IBM gets girl power

The international ICT market was dominated last week with the announcement by IBM of its first female CEO.

At home, the ministerial changes that impacted the South African ICT landscape stole much of the local media space.

* An interim loss from TCS, although revenue up 47%.
* A full-year loss from Neotel.
* Positive trading updates from MiX Telematics, Reunert and Sekunjalo Investments.
* UCS terminated its listing of shares on the JSE.
* Jasco purchased the remaining 15% of the shares of Telesciences it doesn't already own, for R6.5 million.
* Pan African Capital bought a 25.1% stake in XLink Communications, a division of Vodacom Ventures.
* MTN's subscriber numbers have increased to 158 590 000 as of 30 September 2011, an increase of 4.1% for the quarter.
* Mediro ICT was appointed Compuware's sole distributor for SA and sub-Saharan Africa.
* Dina Pule was named the new minister at the Department of Communications.
* Roy Padayachie was transferred to the Department of Public Service and Administration.

* Very poor quarterly figures from Mobinil (Egypt), with revenue down 5% and profit down 96.5%.

The mobile phone market grew 12.8% in Q3 to 393.7 million units.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* LSI acquired SandForce, a provider of flash storage processors, for $322 million.
* Oracle bought RightNow Technologies, a cloud-based customer service provider, for $1.5 billion.
* Sony bought Ericsson's share in their joint venture for EUR1.05 billion.
* HP has ditched its planned PC unit sell-off.
* Kenexa, a provider of business solutions for HR, has transferred its listing to the NYSE.
* Excellent quarterly results from Baidu, Sharp, Softbank and Yandex.
* Very good quarterly figures from Open Text.
* Good quarterly numbers from Anixter international, ARM Holdings, China Telecom, CTG, F5 Networks, Forrester Research, KLA-Tencor, Micros Systems, Motorola Solutions, NEC, SAP and Symantec.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from ADP, Akamai Technologies, AMD (back in the black), Arrow Electronics, CA Technologies, Canon, China Unicom, Citrix Systems, Corning, Iron Mountain (back in the black), JDA Software, PMC-Sierra, Rogers Communications, Unisys, Websense and Xerox.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Diebold, Everything Everywhere, France Telecom, Fujitsu, KPN, Novellus Systems, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, TSMC and UMC.
* Mediocre half-year numbers from Kyocera.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Amazon.com, with revenue up but profit down; Ariba, with revenue up but profit down; BMC Software, with revenue up but profit down; Broadcom, with revenue up but profit down; Cablevision, with revenue up but profit down; Ingram Micro, with revenue up but profit down; Interactive Intelligence, with revenue up but profit down; Lexmark, with revenue up but profit down; Logitech International, with revenue up but profit down; NCR, with revenue up but profit down; Quantum, with revenue down but profit up; Samsung Electronics, with revenue up but profit down; SK Telecom, with revenue up but profit down; TomTom, with revenue down but profit up; VeriSign, with revenue up but profit down; and ZTE, with revenue up but profit down.
* Quarterly losses from AU Optronics, Hynix Semiconductor, Imation, LG Electronics, Motorola Mobility, Sprint Nextel and Tellabs.
* A half-year loss from Nintendo.
* The appointments of Gervais Pellissier as CEO of France Telecom-Orange; and Virginia "Ginni" Rometty as CEO of IBM (as of 1 January).
* The resignation of Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, chairman of Olympus.
* The retirement of Samuel Palmisano, CEO of IBM (as from 1 January, but stays on as chairman).
* A planned IPO from Zynga in the latter half of November.

* International:
* The possible acquisition of Yahoo by a consortium that includes financing by Google.
* The impact on component supplies following the floods in Thailand.
* Africa:
* The possible sell-off by Swaziland Posts and Telecommunications Corp of its stake in the joint venture with MTN.
* Further developments regarding Vodacom and its joint venture in the DRC.
* South Africa:
* Further developments regarding Telkom and the Competition Tribunal's hearings.

* The mobile phone market grew 12.8% in Q3 to 393.7 million units, according to IDC, with Samsung closing the gap on Nokia at the top and ZTE ousting Apple for the number four slot.
* MEA PC shipments rose 7.4% in Q3 to 4.7 million units, according to IDC, with HP, Dell and Toshiba filling the top three slots, followed by Acer and Lenovo.

* JSE All share index: Up 4.6%
* Nasdaq: Up 3.8%
* Top SA share movements: CompuClearing (-10%), Net 1 UEPS Technologies (+9.1%), Poynting Antennas (+20%), SecureData (+32%), Sekunjalo (+16.2%), Stella Vista (+25%) and Zaptronix (-33.3%)

CRNtech, a US-based magazine, recently highlighted several 'emerging vendors' from around the world, which they thought were worth watching. The listed included the following companies that looked particularly interesting:

* Abiquo (USA), a provider of open source cloud management solutions;
* Ctera Networks (Israel), a provider of an attached storage system that combines on-premises applications with cloud-services to provide an integrated all-in-one solution for shared storage, data protection and collaboration;
* EventZero (Australia),the provider of Greentrac, a revolutionary energy-consumption-monitoring application for enterprise PC fleets;
* MeLLmo (USA), the provider of Roambi, a graphics and visualisation application for BI systems; and
* ROBOBAK (Canada), a provider of cloud-based back-up solutions.