HP, Acer head to court

The ICT world was again quiet last week, with a handful of results dominating the local media space and HP's lawsuit against Acer providing the main story for the international media.

* Excellent interim figures from Cape Empowerment Trust, with revenue up over 60% and profit up over 300%; Faritec, with revenue up over 80% and profit up over 50%; and MTN, with revenue and profit both up over 80%.
* Mixed full-year numbers from Square One, with revenue down but profit well up at over 100%.
* An interim loss from Integrear.
* UCS acquired a majority stake (51%) in 3J Holdings, a company supplying computer consumables, equipment, software and/or services to the retail market.
* TallyGenicom opened a local office, headed by Dave Terry.
* Former executives applied for the liquidation of the Prophesy division of New Dawn Holdings.
* The appointment of Nhlanhla Gasa as chairman of Digicore.

* The Ugandan government issued a telecommunications operating licence to Al-Warid, a Dubai-based telecoms company.
* The Kenyan government will sell 34% of Telkom Kenya in its privatisation move scheduled for later this year.

The Kenyan government will sell 34% of Telkom Kenya in its privatisation move scheduled for later this year.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* Kuwait's MTC won the third cellular licence for Saudi Arabia.
* Microsoft acquired devBiz Business Solutions, a developer of a front-end for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.
* HP filed a suit against Acer, alleging patent violations.
* Planned IPOs from Limelight Networks, a provider of content-delivery network services; Netezza, a data warehouse appliance vendor; and Xchanging, a BPO company.
* A good IPO by Aruba Networks, a player in the wireless LAN market.
* Good IPOs by ETelecare Global Solutions, a BPO company, and Super Micro Computer.
* A disappointing IPO by GSI Technology, a provider of SRAM products.

* Indian outsourcer HCL Technologies' bid for Cambridge Solutions.

* JSE All share index: Up 1.3% (highest-ever weekend close)
* Nasdaq: Down 1.1%
* Top SA share movements: Alliance Data (+9.4%), Dialogue (-15%), Faritec (+15%), Integrear (+100%), Stella Vista (+10%), TeleMasters (+10.4%) and Vestor (-24.1%)
* Top international share movements: All American Semiconductor (-50%), Computer Horizons (-84.1%), Delphax Technologies (-19.5%), Eagle Broadband (-32.1%), Geoworks (-25%), Isonics (-25.8%), MIDGARDXX1 (-40%), Pegasus Wireless (-19.4%)

Baseline Briefing has released its 100 most influential people in IT listing. It contains some interesting and comparatively unknown names. However, the top seven places were filled by Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google at number one; followed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web; Linus Torvalds, a founding father of Linux; Larry Ellison of Oracle; Steve Ballmer of Microsoft; Steve Jobs of Apple; and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com. Other prominent names are Sam Palmisano of IBM at 11; Paul Otellini of Intel at 18; Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems at 19; Mark Hurd of HP at 24; and Meg Whitman of eBay at 25.

Since this weekend is Easter, my next column will be published on 16 April and will cover a two-week period.