This is my 30,000 foot search at occasions in the ICT market for February 2014.
head up display of prior year’s Februarys…
5 years in the past in February 2009 the news was ALL about layoffs and financial uncertainty. Nortel, in addition to their layoffs sold their Alteon asset for less than $eighteen million, which they experienced acquired for $7 billion nine years beforehand! In February 2010 M&A action was gradual with no enormous purchases. Google purchased Aardvark Oracle obtained a couple of more compact entities IBM bought a little network software program company that focuses on the telco vertical and Sybase purchased a company that has a robust foothold in the financial providers vertical. There ended up heaps of signs that the restoration was underneath way and Canada noticed some work growth after a time period of drop. February 2011 was yet another silent thirty day period for M&A with HP buying Vertica Opentext bought Metastorm ($182 million) and Rackspace obtained Anso Labs. World news was dominated by the well-liked uprisings in a developing variety of international locations and the reactions of individuals governments which includes the brutality of Gaddafi’s Libyan supporters. Two several years ago, February 2012 was not a blockbuster thirty day period for M&A, but there was some interesting activity. The largest offer of the month observed Oracle pay $one.9 billion for talent administration firm Taleo. Siemens Canada paid $440 million for networking gear business Rugged.com. IBM acquired BYOD company Worklight Dell purchased backup and recovery business AppAssure Apple bought cellular lookup firm Chomp and LM Ericsson acquired Ottawa based mostly BelAir Networks. Previous yr in February 2013 Dell went private in a $24.four billion offer, that included a $2 billion investment decision by Microsoft. Oracle compensated $1.7 billion for networking firm Acme Packet Inc. Rackspace acquired huge info organization ObjectRocket Telus was active with two acquisitions, digital health-related data division of the Canadian Health-related Affiliation and digital forensics company Electronic Wyzdom HP also bought the Palm operating technique to LG for their wise TVs.
Which brings us back to the current…
February 2014 saw Facebook make a huge move with $sixteen billion acquisition of Whatsapp, which is possibly great valuation information for Blackberry since its BBM product would be a direct competitor. Blackberry however had another rough month when IDC released its numbers as the firm’s smartphones accounted for only 1.nine% of sales in Q4 of 2013.
An additional firm with huge information, though not always positive was Sony. They appear to be reinventing on their own in their different niches as they are closing their eReader store and divesting by themselves of their Computer division (Vaio).
In other M&A news Comcast is producing a $45 billion play for Time Warner Cable Oracle paid a reputed $four hundred million for data management platform organization Bluekai LinkedIn compensated $a hundred and twenty million for online occupation search company Vibrant and Klout was acquired for about $a hundred million by Lithium Systems. Google created a pair of acquisitions, on-line fraud organization Spider.io and protected logon firm Slicklogin. IBM is buying database as a support firm Cloudant and Monster bought a couple of firms, social profile business Talentbin and job aggregation and distribution technology organization Gozaic.
Other firms generating news this month incorporate Microsoft who announced a new CEO, Satya Nadella (who replaces Steve Ballmer) in addition a new Board Chair John Thompson (who replaces Monthly bill Gates). Dell commenced its new existence as a non-public firm with main restructuring, ensuing in most likely fifteen,000 job losses. On the good information front, work development and infrastructure additions in Canada come in the type of new datacenters for Bell Aliant and for Telus.
In stories from a variety of sources Android has about eighty% of the cell OS market place share, with Apple a distant 2nd. Samsung was the dominant handset hardware supplier with 32% share, with Apple next. Apple even so accounted for approximately one/three of tablet product sales in Western Europe previous 12 months, with Samsung next.
A Cisco review indicates that customers will enhance cell knowledge utilization by a factor of roughly 8 above the coming 5 years… so make confident you have excellent information ideas! The Canadian Federal Authorities announced an infrastructure expenditure to put broadband into rural communities and Gartner explain to us that IT shelling out was flat yr over calendar year, for the 13th 12 months in a row!
Economic information was generally blended, with no major negative news and no huge breakthroughs. Some work expansion in Canada and the US, some positive self confidence indicators and some not so excellent. One study seemed to sum it up for me, Careerbuilder located that fifty eight% of businesses feel the economic downturn is nevertheless lingering!
That is it for my appear at what was taking place in the technological innovation space more than the last thirty day period, compared to the identical month in prior a long time.
I will be back at the stop of March, till then… walk rapidly and smile!
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