Another virus on the attack

The continuing negotiations between US West, Global Crossing, Qwest and Frontier still dominated the international IT world last week, since there was little else of high enough significance to take its place; while at home it was exceptionally quiet.

• we saw the switch of Top Info Technology Holdings from the venture capital sector to the IT sector of the JSE;

• the successful listing of ShawCell Telecommunications on the JSE; and

• the announcement that the merged AST/Abraxas entity AST-A will list on 2 August, following the de-listing of AST and Abraxas at the end of this month.

[Local]

Local Cautionary Notices (see attachment)

Local Listing calendar (see attachment)

Other local news included:

• the announcement that Enterprise Outsource Holdings, which is listed on the venture capital sector of the JSE, will move to the IT sector in late August after publishing its annual results; and

• the Uthingo consortium has won the National lottery bid. This will see a larger local presence of Gtech and the associated skills and technology it will bring into the country.

• We continue to hear rumours regarding the acquisition of Cabletron Systems in the near future. The latest contenders seem to be Alcatel SA, Nortel Networks and Siemens AG.

• Japan`s largest ISP has been created following the merger of Fujitsu`s NiftyServe online service and its InfoWeb Internet service business into a new entity called @nifty. This edges past NEC`s Big Globe Internet service business in terms of the number of subscribers/users.

[International]

Other international news included:

• the resignation of Sven-Christer Nilsson, the CEO and president of Ericsson; and

• the appointment of Jim Barksdale, the former CEO at Netscape, to the board of Sun Microsystems.

Additionally, the first details of the Siemens/Fujitsu alliance have emerged. It seems there are two parts to the deal. The first will combine sales and marketing operations on a global basis, with Siemens` non-European computer systems business interests and operations being folded into local Fujitsu units. The second part combines Fujitsu`s and Siemens` European operations into a 50/50 owned Fujitsu Computer Systems venture, but excludes Fujitsu`s ICL and Siemens Business Services operations, and includes Siemens` South African operation.

We saw excellent figures from Infosys Technologies, IT Staffing and Yahoo!. Losses came from Broadcast.com, Financials Model Company, OpTel and Semi-Tech.

Good numbers were recorded by InFocus (back in the black) with satisfactory figures from Océ NV.

Very poor results came from Equitrac.

Other financial news included profit warnings from Computer Horizons, Egghead, Epicor, FTC (job cuts also announced), Groupe Bull, HMT Technology, Inprise (loss expected), Mobius Management Systems, New Era of Networks, Sterling Commerce, Summit Design, Vantive (loss expected, COO fired and several job losses announced) and Visio; and a share split announcement from Comtech Telecomms.

Locally

Dectronic (+19%)
JemTech (-20%)
Metropolis (-27.3%)
Paradigm (-29.3%)
Seartec (+30%)
USKO (-20.6%)
Whetstone (-32.5%)
Y2KTec (-21.2%)

Internationally

Compucom Systems (+23.4%)
Epicor (-23.9%)
JBA (+23.1%)
Micron Technology (+20%)
NeoMagic (+26.8%)
Ortel (+27%)
Portal Software (+21.3%)
Psinet (+20.4%)
Sanchez Computer Associates (+19.8%)
Segue Software (+28.6%)
Triquint Semiconductor (-21.5%)
Vantive (-21.1%)
Visio (-20.9%)

This week sees the listing of Bynx, formally Tangram Software Systems, in the IT sector of the JSE.

In addition, I am led to believe that yet another virus, and one worse than Melissa, will manifest itself this week, so it`s again time to update your anti-virus mechanisms via some appropriate software.