Analyst group Ovum has says more software companies will rationalise product lines in the face of the global downturn, warning companies must be ready with alternatives if products they are using are dumped.
Ovum analyst David Mitchell pointed to Google's recent termination of its Dodgeball, Jaiku and Notebook projects as a typical example of the trend.
"Google is only doing what all prudent companies are doing at the moment - ensuring that it stays as focussed as possible and that it targets services that have the greatest bottom-line impact," Mr Mitchell said.
Others were likely to follow suit, he said.
"Software vendors, need to continue to invest in their product management function equipping it with the tools that it needs.
"Product management, as a discipline, will be one of the beneficiaries of the current economic crisis."
Mr Mitchell said that the last round of product development for the internet had been beset by a "build it and they will come" mentality, with companies assembling audiences and only later trying to fit a business case around its products.
But with rationalisation set to sweep through the software space, companies needed to have plans to ensure they weren't caught out when products they were using disappeared.
In particular, they had to have plans that would make it possible to migrate processes and data at very short notice.
"Having alternatives has always been important, but this has been amplified by the internet, where services can be bought online quickly and can, equally quickly, become business critical," Mr Mitchell said.
"It is unlikely that the IT function will be able to halt the viral adoption of new services, but this makes the task of contingency planning even more important," he said.
Yet while some CIOs might fret the loss of critical business systems, some may welcome rationalisation in the software space.
A group of CIOs told a recent MIS roundtable event that they would welcome some consolidation in the software market, saying that the proliferation of suppliers had made procurement more difficult in some cases.
Software suppliers had also expanded their product ranges in an attempt to capture more of a client's business, but in doing so often developed additional systems that were not as good as those supplied by specialists.
At the same time, a lack of true standards in areas such as unified communications made it difficult to stitch together systems from different suppliers, the CIOs said.
