Bain bags 3Com

The buyout of 3Com stole the international ICT limelight, while at home there was little news of any great significance.

* Excellent maiden interim figures from Ansys.
* Satisfactory interim numbers from Cape Empowerment Trust, although profit was up over 200%.
* Mixed interim figures from Altech, with revenue up 20% but profit down over 10%; and Celcom, with revenue up over 200% but profit down.
* Mediocre interim numbers from Square One, with revenue and profit both down.
* Positive trading updates from Altron, Datacentrix and SilverBridge Holdings.

* Celtel opened a new office in Owerri, Nigeria.
* Nokia opened an office in Egypt.
* Antonio Geraldes was appointed MD of MTC Namibia.

Look out for an emergency restructuring plan from Alcatel-Lucent.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* Cisco acquired Latigent, a Web-based BI software developer for call centres. Latigent will be integrated into Cisco's customer contact business unit.
* Bain Capital purchased 3Com for $2.2 billion, with Huawei Technologies taking a minor stake. The deal was inevitable as 3Com had not made any profit since 2000; nevertheless the value of the deal still represents a more than 40% premium on the ruling share price at announcement time.
* Deutsche Telekom bought France Telecom's Orange Netherlands mobile and Internet operations for EUR1.3 billion.
* Emerson purchased Motorola's embedded communications computing business for $350 million. The move will strengthen Emerson's position in the merchant-embedded computing industry, which is estimated to be worth more than $6 billion.
* Very good quarterly figures from Red Hat, with profit up over 75%.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Cognos.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Accenture (although revenue up 25%), and Tibco Software.
* Quarterly losses from CMGI.
* Philip Faraci was appointed president and COO of Eastman Kodak.
* An IPO was filed by Virgin Mobile USA, a joint venture between Sprint Nextel and Virgin Group.

* EMC's acquisition of start-up Berkeley Data Systems, an online services company.
* A possible 5% investment in Facebook by Microsoft.
* An emergency restructuring plan from Alcatel-Lucent, which could be a make or break situation for CEO Pat Russo.

* JSE All share index: Up 0.8%
* Nasdaq: Up 1.1%
* Top SA share movements: Ansys (+14.3%), Beget Holdings (-14.3%), Huge Group (+10.9%), Labat Africa (+16.7%), MICROmega (-13.3%), SAB&T Ubuntu (-22.5%) and SilverBridge Holdings (-10%)

According to a new survey from the UK's Computer Business Review, less than 2% of UK-based companies have upgraded all their desktops to Vista. The results show less than 5% have begun their upgrade programme; 6.5% said they will upgrade in the next six months; 13% in the next 18 months; and 18% in the next two years. This means in two years' time, only 56% of survey respondents will have upgraded to Vista.

These figures are in stark contrast to previous releases from Microsoft and could suggest users are waiting for desktop upgrades before embarking on the adoption of Vista.

My next column will appear on Monday, 15 October and will cover a two-week period.