Oracle, SAP lock horns

In international news, a legal fight is taking place between Oracle and SAP, and Mail.ru issued an IPO. At home, the appointment of a new minister for the Department of Communications stole much of the ICT media space.

* Good interim numbers from Ansys, with revenue up 20% and back in the black (just).
* Satisfactory year-end figures from Sekunjalo, with revenue up 9% and back in the black.
* A mediocre trading update from Business Connexion.
* A negative trading update from ConvergeNet Holdings.
* American Tower Corporation acquired the tower assets of Cell C for $430 million.
* Candice Roberts has bought Dialogue's 51% interest in CallForce, a call centre recruitment specialist and a subsidiary of Dialogue. The deal was worth R2.09 million. Roberts paid an amount of R1.03 million in respect of the purchase consideration. The balance, amounting to R1.06 million, will be settled in cash by the end of November 2010.
* ICASA has licensed globalCom Satellite for the sales of iridium satellite phone systems and handsets.
* Pieter Bensch was appointed country lead, South Africa, for Oracle; Khun Ntshavheni was named COO of SITA; and Roy Padayachie was appointed minister of the Department of Communications.

* Excellent half-year figures from Econet Wireless, with revenue up 79% and profit up 55%.
* Hits Africa purchased Atlantic Wireless Liberia (Libercell).
* LAP Green Network (Libya) bought 60% of Sotel Tchad (Chad) for $90 million.
* Bachar Saghir was named CEO of Libercell, and Azzam Shaity was appointed chairman of Libercell (was CEO).

* Oracle challenged SAP in court last week, seeking $2.3 billion in damages, because the German company downloaded Oracle materials without permission.
* Accenture acquired Knowledge Rules, a consulting company that focuses exclusively on implementing and integrating business solutions using Pegasystems' BPM software.
* AT&T bought some assets of inCompass Wireless.
* Dell purchased Boomi, a cloud computing services company.
* Etisalat acquired 46% of Zain, the Kuwait-based telecommunications group, for $12 billion.
* Oracle bought Art Technology Group, an e-commerce software company, for $1 billion.
* Xerox's subsidiary, ACS, purchased Spur Information Services, a UK-based maker of software used for parking enforcement.
* Affiliates of Credit Suisse Group and Willowridge Partners made a $23 million winning bid for Nortel Networks' venture capital investments.
* Excellent quarterly results from Elpida Memory (back in the black).
* Very good quarterly figures from Cognizant Technology Solutions, Sanmina-SCI (back in the black) and Sapient.
* Good quarterly numbers from Plantronics (back in the black).
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Alcatel-Lucent (back in the black), Amdocs, Cablevision Systems, Corning, Gartner, Hitachi (back in the black), Qualcomm and Time Warner Cable.
* Mediocre quarterly results from CenturyLink and Pitney Bowes.
* Mixed quarterly figures from AOL, with revenue down but profit up; BCE, with revenue up but profit down; Cable & Wireless Communications, with revenue up but profit down; Deutsche Telekom, with revenue down but profit up; Garmin, with revenue down but profit up; MicroStrategy, with revenue up but profit down; and Sykes Enterprises, with revenue up but profit down.
* Quarterly losses from Alvarion, Guidance Software, NetSuite, Qwest Communications and SGI.
* A planned IPO from Skype in early 2011, rather than the latter part of this year.
* A planned IPO on either the NYSE or Nasdaq by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
* An excellent IPO in London from Russia's Mail.ru, a company in which Naspers has a major interest. This was the world's largest Internet IPO since the $1.5 billion debut of China's Alibaba in 2007.

* International:
* A buyer for India's Sonata Software, a consulting and services company. Among the purchasing contenders are HCL, Ingram Micro, Oracle and Wipro.
* Africa:
* Further developments at Nitel following the preferred bidder's failure to pay the 30% ($750 million) security sum as required by the tender.
* South Africa:
* The closure of various loss-making divisions inside Sentech, including its DTH TV unit.
* The new chairman of Telkom, following the expiration of the contract of the current incumbent, Jeff Molobela.

Roy Padayachie was appointed minister of the Department of Communications.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* According to Ernst & Young's 13th annual Global Information Security Survey, fewer than one-third of global businesses have an IT risk management programme in place capable of addressing the risks associated with the use of new technologies.
* Data growth is the largest data centre infrastructure challenge, according to a recent Gartner survey.
* Mobile and cloud computing will emerge as the most in-demand platforms for software application development and IT delivery over the next five years, according to the 2010 IBM Tech Trends Survey.
* The worldwide smartphone market grew 89.5% in Q3 to 81.1 million units, with Apple taking the number two slot from RIM, and Samsung and HTC filling the number four and five positions, reports IDC.

* JSE All share index: Up 3.4% (highest weekend close since June 2008)
* Nasdaq: Up 2.9% (highest weekend close since December 2007)
* Top SA share movements: Ansys (+23.8%), BCX (+9.5%), Dialogue Group (+9.1%), FoneWorx (+14.8%), Huge Group (-10%), Labat Africa (-9.1%), Poynting Antennas (-31%), Sekunjalo (+20.9%), Silverbridge Holdings (+17.3%) and Simeka (+16.7%)

US-based Network World has published its latest '25 new IT companies to watch' list, many of which are start-ups that could become the next Intel or Microsoft. The list includes the following:

* AppDynamics, which makes software that manages the performance of distributed Java and .NET applications.
* CloudFlare, a company that has built a content delivery firewall, as well as a network traffic accelerator, and is planning to introduce performance and security tools previously only available to the Internet giants, to anyone with a Web site.
* Delphix, a company providing database virtualisation, storage optimisation and management software designed to improve efficiency of storage used by Oracle and other databases.
* Infineta Systems, which offers Velocity Dedup Engine, a WAN traffic accelerator that uses de-duplication and other techniques to reduce the network traffic going over WAN links by up to 80% or 90%.
* LightSquared, a company already building its own LTE-based 4G wireless broadband network to fuel the next generation of smartphones for consumers and enterprise customers.
* Oxygen Cloud, a company helping businesses use cloud services to securely share and collaborate on files.
* SeaMicro, a company building chips for servers that consume 75% less power and space than traditional machines.