From an IT investment research perspective, it means very little that Rocket Software acquired Computer Corporation of America (CCA) on March 29.
Neither is traded publicly. Neither is likely to be. Eventually going public might be the idea behind Rocket's little M&A program but it is like the guy that buys up Baltic and Mediterranean in Monopoly when the leading players in the game already own Park Place, Boardwalk, the utilities and the railroads. The investment play, as I outlined back in October 2009 (see link above), if there is one, is to find IBM-mainframe-related public companies that Rocket might acquire.
But CCA was not in that mold. The real IT investment advice nugget is the fact that CCA still exists. It illustrates that despite the breathless PR hype that surrounds IT investing, the aircraft carrier that is the IT market turns very, very slowly.
I was going to write a little historical snippet on CCA to support my point but a quick Google showed me that Baseline already had written what I wanted to write... back in 2002. I doubt if much has changed with CCA since the Baseline article was written.
So the conclusion is... when you are going to invest based on some blogoblather that the cloud is going to take over the world, or software as a service (SaaS) will deystroy on-premise software, or open source will wipe out Microsoft (MSFT), or that the Oracle (ORCL) maintenance revenue stream will dry up next year because IT directors are unhappy with maintenance fees, or any such similar supposedly earthshaking news... think of CCA.
-- Dennis Byron
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