HP heads for milestone

The international and local ICT world was quiet last week, with HP's quarterly results being one of the global highlights. At home, a new listing and the appointment of a new ICASA CEO stole the limelight.

* A full-year loss from Beget Holdings, with revenue also down.
* The R80 million acquisition by Huge Group (TelePassport) of Centracell, a least-cost routing company and a competitor of the former.
* The 49% investment by Community Investment Ventures, a black-owned investment holding company, in Muvoni Weltex, a specialist fibre optic laying operation for broadband operations.
* The appointment of Karabo Motlana as CEO of ICASA.
* The resignation of Henry Ferreira, country manager of Unisys SA.
* Pinnacle Micro was appointed as master distributor for Canon products.
* Drive Control was named as a distributor for Toshiba notebooks.

* Seven companies bid for a 51% stake in Telkom Kenya, which is being privatised later this year. These include BT Group via a partnership with a Libyan-based investment group, France Telecom, Tata Group (VSNL) and Telkom SA.
* The Rwanda government is planning to sell up to 70% of Rwandatel/Terracom SA.

Look out for the scramble for ownership of Telecel Zimbabwe following the cancellation of its operating licence.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* Citrix Systems' $500 million acquisition of XenSource, a provider of virtualisation software.
* EMC acquired Tablus, a provider of data loss prevention software. The Tablus products will be combined with EMC's Infoscape intelligent information management products to create a platform customers can use to discover, classify and take policy-based action on all of their data. It will be marketed through its RSA security division.
* Novell bought Senforce Technologies, the developer of network access control technology that the former has been 'OEMing' in-house.
* RF Micro Devices' $900 million purchase of Sirenza Microdevices in a deal that increases its total addressable market by 67% to $20 billion.
* Texas Instruments acquired Integrated Circuit Designs, a company that specialises in RF integrated circuits.
* Excellent quarterly results from Salesforce.com (and back in the black).
* Very good quarterly figures from HCL Technologies, India's fifth largest IT company.
* Good quarterly numbers from HP. With one set of quarterly numbers still to be announced for its current financial year, HP is well on track to become the first IT company to break the $100 billion revenue mark for a full year.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from BEA Systems.
* Mediocre quarterly results from CACI International and Network Appliance.
* Quarterly losses from ProMOS Technologies, Taiwan's third largest memory chipmaker.
* The appointment of Edward Mueller as CEO of Qwest Communications, the fourth largest US telecommunications group.
* An excellent IPO from VMware, a unit of EMC, which raised over $950 million, making it one of the largest technology IPOs since Google.
* A planned IPO on Nasdaq by EqualLogic, an iSCSI storage vendor. EqualLogic expects to raise $125 million and is targeting mid-range customers with its stripped-down version of its SAN storage systems.

* The scramble for ownership of Telecel Zimbabwe following the cancellation of its operating licence.
* The outcome of the indictment of nine senior executives for insider trading at Taiwan's Inventec Appliances, one of Apple's iPod contract manufacturers.

* Worldwide semiconductor manufacturing billings reached $11.06 billion in Q207, 3% up on Q107 and 15% up on Q206, according to SEMI.
* The worldwide market for mobile video telephony and messaging services will grow from $1 billion this year to over $17 billion by 2012, says ABI Research.

* JSE All share index: Down 4%
* Nasdaq: Down 1.6%
* Top SA share movements: Begat Holdings (+20%), Celcom (-11%), Cyberhost (-13.3%), Huge Group (+13%), Labat Africa (-15.8%), TeleMasters (-10.3%) and Zaptronix (+20%)

T-Systems was ranked as the worst performing IT services vendor for the second consecutive quarter, according to Computerwire. Computer Task Group (US) and Unisys were also in the top three worst category. At the top of the pile were 3i Infotech (India) followed by Cognizant (US) and Tech Mahindra (India).