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In this Issue: > General Interest |
> GENERAL INTEREST
General
Gartner has lowered its 2012 IT spending forecast, with spending expected to rise only 3.7 per cent, rather than the previous forecast of 4.6 per cent growth. Drivers for this change were a faltering global economic growth, the eurozone crisis and the impact of Thailand’s floods on hard-disk drive (HDD) production.
Many popular websites shut down their sites, or otherwise protested for 24 hours against the American bill SOPA, meant to stop international piracy mostly affecting the entertainment, publishing, and pharmaceutical industries. The protesters felt that this new law would reduce internet freedoms and proliferate censorship. The result was that progress on the SOPA bill has been halted, while politicians take into consideration the concerns of protestors.
The U.S. and U.K. are relatively well prepared for cyberattacks, compared to many other developed nations, but everyone has more work to do, according to a new cybersecurity study from McAfee and Security & Defence Agenda (SDA). The report, which ranks 23 countries on cybersecurity readiness, gives no countries the highest mark, five stars. Israel, Sweden and Finland each get four and a half stars, while eight countries, including the U.S., U.K., France and Germany, receive four stars. India, Brazil and Mexico ranked near the bottom. Countries ranking in the middle of the pack included Japan, China, Russia and Canada, while Brazil, India and Romania received two and half stars and Mexico just two stars.
The economy – Canada
The IT staffing outlook for 2012 in Canada is decidedly mixed, according to a survey of Canadian business decision-makers commissioned by Randstad Technologies and IBM Canada. 49% of CIOs and IT VPs plan to grow their current staffing levels, 41% expect status quo and 10% expect reductions.
Canada added 17,500 jobs in December for a total of 17.34 million, according to seasonally adjusted numbers from Statistics Canada. However, the unemployment rate edged up to 7.5 percent in December from 7.4 percent in November, as more people participated in the labor market.
A CICA/RBC Business Monitor study of chartered accountants in executive positions (i.e., CEOs, CFOs and COOs), showed that 66% expect their company’s revenues to rise over the next 12 months. On the jobs front, 42% expect to be hiring new employees in 2012, with nearly half of those (19%) expecting to increase employment by 5% or more. (Another 41% say they don’t anticipate any new hiring, but just 16% expect their workforces to decrease in number.)
Hays Canada released its fifth annual Hays Compensation, Benefits Recruitment and Retention Guide, which covers staffing requirements across a number of different industries including a substantial set of data on the IT industry. According to Hays, 43% of Canadian firms plan to increase the headcount of their IT departments in 2012.
The economy – US
The U.S. jobs numbers beat their expected gain of about 150,000 jobs in December, actually creating 200,000. The unemployment rate also fell to 8.5% from 8.6% in November. Economists had been expecting a slight uptick, to 8.7 per cent.
U.S. real gross domestic product rose at an annual rate of 2.8% in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to the “advance” estimate released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the third quarter, real GDP increased only 1.8%.
The Technisource IT employee confidence index rose to a reading of 52.0 in the fourth quarter from a reading of 47.3 in the third quarter as IT professionals perceived more jobs to be available.
Small businesses added 50,000 new jobs in January but paid employees less and gave them fewer hours, according to an Intuit small business index. Small business employment rose by 0.2 percent in January. However, average monthly pay for all small business employees slipped by 0.1 percent to $2,632 in January, slightly less than the December revised estimate of $2,635 a month.
The US Conference Board’s U.S. leading economic index rose 0.4% in December to 94.3 (2004=100). The index rose 0.2 percent in November and 0.6 percent in October.
After declining in the third quarter, the US Conference Board tell us that confidence among CEOs improved in the last quarter of 2011. The organization’s measure of CEO confidence rose to a reading of 49 in the fourth quarter from a reading of 42 in the third quarter. A reading of more than 50 points reflects more positive than negative responses.
Monster Worldwide Inc.’s U.S. employment index fell seven points to a reading of 140 in December as is typical of year-end recruiting patterns, the company said. The reading is still up 10 points from its December 2010 level, indicating slow but steady growth in online recruitment.
The economy – Outside North America
According to Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland 2011 saw a staggering 41 million people in employment in Germany, a first in the country’s history. Never have employment rates been higher and with a decrease in unemployment to just under three million, many predict that prospects for the future will be rosy, despite the Euro financial crisis.
The UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports that the number of people in full-time employment fell by 57,000 in the last three months to 21.26 million, but there was a 75,000 increase in part-time workers to 7.86 million. The number of employees and self-employed people who were working part-time because they could not find a full-time job increased by 44,000 on the quarter to reach 1.31 million, the highest figure since comparable records began in 1992. The total number of self-employed people increased by 101,000 on the quarter to reach 4.12 million.
Unemployment has reached a 17-year high after a 118,000 increase to 2.68 million. The unemployment rate for the three months to November 2011 was 8.4% of the economically active population, up 0.3 on the quarter.
Price-adjusted GDP increased by +3% in 2011 compared with the previous year, according to first calculations by the German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis). In the course of 2011, price-adjusted GDP exceeded its pre-crisis level.
> COMPANY NEWS
Online shoe shop Zappos suffered a massive data breach that exposed user accounts for about 24 million users. The attackers may have swiped customer account information on Zappos.com, including names, e-mail addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers, the last four digits of credit card numbers and/or cryptographically scrambled password (but not the actual password). Zappos made it clear that the database that stores critical credit card and other payment data was NOT affected or accessed. Amazon.com, which owns Zappos, was not affected by this breach.
HP will pay US$425,000 to settle a claim that it knowingly sold laptops with hazardous batteries that could overheat or catch fire according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. HP had learned of about 22 incidents involving the batteries by September 2007, but it failed to report the problem until 10 months later, according to the Commission. In agreeing to the settlement, HP denied the batteries posed an unreasonable risk or that it had violated federal reporting requirements. With respect to the recall, it acted “in accordance with the CPSA and in its customers’ best interests,” HP said in the agreement.
RIM was in the news again this month, after months of speculation co-CEOs and founders Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis stepped down and new CEO Thorsten Heins was promoted from the internal ranks. It remains to be seen whether this move will be enough to revive the flagging fortunes of a company that has lost its way.
> MERGER & ACQUISITION ACTIVITY
Google has acquired more IBM patents, adding more than 200 to approximately 2,000 patents it had previously bought from IBM. The latest set of IBM patents, transferred to Google on Dec. 30, 2011, includes 222 patents and covers a variety of technologies, including email management, server backup, tuning and recovery, e-commerce, advertising, mobile Web page display, instant messaging, online calendaring and database tuning. Google acquired about 1,000 IBM patents in July of last year and about 1,000 other IBM patents in September.
Xerox Corp. has acquired Oakville, Ont.-based LaserNetworks Inc. in a deal that will bolster the vendor’s managed print services (MPS) offerings here and extend LaserNetworks’ customer reach. LaserNetworks has been strong among the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market, but was looking to expand among larger enterprises, where Xerox has the most know-how. The vendor was looking to expand its customer base among SMBs, but also expand its managed print services offerings. Managed print services is a strategic growth area for Xerox and this acquistion will double the company’s MPS market share in Canada. LaserNetworks will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Xerox Canada. LaserNetworks currently provides support services for more than 50,000 print-related devices and operates 13 locations across North America.
Symantec has acquired LiveOffice, a provider of cloud-based data archiving and storage, for US$115 million. LiveOffice, based in Torrance, Calif., offers a variety of storage and e-discovery services, for e-mail, instant messaging, social media, file sharing and other applications in order to meet regulatory requirements. The company works with 20,000 companies in 50 countries. The acquisition will allow Symantec to add to its information governance products, allowing customers to have the choice to store information either on-premise or in Symantec’s data centers or a mix of both. LiveOffice gives unlimited storage to its customers, who pay a flat price per user per month. The cloud-based application links to other commonly used programs such as Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Dropbox.
JDS Uniphase Corp. was a big name among Canadian IT companies, an optical network equipment maker with 10,000 employees around the world. Then the dot-com bubble burst and it lost tens of billions of dollars, shrunk to less than a thousand workers and shifted its headquarters from Ottawa to California. Over the years it has been rebuilding itself, while still maintaining operations in Canada. JDS has expanded its presence in this country a little more by buying Dyaptive Systems, a Vancouver-based company that makes systems for testing the capacity of cellular networks. “Dyaptive gives us a chance to grow our portfolio in the wireless space,” said JDS. “We saw it as giving our customers [network equipment makers and wireless carriers] a broader set of solutions. Dyaptive, which has only 40 employees, will be able to take advantage of the broader reach of JDSU, which has grown to US$1.8 billion in revenue and has 5,000 employees around the world. JDSU still makes optical communications components bought by network equipment makers and carriers, but it also has a network test and measurement division, largely for Ethernet and cable networks. The Dyaptive aquistion broadens its test solutions for 3G and 4G wireless networks.
> PRIMARY SOURCES:
IT World Canada – http://www.itworldcanada.com
Ottawa Business Journal – http://www.ottawabusinessjournal.com
ZDNet – http://www.zdnet.com
Canada IT – http://www.canadait.com
Monitor – http://www.monitortoday.com
