Subscribe

FireEye has sights set on iSight

The company buys iSight Partners for $200 million, in a move designed to boost its cyber intelligence offerings.

Paul Booth
By Paul Booth
Johannesburg, 25 Jan 2016

Small acquisitions by FireEye and IBM were the main stories of the international ICT market last week.

At home, it was very quiet.

Key local news of the past week

* A positive trading update from Jasco.
* A new JSE cautionary by MTN.

Key African news

* Dakika online, a Kenyan owned e-commerce platform, has launched its operations in Kenya.

* Cameroon's anti-corruption body has levied fines worth US$160 million on Orange and MTN for failing to pay taxes on gambling and gaming services.

Key international news

* Ericsson acquired FYI Television, the US-based entertainment metadata and rich media content supplier.
* FireEye bought iSight Partners for $200 million, in a move designed to boost its cyber intelligence offerings for governments and businesses.
* Fiserv purchased ACI Worldwide's assets of its Community Financial Services business for $200 million.
* IBM acquired Ustream, an online video streaming service provider, in a move designed to boost its cloud offerings for businesses. The deal was worth $130 million.
* Kyocera Communications Systems has bought Labellio from AlpacaDB. Labellio is an image recognition Web service powered by deep learning.
* Riverbed Technology purchased Germany-based Ocedo, a provider of software-defined networking and SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) solutions.
* Diebold and Inspur Group, a developer of IT hardware and software, cloud computing, big data and a self-service terminal provider, have established a joint venture named Inspur Financial Technology Service.
* IBM received the most US patents (7 355) for the 23rd consecutive year. Samsung, Canon, Qualcomm and Google (in that order) made up the remainder of the top five places.
* Qualcomm and the provincial government of Guizhou in southwest China have entered a $280 million joint venture for the design, development and sale of advanced server technology.
* Former Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo, is starting a new company with Bryan Oki, co-founder and CEO of Fitify. They intend building a software platform that re-imagines the path to personal fitness.
* ChipMOS Technologies (Bermuda), a provider of outsourced semiconductor assembly and test services, and its 58.3% owned subsidiary ChipMOS Technologies (Taiwan) will merge, with ChipMOS Taiwan becoming the surviving company.
* Very good year-end figures from ZTE.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Amphenol, ASML Holding, Cree, Digital International (back in the black), F5 Networks, Linear Technology, Verizon Communications (back in the black) and Wipro.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Adtran, IBM, TE Connectivity and Xilinx.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Idea Cellular, with revenue up but profit down; Logitech International, with revenue up but profit down; Maxim Integrated Products, with revenue down but back in the black; Netflix, with revenue up but profit down; and SAP, with revenue up but profit down.
* Quarterly losses from 8x8, AMD, PTC and Zain Saudi Arabia.
* The appointments of Kirill Tatarinov as president and CEO of Citrix Systems; and Hilary Schneider as CEO of LifeLock.
* The resignation of Todd Davis, CEO of LifeLock.

Research results and predictions

* According to Cisco's findings, cloud traffic in the Middle East and Africa (including SA) is forecast to more than quadruple by the end of 2019. By 2019, 83% of all MEA data centre traffic will come from the cloud. These are among the findings from the fifth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2014-2019), which found the MEA region is expected to have the highest cloud traffic growth rate, at 41%, by 2019.

Worldwide:
* There were 157.4 million notebooks shipped globally in 2015, a decrease of 9% on year, according to Digitimes Research. The shipments will slip a further 2.5%, to 153.5 million units, in 2016.
* Increased security will displace cost savings and agility as the primary driver for government agencies to move to public cloud within their jurisdictions, according to Gartner.
* Worldwide combined shipments of devices (PCs, tablets, ultramobiles and mobile phones) are expected to reach 2.4 billion units in 2016, a 1.9% increase from 2015, according to Gartner.
* Worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow at a 19.4% compound annual growth rate, almost six times the rate of overall IT spending growth - from nearly $70 billion in 2015 to more than $141 billion in 2019, according to IDC.
* Global spending on 3D printing will grow at a 27% compound annual growth rate, from nearly $11 billion in 2015 to $26.7 billion in 2019, according to IDC.
* WiFi shipments have reached 12 billion units, and are expected to surpass 15 billion units by the end of 2016, according to the WiFi Alliance.

Stock market changes

* JSE All share index: Up 1.5%
* Nasdaq: Up 2.3%
* NYSE (Dow): Up 0.6%
* S&P 500: Up 1.4%
* FTSE100: Up 1.7%
* DAX: Up 2.3%
* Nikkei225: Down 1.1%
* Hang Seng: Down 2.3%
* Shanghai: Up 0.5%

Look out for

International:
* The buyer for AT&T's Latin American pay-TV assets.
* The buyer for Sharp, as a rescue by the government-backed Innovation Network Corporation of Japan competes with a potentially larger offer ($5.3 billion) from Taiwan's Foxconn Technology.
* The possible sell-off by Toshiba of part of its chip business.

South Africa:
* Further local telecommunications news regarding Vodacom/Neotel.

Final word

Gartner's latest forecast shows worldwide IT spending is expected to total $3.54 trillion in 2016, just a 0.6% increase over the 2015 spending of $3.52 trillion.

Worldwide IT spending forecast ($bn)

2015 Spending

2015 Growth (%)

2016 Spending

2016 Growth (%)

Data centre systems

170

1.8

175

3.0

Software

310

-1.4

326

5.3

Devices

653

-5.8

641

-1.9

IT Services

912

-4.5

940

3.1

Communications Services

1 472

-8.3

1 454

-1.2

Overall IT

3 517

-5.8

3 536

0.6

Source: Gartner (January 2016)

Share