Our alma mater goes to Datamonitor
It ain't over, so they say, until the oversized dame trills, but it looks rather like my and Neil Macehiter's alma mater,
Ovum, is very soon
going to be part of Datamonitor.
I'm not really an analyst of analyst firms (I'll leave that to people like
Duncan) but of course I have an interest in this as Ovum has been a kind-of-competitor, as well as our former employer. It's interesting to me that while Ovum has been busy doing some acquiring of its own, helped along by the cash pile generated from its recent IPO (in the period since we left Ovum, it's bought telecoms infrastructure specialist RHK, IT infrastructure specialist Summit Strategies and outsourcing specialist Orbys Consulting), it's also been in discussions with Datamonitor. I guess the acquisitions made Ovum a pretty attractive target.
It'll also be interesting to see if the acquisition, assuming it gets the go-ahead from Datamonitor's and Ovum's shareholders, has any effect on the demand for services from "independents" like us...it certainly continues the consolidation at the "upper levels" of the ICT analyst market (although strictly speaking Datamonitor is a cross-industry market intelligence provider). Until now, though, we've not seen any noticeable negative effects from analyst firm consolidation. The opposite, if anything.
Disclaimer: I was an Ovum shareholder until fairly recently, but I sold... too early, it seems!
