Any prediction effort would not be complete without the customary M&A “crystal ball” pronouncements. Don’t look for these here. Unless one has a perfect view of all the strategies and all the players, including a full view of all financial details, great market prediction capabilities, and genius financial engineering inspiration, it’s mostly conjecture and specific moves by one vendor or another, or their financial sponsors, can change on a whim or due to a poorly conducted negotiation.

Let’s not worry about specifics, but rather look at the bigger picture and make the following observations. Let’s call them five parameters that we believe will be at play, assuming (wishing) that no significant and lasting global economic slowdown takes place:

Too many vendors are focused on the enterprise space and not everyone’s financials make sense. We believe that something has to give—unless you really like sock puppet mascots, or questionable office sharing ventures, for a more recent reference.

The equity structure and ownership of a vendor make a difference in strategy. A private equity-owned organization will not look for the same KPIs as a venture capitalist-owned company. This totally changes what makes sense and what doesn’t when it comes to M&A opportunities, investing, and divesting.

Execution matters. Marketing investment accelerates sales, and a clear message helps. Execution on strategy and roadmap and a sound partner strategy combined with marketing talent and investment/spend will make a significant difference. This has been proven over and over again. In the market today, some vendors fall short in one or multiple areas.

Some niche players offer very attractive options to jumpstart new offerings and take positions in the next phase of the market or acquire specific capabilities to boost or renew a portfolio.

Adjacent markets give us a sense of how offerings and partnerships may morph moving forward. We can see the storage and the vast cybersecurity segments starting to combine (as has already been seen in the past few years and in 2019) with the traditional backup and recovery space.

And finally, the only thing we can be sure of: There will be more data to protect and manage in 2020.