Cendant to Become Four Companies in 2006

Interesting news from Cendant today: Its board of directors announced that the company was going to break itself up into four separate, publicly owned companies in 2006. Some of the conglomerate’s more well-known brands that it acquired over the years include: Avis, Budget, Coldwell Banker, Days Inn, Orbitz, Ramada and many others.

The stock price of the $20 billion company has languished for some time, and the move, according to The Wall Street Journal, has received initial enthusiasm from the analyst community.

But one has to wonder how IT fits into this breakup: How much has IT prepared for this event. If there were IT centralization plans in the works, those would have to be scrapped, or modified, at the least. If IT was decentralized to begin with, then the break up shouldn’t be as messy.

Any way you slice it, though, IT has to play one of the lead roles during the next six or so months – whether they initially knew about this or not. For its CIOs’ and IT staffs’ sake, let’s hope it was the former.

–Tom Wailgum