HP head quits

The shock resignation of Mark Hurd, CEO of HP, stole the limelight in the international ICT market.

At home, the suspension of the shares of Beget Holdings and the details of the Business Connexion BEE deal were the main stories.

* A full-year loss from Simeka, with revenue also down 9%.
* A positive trading update from Pinnacle Technology.
* A negative trading update from MICROmega.
* Jasco acquired the Snapper range of plug and accessory products from Schneider Electrical SA for R7.5 million.
* The shares of Beget Holdings on the JSE have been suspended, a precursor, it would seem, to a possible winding-up of the company.
* Business Connexion will sell a 30% stake at a group level to black investors, including Gadlex, which already owns part of a subsidiary company, in order to enhance its empowerment status.
* South African-based FireID, a developer of mobile authentication solutions, has expanded its operations into the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.
* The appointments of Ian Jeremy Jones as acting CEO of Ifca Technologies; Paris Mashile as chairman of Vunani Technology Ventures and CEO of Vunani Electronic Communications; and Piet Nel as SA country manager for Eaton Telecom.
* The resignations of Jeffrey Christopher, CEO of Ifca Technologies, and JF Nalane, chairman of Beget Holdings.

* Arrow Electronics purchased Shared Technologies, a US-based unified communications and managed services provider.
* CSC bought Bass & Company, a privately owned strategy and operations consulting firm providing services to utility companies.
* Google acquired Slide.com, a maker of widgets for social networking sites, for $180 million.
* HgCapital, a UK private equity group, purchased TeamSystem, an Italian accounting software developer that was previously owned by Bain Capital. The deal was worth EUR565 million.
* LinkedIn bought mSpoke, a start-up company that is focused on making media relevant, with offerings for content publishers, research analysts and individuals. This is LinkedIn's first acquisition.
* McAfee acquired tenCube, the Singapore-based provider of WaveSecure mobile security service for consumers that allows users to remotely control their devices, manage the data on their phones, ensure privacy in the event of device theft or loss and enhance the possibility of recovering the phone.
* NTT DoCoMo purchased PacketVideo, a subsidiary of NextWave Wireless, for $111.6 million, increasing its shareholding to 100%.
* Tech Data, one of the world's largest distributors of IT products, acquired Netherlands-based Triade Holding, which owns a portfolio of value-added distributors of consumer electronics, mobility and information technology.
* Acer has formed a strategic alliance with Founder Technology Group, the Chinese PC vendor, in a move that could see Acer's revenue in China more than double in 2011. The move could also help Acer achieve the number one PC vendor slot as HP is struggling to gain market share in that country.
* Inmarsat has confirmed a $1.2 billion order for a new fleet of satellites.
* Intel has agreed an anti-trust settlement with US regulators that would bring an end to the raft of anti-trust investigations that are extant around the world.
* SAP accepted liability in its lawsuit with Oracle over copyright infringements, a dispute that dates back to 2007.
* Excellent quarterly results from CenturyLink (in the process of merging with Qwest Communications).
* Very good quarterly figures from Acer.
* Good quarterly numbers from Cognizant Technology Solutions, Harris (back in the black), Inmarsat, MicroStrategy, Portugal Telecom, Sapient and UMC.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from ADC Telecommunications (being acquired by Tyco Electronics), BCE, Time Warner Cable and VeriSign.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Deutsche Telekom, Logica, NTT Data, Pitney Bowes and Qwest Communications.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Cablevision Systems, with revenue up but profit down; Garmin, with revenue up but profit down; Swisscom, with revenue up but profit down; and Sykes Enterprises, with revenue up but profit down.
* A full year loss from BSNL (India) with revenue also down.
* Quarterly losses from AOL, NetSuite and Teac.
* Cathie Lesjak was named interim CEO at HP.
* The shock resignation of Mark Hurd, CEO of HP, following allegations of sexual misconduct and an expenses 'investigation'. The move saw the company's stock drop almost 10%, wiping $10 billion off its value.
* An IPO filing from Demand Media, an Internet data analysis and content distribution company.
* A mediocre IPO on NYSE by IntraLinks, a software maker of Web-based collaboration tools.

* International:
* The new CEO at HP.

* Africa:
* The acquisition of Meditel (Morocco) by France Telecom.

* South Africa:
* The sell-off of Square One Solution Group's interest in its subsidiary companies and its subsequent de-listing from the JSE.

* IT markets beat expectations in the first half of 2010, according to IDC, which has increased its worldwide growth projection to 6% for the full year, ie, $1.51 trillion.

IT markets beat expectations in the first half of 2010.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* JSE All share index: Down 0.3%
* Nasdaq: Up 1.5%
* Top SA share movements: African Cellular Towers (+62.1%), Cape Empowerment (-16%), FoneWorx (+16.3%), Labat Africa (-25.7%), Spescom (-10.4%), TeleMasters (+12.7%) and Zaptronix (-33.3%)

Gartner has just released a document in which it says the 'world of work' will witness 10 changes during the next 10 years, and organisations will need to determine which of them will affect them and consider whether radically different technology governance models will be required. These 10 changes are, in brief:

* The de-routinisation of work: The core value that people add is not in the processes that can be automated, but in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning. Non-routine skills are those we cannot automate.
* Work swarms: Swarming is a work style characterised by a flurry of collective activity by anyone and everyone conceivably available and able to add value.
* Weak links: In swarms, if individuals know each other at all, it may be just barely, via weak links. Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. They are indirect indicators and rely, in part, on the confidence others have in their knowledge of people. Navigating one's own personal, professional and social networks helps people develop and exploit both strong and weak links and that, in turn, will be crucial to surviving and exploiting swarms for business benefit.
* Working with the collective: There are informal groups of people, outside the direct control of the organisation, who can impact the success or failure of the organisation. These informal groups are bound together by a common interest, a fad or a historical accident, as described by Gartner as “the collective”.
* Work sketch-ups: Most non-routine processes will also be highly informal. It is very important that organisations try to capture the criteria used in making decisions, but at least for now, Gartner does not expect most non-routine processes to follow meaningful standard patterns.
* Spontaneous work: This property is also implied in Gartner's description of work swarms. Spontaneity implies more than reactive activity, for example, to the emergence of new patterns. It also contains proactive work such as seeking out new opportunities and creating new designs and models.
* Simulation and experimentation: Active engagement with simulated environments, which are similar to technologies depicted in the film Minority Report, will come to replace drilling into cells in spreadsheets.
* Pattern sensitivity: Gartner has published a major line of research on Pattern-Based Strategy. The business world is becoming more volatile, affording people working off of linear models based on past performance far less visibility into the future than ever before. Gartner expects to see a significant growth in the number of organisations that create groups specifically charged with detecting divergent emerging patterns, evaluating those patterns, developing various scenarios for how the disruption might play out and proposing to senior executives new ways of exploiting the changes to which they are now more sensitive.
* Hyperconnected: Hyperconnectedness is a property of most organisations, existing within networks of networks, unable to completely control any of them. While key supply chain elements, for example, may be "under contract", there is no guarantee it will perform properly, not even if the supply chain is in-house. Hyperconnectedness will lead to a push for more work to occur in both formal and informal relationships across enterprise boundaries, and that has implications for how people work and how IT supports or augments that work.
* My place: The workplace is becoming more and more virtual, with meetings occurring across time zones and organisations and with participants who barely know each other, working on swarms attacking rapidly emerging problems. But the employee will still have a "place" where they work. Many will have neither a company-provided physical office nor a desk, and their work will increasingly happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In this work environment, the lines between personal, professional, social and family matters, along with organisation subjects, will disappear. Individuals, of course, need to manage the complexity created by overlapping demands, whether from the new world of work or from external (non-work-related) phenomena. Those that cannot manage the underlying "expectation and interrupt overloads" will suffer performance deficits as these overloads force individuals to operate in an over-stimulated (information-overload) state.