BlackBerry flattened to a pulp

Speculation on the future of BlackBerry ahead of its results announcement this week, and a raft of successful IPOs, dominated the international ICT scene last week.

At home, the output from the annual Gartner conference seemed to take pride of place in the local media.

* Mixed year-end figures from Silverbridge Holdings, with revenue down 0.4% but back in the black.
* A full-year loss from Jasco, although revenue up 16.3%.
* Positive trading updates from ISA and Poynting.
* A negative trading update from Digicore.
* A renewed JSE cautionary by SecureData.
* A withdrawn JSE cautionary by Morvest Business Group.
* The appointment of Francois Swart as CEO of Mxit.

* IBM will establish a software incubation centre and support ICT skills development programmes in Nigeria.
* iLAB Africa has unveiled a new training academy for digital security in Kenya.
* The Libyan government intends to list Libyana, one of its two state-owned mobile operators, next year.

* F5 Networks acquired Versafe, a provider of anti-fraud, anti-phishing and anti-malware solutions.
* Google bought Bump, a maker of applications for sharing photos and files.
* IBM purchased Daeja Image Systems, a provider of software that makes it easier for businesses to view large documents and images.
* Splunk acquired BugSense, a provider of an analytics solution for machine data generated by mobile devices.
* Sprint bought Handmark, a mobile application developer.
* Tibco Software purchased Extended Results, a provider of mobile business intelligence software and services.
* Trimble Navigation acquired Asset Forestry, a provider of forestry logistics software and support services.
* Tencent made a $448 million (36.5%) investment in Sogou, Sohu's search business.
* Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy, has made the first investment from his $1 billion technology fund, Invoke Capital, in Darktrace, a cyber security company.
* Agilent is splitting off its electronic measurement business to focus on its life-science tools and diagnostics. The company was originally spun-off from HP in 1999.
* Google will establish a health company called Calico, headed by Art Levinson, the chairman of Apple and Genentech.
* IBM will pledge $1 billion over the next four or five years on Linux and related open source technologies for use on its Power line of server systems.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Oracle.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Adobe.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Tibco Software, with revenue up but profit down.
* The appointments of Stephanie DiMarco as chairman of Advent Software; Paul Read as president and COO of Ingram Micro; and Andrew Wilson as CEO of Electronic Arts.
* The resignation of John Scully, chairman of Advent Software.
* The death of Hiroshi Yamauchi, a former president of Nintendo.
* A planned IPO in Q4 from Numericable, a French cable company.
* An IPO filing for Nasdaq from Criteo, a French digital advertising company.
* An IPO filing for NYSE from RingCentral, a provider of a SaaS for business communications.
* An excellent IPO on Nasdaq by Benefit focus, a provider of a cloud-based platforms for employee benefits management (up over 100% on the first day of trading).
* An excellent IPO on Nasdaq by FireEye, a network security company (up 80% on the first day of trading).
* An excellent IPO on Nasdaq by Rocket Fuel, a company that uses artificial intelligence to optimise real-time advertisement buys (up nearly 100% on the first day of trading).

International:

* The latest quarterly results from BlackBerry that could show a loss of $1 billion and revenue down nearly 50%. This follows last week's announcement of job cuts (40%) and a huge inventory of unsold phones. Shares were halted from trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange and on Nasdaq late Friday afternoon.
* The IPO from Violin Memory, a maker of high-speed storage systems that could raise $180 million.
* The sell-off by AT&T of its tower business that could raise as much as $5 billion.

South Africa:

* Further developments emanating from the Department of Communications and Telkom SA.

* Mobile app stores will see annual downloads of 102 billion in 2013, up from 64 billion in 2012, with revenue also up to $26 billion from $18 billion, according to Gartner.
* Thin client shipments in EMEA in Q2 increased marginally (0.1%) to 407 417 units, with Dell and HP continuing to dominate the market with a combined share of 54.6%, according to IDC.
* The portable GPS-enabled device market is expected to grow from 33.3 million units in 2012 to 36.79 million in 2018, following a brief dip in 2013, according to ABI Research.
* The global smartphone shipment volume will reach nearly 2 billion units in 2018, with a CAGR of 18.7%, according to Taiwan's Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute.
* The worldwide security appliance market grew 6.1% in Q2 to $2.1 billion, according to IDC.
* Worldwide PC monitor shipments declined 6.7% in Q2, with Dell gaining the number one slot from Samsung, according to IDC.

* JSE All share index: Up 1.1% (highest-ever weekend close)
* Nasdaq: Up 1.4% (highest weekend close for 13 years)
* NYSE (Dow): Up 0.5%
* Top SA share movements: AdaptIT (+14.9%), Ansys (-12.5%), Datacentrix (+9%), Digicore (+12%), Gijima (-11.4%), ISA (+16.7%), Jasco (-11.8%), Pinnacle (-9.7%), SecureData (+26.7%) and TCS (-50%)

Last week, Cape Town was host to Gartner's new season of eight worldwide Symposium ITXPO 2013 events that are being presented under the title: "Leading in a Digital World". This local annual event saw more than 1 000 CIOs and senior IT executives attending over a period of three days.

Google will establish a health company called Calico.

The keynote address, given by Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's head of Research, focused on the digital industrial economy and IT 2020, when Gartner expected every company to be digitised; while the final session, given by Chris Howard, briefly examined Gartner's 'Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends' for 2014.

The opening of the keynote presentation was dominated by the theme that the digital world is upon us and that every company and every budget is an IT budget. The session, as always, included numerous predictions, including the following:

* By 2016, 30% of businesses will have begun directly or indirectly monetising their information assets via bartering or selling them outright.
* By 2017, 20% of computers will be learning rather than processing.
* By 2024, at least 10% of activities potentially injurious to human life will use a mandated 'smart system'.
* By 2020, one in three knowledge workers will be replaced by enterprise-owned smart machines they trained.
* By 2020, consumer data collected from wearable devices will drive 5% of sales from the Global 1000.
* By 2020, at least one consumer product manufacturer will be held liable by a national government for security vulnerabilities in its product.
* By 2025, 25% of global enterprises will engage the services of a 'cyber war mercenary' organisation.
* By 2020, labour reduction effects will cause social unrest in mature economies.
* By 2016, 3D printing of human organs will cause a global debate and local regulation.
* By 2016, at least one mega technology company will have announced plans to develop its own automobile offering.

The session closed with the suggestion that by 2020, leaders will take people and organisations where they were not going before.

In the final session, Howard explained that in creating the 2014 list of strategic technology trends, the following were the criteria were used:

* What technology trends will have the biggest potential for significant enterprise impact over the next three years?
* Which tech or trends will drive significant change or disruption?
* Are there changes or tipping points occurring now or over the next three years that make the technology market newly strategic or applicable to a wider market?

The lists for 2013 and 2014 are as follows (not in any order of priority):

2013

* Personal cloud
* Hybrid IT and cloud computing
* Internet of things
* Enterprise app stores
* Mobile applications and HTML5
* Mobile devices battles
* Actionable analytics
* Strategic big data (now no longer disruptive)
* Mainstream in-memory computing (now included in other areas)
* Integrated ecosystems (now included in other areas)

2014

* The era of personal cloud
* Hybrid cloud and IT as service broker
* The Internet of everything
* Cloud/client app architecture
* Mobile apps and ecosystems
* Enterprise mobile platforms
* Smart machines
* Software-defined everything (ie, functions defined through software, not hardware)
* Web-scale IT
* 3D printing