In memoriam: the ISV

Customers who haven't bought into a software stack from a big platform vendor have a different quandary. "The question to ask yourself is, what's your packaged application strategy, and should you bet on one of these platforms?"

The merger wave is almost certainly not over, and bigger surprises may be ahead in 2008. Hewlett-Packard has set about rebuilding its software business after it sold off or squandered its middleware assets at the end of the last decade. Just last month, HP CEO Mark Hurd predicted another wave of industry buyouts. "In the end, math wins," he said.

And don't assume that the big fish left in the tank won't eat each other. A merger between Microsoft and SAP seemed unthinkable a few years ago -- until Microsoft admitted it had been considering exactly that. In the end it dropped the idea only because it seemed too complicated.

"It's not inconceivable to expect mergers of equals and blockbuster deals on an order of magnitude larger than the ones we witnessed in 2007," Trifkovic said.