Alcatel-Lucent makes some changes

The new appointments at Alcatel-Lucent occupied the international ICT stage last week. At home, the fall-out from last week's High Court decision regarding the self-provisioning for VANS stole much of the ICT headline space.

* Excellent interim numbers from Dialogue Group, with profit up almost 50% and revenue more than double.
* Good year-end figures from Metrofile, with revenue up 10% but profit up over 50%; and Venfin (headline earnings only).
* A positive trading update from Pinnacle.
* Atec Systems and Technologies, an IT service and infrastructure provider, acquired 65% of SA Technologies (Satec), a cabling and networking specialist.
* MIH Print Africa, a subsidiary of Naspers, bought Afrigator Internet, a social media aggregator and blog directory company that was created for African consumers.
* The 'big' telcos (Broadband Infraco, MTN, Neotel, Telkom and Vodacom) announced their intention to build a cable down the West Coast of Africa that will supplement the current SAT-3 system.
* Pinnacle Micro was appointed distributor for Dell in South Africa, and IntelliStor was appointed the sole distributor for Sony Enterprise Storage Solutions for southern Africa.
* Kian Keong Yong was appointed acting CEO of Ifca Technologies.
* Craig Christensen resigned as CEO of Ifca Technologies.

The 'big' telcos announced their intention to build a cable down the West Coast of Africa that will supplement the current SAT-3 system.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* Mixed half-year figures from Orascom Egypt, with revenue up 19% but profit down 72%.
* A telecommunications licence was awarded in Uganda to South African-based Smile Communications, a company led by former MTN director Irene Charnley and owned by a consortium that includes Saudi Arabian investors.
* Telekom Malaysia announced it has divested its 60% stake in Sotelgui (Republic of Guinea) to the Guinea government for just $1. This was Telekom Malaysia's last remaining investment on the continent.

* Intel acquired OpenedHand, a UK-based mobile Linux development and services company.
* Oracle bought ClearApp, a supplier of application management solutions for composite applications.
* Red Hat purchased Israel-based Qumranet, a virtualisation company.
* Telefonica announced it would invest up to $1.2 billion in China Netcom following the latter's merger with China Unicom.
* Philippe Camus was appointed non-executive chairman of Alcatel-Lucent and Ben Verwaayen, the ex-CEO of BT, as CEO of Alcatel-Lucent.

* A possible buy-out of SanDisk by Samsung Electronics.
* The break-up of Cable & Wireless into two separate companies, ie, one looking after the UK and the other handling its international operations.

* The worldwide external controller-based disk storage market grew 18.8% in Q208 to $4.5 billion, according to Gartner. EMC retained its number one position, followed by IBM, HP and Dell.

* JSE All share index: Down 8.2% (lowest weekend close this year)
* Nasdaq: Down 4.7%
* Top SA share movements: Beget Holdings (-25%), Dialogue Group (-39.1%), FoneWorx (-15%), Huge Group (+14.1%), Ifca Technologies (-11.1%), Mustek (-10.8%), Simeka (-13.1%), TCS (-28.1%) and TeleMasters (-26.1%)

BusinessWeek has published its listing of 'The 50 employers with the right stuff'. From a technology perspective, Google came in at number seven, IBM at number nine, Microsoft at 13 and Verizon Communications at 22.