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No soothsayer is needed to forecast what is up ahead. Three key trends are shaping up. One, the big listed tech companies will go private to survive quarterly market pressures and to execute a long-term growth plan. Two, Tier 2 tech companies will scale up inorganically and three, one will see de-mergers becoming the norm.

Per se, if one looks at the last one month, two significant events happened. One the tech world saw the dawn of Dell Technologies (Dell and EMC combined) which is expected to post combined revenues in excess of $ 74 bn. Probably, one of the world’s biggest tech consolidation executed impressively by Michael Dell.

The second one relates to HPE selling its software business to UK-based Micro-Focus, the legacy transformation company for $8.8 bn. While companies like Dell are getting bigger, the iconic Silicon Valley companies like HP are slimming down and shedding non-profitable businesses and concentrating on high margin areas like Storage, Networking and Data Center business.

Clearly, the global IT landscape is at the cusp of a major change. All companies are going through a capability and competency refresh and advancing new concepts to survive in the digital age and to stay relevant. While IBM is betting heavily on ‘cognitive’ but for much traditional hardware-centric companies like HP, the transformation might be little tricky.

Meanwhile for lesser-known smaller companies like Micro Focus, buys like HPE’s software business is a big boon. For instance, Micro Focus by virtue of this acquisition has gained huge traction in its software business and access to the pan –global HPE’s footprints. So it is clearly a win-win deal for both the companies. Finally, as we look ahead, mergers and de-mergers will be the norm.