This is my 30,000 foot seem at activities in the ICT market for February 2014.
A Minor History of prior year’s Februarys…
5 many years ago in February 2009 the news was ALL about layoffs and financial uncertainty. Nortel, in addition to their layoffs bought their Alteon asset for significantly less than $18 million, which they had bought for $seven billion nine several years formerly! In February 2010 M&A activity was gradual with no huge buys. Google bought Aardvark Oracle acquired a pair of scaled-down entities IBM purchased a small network software program business that focuses on the telco vertical and Sybase acquired a firm that has a strong foothold in the fiscal solutions vertical. There had been lots of signs that the recovery was beneath way and Canada saw some job development after a period of time of decrease. have a peek here was another tranquil month for M&A with HP acquiring Vertica Opentext bought Metastorm ($182 million) and Rackspace obtained Anso Labs. World news was dominated by the well-known uprisings in a developing number of nations around the world and the reactions of people governments including the brutality of Gaddafi’s Libyan supporters. Two many years ago, February 2012 was not a blockbuster thirty day period for M&A, but there was some interesting action. The greatest offer of the thirty day period saw Oracle shell out $1.nine billion for talent management organization Taleo. Siemens Canada paid $440 million for networking tools company Rugged.com. IBM acquired BYOD company Worklight Dell acquired backup and recovery business AppAssure Apple purchased cellular search firm Chomp and LM Ericsson acquired Ottawa based mostly BelAir Networks. Final calendar year in February 2013 Dell went personal in a $24.four billion deal, that incorporated a $2 billion investment decision by Microsoft. Oracle paid $1.7 billion for networking firm Acme Packet Inc. Rackspace bought massive knowledge business ObjectRocket Telus was active with two acquisitions, electronic health care documents division of the Canadian Healthcare Association and digital forensics company Digital Wyzdom HP also offered the Palm operating technique to LG for their smart TVs.
Which provides us back to the present…
February 2014 noticed Facebook make a big move with $16 billion acquisition of Whatsapp, which is possibly excellent valuation information for Blackberry simply because its BBM merchandise would be a direct competitor. Blackberry even so experienced another tough month when IDC launched its figures as the firm’s smartphones accounted for only 1.nine% of product sales in This fall of 2013.
An additional organization with huge information, despite the fact that not always good was Sony. They look to be reinventing by themselves in their a variety of niches as they are closing their eReader store and divesting them selves of their Pc division (Vaio).
In other M&A news Comcast is generating a $45 billion play for Time Warner Cable Oracle paid a reputed $four hundred million for info administration platform company Bluekai LinkedIn paid out $a hundred and twenty million for on the internet job research firm Bright and Klout was purchased for about $a hundred million by Lithium Systems. Google made a few of acquisitions, on the web fraud firm Spider.io and safe logon firm Slicklogin. IBM is purchasing database as a provider organization Cloudant and Monster bought a pair of companies, social profile firm Talentbin and task aggregation and distribution technologies business Gozaic.
Other companies creating news this thirty day period incorporate Microsoft who declared a new CEO, Satya Nadella (who replaces Steve Ballmer) furthermore a new Board Chair John Thompson (who replaces Invoice Gates). Dell started its new daily life as a personal business with main restructuring, ensuing in very likely 15,000 task losses. On the excellent news entrance, work development and infrastructure additions in Canada come in the sort of new datacenters for Bell Aliant and for Telus.
In stories from a variety of resources Android has about eighty% of the cellular OS industry share, with Apple a distant next. Samsung was the dominant handset components supplier with 32% share, with Apple 2nd. Apple however accounted for approximately one/three of tablet sales in Western Europe last yr, with Samsung second.
A Cisco examine indicates that end users will improve cellular knowledge utilization by a element of approximately 8 more than the coming five a long time… so make positive you have good data programs! The Canadian Federal Authorities introduced an infrastructure expense to place broadband into rural communities and Gartner inform us that IT shelling out was flat year more than year, for the 13th year in a row!
Financial news was generally combined, with no significant poor news and no large breakthroughs. Some job development in Canada and the US, some positive self-confidence indicators and some not so excellent. One examine seemed to sum it up for me, Careerbuilder discovered that fifty eight% of employers really feel the economic downturn is still lingering!
That is it for my search at what was happening in the technology space over the last month, when compared to the exact same month in prior several years.
I am going to be again at the finish of March, until then… wander fast and smile!