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In this Issue: > General Interest > Company News > Merger & Acquisition Activity > Primary Sources

> GENERAL INTEREST

Canada lost 2,600 jobs in December, according to seasonally adjusted numbers released today by Statistics Canada, while economists had expected a gain of 20,000 jobs. The unemployment rate was unchanged month-over-month at 8.5%.

The ECRI weekly leading index measuring the U.S. economy reached a one-and-a-half year high. In the weekly period ending January 1, the weekly leading index level rose to 131.5, up from the previous reading of 130.7.

The U.S. lost an estimated 84,000 private-sector nonfarm jobs in December on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to ADP. This was the smallest decline since March of 2008.

According to the latest statistics published by the Association of Temporary Employment Agencies in France, temporary employment in 2009 was down by 28.7% or 175,000 job losses. This compares to a fall of 8.3% in 2008 or 55,000 job losses. In total, 230,000 jobs have been lost in the temporary employment market since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008.

A mid-2009 job satisfaction survey by the Corporate Executive Board, a Washington-based advisory firm that counts many Fortune 500 firms among its clients, found that the number of dissatisfied workers continues to increase. The CEB’s latest survey found that the willingness of IT employees to “exert high levels of discretionary effort” — put in extra hours to solve a problem, make suggestions for improving processes, and generally seek to play a key role in an organization — has plummeted to its lowest levels since the survey was launched 10 years ago. In 2007, about 12% of the IT employees fit in category of “highly engaged” workers, but that have since fallen to 4%!!!

U.S. real gross domestic product rose at an annual rate of 5.7% in the fourth quarter, according to the U.S. Commerce Department’s advance estimate. MarketWatch reported the growth was the fastest in six years, but said that most economists believe the pace of growth will be around 3% in 2010. Real GDP had grown at an annual rate of 2.2% in the third quarter. It fell 0.7% in the second quarter and declined 6.4% in the first. For full-year 2009, real GDP fell 2.4%. It had grown 0.4% in 2008.

The latest statistics released by the statistical office of the European Union (eurostat) reveal that the euro area seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate was 10.0% in December 2009, compared with 9.9% in November. It was 8.2% in December 2008.

The US Conference Board’s measure of CEO confidence rose one point to a reading of 64 in the fourth quarter — readings of more than 50 indicate more positive than negative responses. In comparison, the figure was 24 one year ago.

U.S. and global spending on IT hardware and software will bounce back strongly in 2010, market watcher Forrester said. The research firm is calling for tech spending in the U.S. to grow 6.6% this year, to $568 billion, after being down 8.2% in 2009. Worldwide spending will jump 8.1% to more than $1.6 trillion, following a decline of 8.9% last year.

> COMPANY NEWS

CA has a new CEO. William McCracken, now CEO and Chairman of the Board replaces John Swainson, who announced his retirement last September.

Apple’s new iPad, a slate-style tablet computer that has been the subject of rumour for months. The success or not of the device is yet to be seen, but there has been plenty of chatter about it; some even good!

> MERGER & ACQUISITION ACTIVITY

Oracle this week announced it has completed the acquisition of Silver Creek Systems, the Westminster, Colo.-based purveyor of DataLens product data quality software. Oracle says the technology will bolster its data hub, product lifecycle management, supply chain and ERP applications. Silver Creek was a small, privately held company and the terms of the purchase were not disclosed. Silver Creek’s technology is used by companies that buy, make or sell products prone to complex data quality issues, such as computers and electronics, part and repair items, or electrical and plumbing supplies.

Apple has acquired Quattro Wireless. Quattro has an ad serving, tracking and analytics platform to help advertisers engage with mobile consumers. Its Q Elevation platform can be used to target ad campaigns based on consumer demographics, location, time of day and other factors. The Wall Street Journal reported Apple planned to pay US$275 million for Quattro. Mobile advertising is considered a hot market because of the potential to reach consumers on devices that they carry with them everywhere and personalize. Observers see the market for mobile advertising as relatively untapped, with effective approaches just beginning to take shape.

EMC is buying Archer Technologies in a move to beef up its offerings for governance, risk, and compliance software. Archer, which has some six million licensed users, is a privately held company; the financial terms of the acquisition were not released. Archer’s SmartSuite Framework delivers out-of-the-box solutions in categories of policy, risk, compliance, enterprise, incident, vendor, threat, business continuity, and audit management. The solution enables users to tailor solutions to their specific requirements in both on-premises and Archer SaaS models. EMC indicated that Archer will work effectively not only with RSA, but also with EMC’s recently acquired Ionix unit as customers work to automate their IT configurations across servers, networks, and storage environments.

BMC Software, the Houston-based supplier of systems management software, is acquiring Phurnace Software, a supplier of assessment tools for automated Java application deployment, for an undisclosed amount. Phurnace uses a set of red flames as its company symbol, and it’s rise has been rapid from its start as a 2006 an entry in a business plan contest at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. The business plan was the brainchild of MBA student Daniel Nelson and economics major Robert Reeves, who became the company founders. The firm’s flagship product is Phurnace Deliver, which assesses whether the configuration of a Java application and its application server are correct for optimal performance.

Cisco has bought Rohati Systems Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., for an undisclosed price. Rohati’s agentless appliances work in-line and can intercept transactions to perform policy enforcement and management. Rohati, headed by CEO Shane Buckley, was created by a team of former Cisco staffers in 2006. It makes two models of appliances: the TNS 100, a single unit for medium sized data center environments and departmental server farms, and the TNS 500, a chassis that can hold five units for centre environments that need multi-10G application throughput with millions of connections. It claims it can provide per-transaction policy enforcement for any supported protocol based on any combination of user, resource, protocol, and network attributes.

PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada has purchased MTS Allstream’s non-telecom IT consulting business in a move aimed at rebuilding its IT consulting business. In addition to a slew of client contracts, the acquisition will bring PwC Canada 180 new employees from MTS Allstream’s professional services consulting group, including those specializing in enterprise apps, IT management, systems integration, and project management. The history behind the acquisition might actually date back to 2002 and a deal which saw IBM Corp. pay US$3.5 billion to buy up PwC Consulting and its 30,000 consulting professionals. The massive acquisition also came with a five-year non-compete clause, which ended in 2007. For MTS Allstream, the transaction is expected to bring the company back to basics, with a renewed focus on its core business offerings in unified communications and converged IP services. The company also announced a new strategic alliance as part of the deal. This alliance will have PwC Canada customers referred to MTS Allstream for communications solutions and MTS Allstream customers sent to PwC Canada for non-telecom IT support.

Looking to boost its offerings for advertisers on mobile devices, Opera announced the acquisition of AdMarvel. Financial terms were not disclosed. AdMarvel, based in San Mateo, Calif., and founded in 2006, helps publishers and operators track advertising distributed over a mobile network. Opera, based in Norway, claims nearly 50 million people worldwide use its namesake browser on mobile phones every month. In purchasing AdMarvel, Opera is hoping to tap the “long-term revenue opportunity” of mobile advertising, as consumers increasingly embrace smartphones and other portable computing devices.

VMware has struck a deal with Yahoo to acquire all of Zimbra’s technology and intellectual property. It plans to use Zimbra’s open-source email and collaboration software to build out VMware’s virtualization infrastructure for cloud computing environments. Financial terms were not disclosed. Acquiring an email provider is an unexpected move from VMware. However, Steve Herrod, chief technology officer for the company, said Zimbra fits VMware’s strategy of adding a ready-to-run application layer at the top of its vCloud software stack. VMware’s cloud stack starts with its vSphere compute and storage infrastructure, which is topped by the simplified Java development environment VMware got last August with its $420 million acquisition of SpringSource. The platform provides a runtime environment for developers code, while handling all the calls to VMware’s virtualization infrastructure.

Symantec is buying Gideon Technologies to boost Symantec’s risk management offerings for the public sector. Gideon will extend Symantec’s security portfolio with security content automation protocol-validated configuration and vulnerability assessment technology. SCAP is a method for using specific standards to communicate software flaw and security information between security software products. Government agencies use SCAP in automating vulnerability and patch checking, technical control compliance activities, and security measures. The federal government, which requires the use of SCAP in vendor products, has built the National Vulnerability Database as its content repository for SCAP. Symantec said demand for standards-based security technology is increasing because of the government’s efforts to improve cybersecurity in public and private infrastructures.

Independent data integration vendor Informatica has entered the master data management (MDM) market with the $130 million cash purchase of Siperian. Informatica has been steadily pushing beyond the confines of extract, transform and load software for data warehousing. The move into MDM was long expected because it’s a natural extension of the company’s data quality offerings. “The combination of Siperian and Informatica expands our addressable market… and we will cross-sell Informatica data integration and data quality products into MDM opportunities,” said Sohaib Abbasi, chairman and CEO of Informatica, during a conference call with financial analysts.

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