Unix ruling ruffles feathers

The world of ICT was quiet last week both internationally and locally. On the international front, there was another acquisition by Dell, but the Unix ruling announced late Friday will ruffle a few feathers. Locally, another successful technology listing during a period of market uncertainty was one of the highlights.

* An interim loss from Cell C.
* Huge Group, which includes TelePassport, a telecommunications solutions company, successfully listed on AltX.
* Legara Enterprise Solutions (Lejara) invested a significant but unspecified stake in Bridge People & Technology, a supplier of e-learning software and solutions. Lejara is a supplier of BI services in Africa.
* Hamilton Ratshefola was appointed chairman of DVT, a company 28.5% owned by Cornastone Consulting.
* AMD axed Rectron as one of its distributors.
* Vestor Investments proposed its name changes to ConvergeNet Holdings.

* Egypt's Mobinil showed very good Q2 profit numbers, with almost 50% growth over Q206.
* MTN Nigeria acquired XS Broadband (Nigeria), a fixed wireless access licensee owned by UBA.
* Telecel Zimbabwe's licence was revoked by Zimbabwe's Postal & Telecommunications Regulatory Authority.
* Portugal Telecom created an African subsidiary that will consolidate its African interests in CST (Sao Tome and Principe), CVT (Cape Verde), Medi Telecom (Morocco), MTC (Namibia) and Unitel (Angola).
* Ghana's number one mobile provider Areeba changed its name to MTN Ghana.
* Rainier Koch was appointed MD and Technology Solutions Group lead of HP Africa.

The $1.53 billion judgement against Microsoft in favour of Alcatel-Lucent was overturned.

Paul Booth, MD, Global Research Partners

* A US federal court in Utah ruled that Novell and not SCO Group is the rightful owner of the copyright in the Unix operating systems.
* Dell acquired ZING Systems, a consumer technology and services company that focuses on always-connected audio and entertainment devices. This is the third acquisition by Dell in the past two months; prior to this, Dell has only ever concluded two acquisitions.
* Wipro Technologies, one of India's big guns, bought Infocrossing, a provider of IT infrastructure management, enterprise application and business processing outsourcing services, for $600 million. This is part of Wipro's planned growth strategy and establishes it as one of the world leaders in end-to-end IT infrastructure management solutions.
* The $1.53 billion judgement against Microsoft in favour of Alcatel-Lucent was overturned.
* Gregory Reyes, the former CEO of Brocade Communications Systems, was convicted of securities fraud associated with the backdating of stock options.
* Very good quarterly figures from Nvidia (and earnings nearly doubled).
* Good quarterly numbers from Cisco, Lenovo Group, Swisscom AG and Trend Micro.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from BMC Software (but earnings well up).
* Mediocre quarterly results from Deutsche Telekom, Mitek Systems (but back in the black), Sykes Enterprises and T-Systems.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Printronix.
* Very poor quarterly numbers from Sprint Nextel (revenue marginally up).
* Quarterly losses from Borland Software, Creative Technology, Intelsat, Overland Storage and Vonage.

* The possible acquisition by the BT Group of the infrastructure division of French IT services company, CS Communications & Systemes.
* Lenovo's entry into the fight for Packard Bell. Acer is in the frame already, but Gateway has also been added into the equation, as the owner of Packard Bell is a small shareholder in Gateway. Packard Bell is the fifth largest consumer PC manufacturer in Western Europe, with sales last year of about EUR1.5 billion, 3% of that market. John Hui, the owner of Packard Bell, bought the company from NEC less than 12 months ago.

* The worldwide software as a service market is expected to be worth $5.1 billion this year, up 21% from 2006, and rising to $11.5 billion in 2011, according to Gartner.

* JSE All share index: Down 1.8%
* Nasdaq: Up 1.3%
* Top SA share movements: Beget Holdings (-16.7%), Celcom (-13.7%), Dialogue Group (-14.2%), FoneWorx (-11.3%), ISA (-10.1%), MICROmega (-11.3%), Spescom (-11.4%), Vestor (+27.9%) and Zaptronix (-28.6%)

In the past few weeks, Interbrand, in conjunction with BusinessWeek, released its latest Best Global Brands for 2007. As would be expected, Cisco, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Nokia are all in the top 20. Other significant technology brand rankings are Samsung at number 21, Sony at 25, Oracle at 27, Dell at 31, Apple at 33, Sap at 34 and Canon at 36. Asus is the top Taiwanese brand.