This is my 30,000 foot appear at occasions in the ICT sector for February 2014.
A Small Heritage of preceding year’s Februarys…
Five several years in the past in February 2009 the news was ALL about layoffs and economic uncertainty. Nortel, in addition to their layoffs sold their Alteon asset for less than $eighteen million, which they experienced acquired for $seven billion nine several years formerly! In February 2010 M&A exercise was sluggish with no large purchases. Google bought Aardvark Oracle bought a few of smaller sized entities IBM bought a modest network application company that focuses on the telco vertical and Sybase acquired a firm that has a robust foothold in the monetary services vertical. There ended up heaps of indicators that the restoration was underneath way and Canada saw some occupation expansion soon after a interval of decline. February 2011 was one more quiet thirty day period for M&A with HP purchasing Vertica Opentext bought Metastorm ($182 million) and Rackspace acquired Anso Labs. Entire world news was dominated by the well-liked uprisings in a growing variety of international locations and the reactions of those governments like the brutality of Gaddafi’s Libyan supporters. Two many years ago, February 2012 was not a blockbuster month for M&A, but there was some fascinating activity. The biggest deal of the month noticed Oracle shell out $1.9 billion for talent management firm Taleo. Artikel paid $440 million for networking products firm Rugged.com. IBM bought BYOD firm Worklight Dell acquired backup and restoration company AppAssure Apple acquired cell search firm Chomp and LM Ericsson bought Ottawa based mostly BelAir Networks. Previous 12 months in February 2013 Dell went private in a $24.four billion deal, that provided a $two billion expense by Microsoft. Oracle paid out $one.7 billion for networking business Acme Packet Inc. Rackspace acquired large information organization ObjectRocket Telus was occupied with two acquisitions, electronic health-related records division of the Canadian Health-related Affiliation and electronic forensics organization Electronic Wyzdom HP also offered the Palm operating technique to LG for their wise TVs.
Which brings us back again to the existing…
February 2014 saw Facebook make a massive transfer with $sixteen billion acquisition of Whatsapp, which is almost certainly good valuation news for Blackberry simply because its BBM merchandise would be a direct competitor. Blackberry even so experienced one more tough month when IDC unveiled its quantities as the company’s smartphones accounted for only one.9% of sales in This fall of 2013.
An additional firm with big information, although not automatically constructive was Sony. They appear to be reinventing by themselves in their various niches as they are closing their eReader shop and divesting by themselves of their Computer division (Vaio).
In other M&A news Comcast is creating a $forty five billion enjoy for Time Warner Cable Oracle paid out a reputed $400 million for knowledge management platform company Bluekai LinkedIn compensated $one hundred twenty million for on the internet job lookup organization Brilliant and Klout was bought for about $100 million by Lithium Technologies. Google produced a couple of acquisitions, on-line fraud business Spider.io and safe logon company Slicklogin. IBM is getting databases as a provider firm Cloudant and Monster bought a couple of organizations, social profile company Talentbin and occupation aggregation and distribution engineering organization Gozaic.
Other companies making information this thirty day period contain Microsoft who declared a new CEO, Satya Nadella (who replaces Steve Ballmer) additionally a new Board Chair John Thompson (who replaces Bill Gates). Dell started its new lifestyle as a private firm with significant restructuring, ensuing in probably fifteen,000 work losses. On the good information entrance, jobs development and infrastructure additions in Canada arrive in the kind of new datacenters for Bell Aliant and for Telus.
In reports from various sources Android has about eighty% of the cellular OS marketplace share, with Apple a distant second. Samsung was the dominant handset components supplier with 32% share, with Apple next. Apple nonetheless accounted for around one/three of tablet revenue in Western Europe very last calendar year, with Samsung second.
A Cisco examine indicates that consumers will improve cellular knowledge usage by a element of about eight over the coming 5 a long time… so make confident you have good information ideas! The Canadian Federal Government introduced an infrastructure investment decision to put broadband into rural communities and Gartner notify us that IT investing was flat year more than calendar year, for the 13th 12 months in a row!
Economic information was typically mixed, with no major poor news and no massive breakthroughs. Some work progress in Canada and the US, some positive self-confidence indicators and some not so great. 1 review seemed to sum it up for me, Careerbuilder discovered that fifty eight% of businesses really feel the economic downturn is even now lingering!
That is it for my look at what was going on in the engineering place more than the very last thirty day period, compared to the same thirty day period in preceding several years.
I’ll be back at the stop of March, right up until then… walk rapidly and smile!