco in voice and unified communications. Also they would get the optical unit at Nortel which would just get under the skin of the Cisco people. But there could be another company who might buy Nortel, remember that Nortel does allot of carrier class switching. This could be a great time for AT&T to buy a vendor or even Qwest.
Riverbed is looking more and more like a takeover target, they have good numbers even in this down economy and the stock is down just because of the markets. This is a prime time for Chambers to take over his biggest pain right now other than Juniper and ProCurve. We all know how Cisco is, if they cannot beat them they buy them. But I will say they would need to leave them intact and keep them on their own. We all know what happens when a company gets sucked in by Cisco, the product goes downhill.
So why would Cisco really buy them? No matter what Cisco says or what the marketing team spins to the public, people know that Cisco is not in the top three when it come WAN Acceleration. The only way they can get to number one is to buy Riverbed and then scrap the WAAS in a hurry. So if the stock gets lower than what it is now, look for a hostile takeover by Cisco.
Another prediction that I will make, Cisco will lose 50% of its partners in the next year due to the economy. We see it now with the Gold Partners laying people off, the SMB partners are weathering it better since they don’t have a big bench to pay. But that will only last so long and they will start going under in masses. This could be the same for many other vendors as the economy takes IT downhill very fast. Many other vendors will lose 50% or more of their partners.
The only partners that will be left standing will be the ones who can be a value add, by value add I mean showing customers an ROI for the purchase. If you cannot show an ROI to a customer they should not buy it. Customer who thought that they will never get fired for buying Cisco will have a huge surprise when they get fired for no ROI.
The catalogue companies will drop big, the big two or three that took on consulting arms and VAR’s will drop them and get back to just catalog call center business. The cost to have a consulting arm will run them in the ground in the economy we have now.
The CIO who thought he knew everything and refused to meet with value add partners will be gone and the CFO’s will be running more of the business and operations. With this new economy we will usher in a new version of a CIO that has more of a financial background and understands you need an ROI to purchase anything. They will also look at other products to get those ROI’s for their company.
This is just my opinion.
