Larry Ellison tops most influential list

The various manoeuvres involving Microsoft, Yahoo and several other parties dominated the international ICT world last week. At home, it was a very quiet week despite the disappointing listing of TCS.

* A positive trading update from Paracon
* The listing on AltX of Total Client Services (TCS), previously known as Labat Traffic Solutions; and the parallel de-listing of Labat Africa from the Venture Capital sector of the JSE
* The acquisition by Atio of Saab Grintek's enterprise division, a move which consolidates the former's position as a Nortel reseller and gives it the local representation for Nice Systems
* The announcement by Telfree, a VANS providing VoIP and desktop video services, that it intends to list on AltX around mid-year
* The launch of Neotel's Telecoms Academy in collaboration with the National Electronic Media Institute of SA (NEMISA).

* Satisfactory year-end numbers from Namibia's MTC
* The announcement by Celtel Zambia that it intends to float 20% of its shares on the Lusaka Stock Exchange later this month
* The appointment of Richael Foley as Managing Director of Celtel Tanzania

Look out for the outcome of the various manoeuvres involving AOL, Microsoft, News Corp and Yahoo.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* The $45m acquisition by Amdocs of Jacobs Rimell, a provider of fulfilment solutions for the broadband cable industry
* The acquisition by ComTrade, Serbia's largest IT company, of Hermes Softlab, a Slovenian software provider; a move that creates the largest IT company in South East Europe with combined revenues of nearly $500m
* The £89m acquisition by Diodes of Zetex, a UK-based and listed analogue semiconductor group that is 33,12% owned by Bill Venter, founder and chairman of the Altron Group. Zetex was originally founded in 1989 in a management buyout from Plessey Semiconductors and then became part of Telemetrix, a Venter company. The name change to Zetex occurred in 2004.
* The $213m acquisition by EMC of Iomega, a data storage company that was being courted by China's ExcelStor Great Wall Technology
* The acquisition by IBM of Israeli-based FilesX, a company that offers data protection and recovery of business-critical applications and servers running on Microsoft Windows platforms
* The acquisition by Symantec of AppStream, an application streaming developer
* The acquisition by Yahoo of most of the assets of Tensa Kft, a provider of Web analytics software for online ,marketing
* The additional investment (20%) by Cisco in Nuova Systems, a networking start-up, thus increasing its shareholding to 100%
* Very good quarterly figures from HTC,
* The appointments of David Dorman as Chairman of Motorola and Ian Livingston as CEO of BT Group, following the resignations of Ben Verwaayen, CEO of BT Group and Ed Zander, Chairman of Motorola.

* The outcome of the various manoeuvrings involving AOL, Microsoft, News Corp and Yahoo
* The acquisition by IBM of the IT unit of Germany's ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG, a commercial TV corporation

* According to Technology Business Research Telecom Infrastructure Services Market Model, the market grew 8% in 2007 to $70bn.
* According to Gartner, Enterprise Search is set to become a pervasive and demanding force in IT over the next several years

* JSE All share index: Up 2,4%
* Nasdaq: Down 3,4%
* Top SA share movements: Ansys (+21,1%), Beget Holdings (-28,6%), Celcom (-10%), Dialogue Group (-15%), FoneWorx (+33,3%), Ideco (+17,1%), Metrofile (+17,6%), MICROmega (+10%), Paracon (+13,7%), TCS (-42%) and TeleMasters (-13,4%)

A very recent edition of USA's eWeek contained this year's 'Top 100 Most Influential People in IT' listing. The top 10 were Larry Ellison (Oracle), Steve Jobs (Apple), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), Sam Palmisano (IBM), Marissa Mayer (Google), Jean-Philippe Courtois (Microsoft), Joe Tucci (EMC), Mark Hurd (HP), John Chambers (Cisco) and Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google). Other key people were Michael Dell at No 18, Henning Kagermann (SAP) at No 25, and Paul Otellini (Intel) at No 32.