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In this Issue: > General Interest |
> GENERAL INTEREST
General
A hacking group from Nepal known as TeamSwaStika, has published 10,000 stolen Facebook accounts on Pastebin for everyone to see and take advantage of. As a precaution, Facebook users are advised to periodically change their passwords from a malware-free host.
The Economy – Canada
Statistics Canada reported that Canada added 61,000 jobs in September, all full time, following two months of little change. The increase pushed the unemployment rate down to 7.1 percent, the lowest rate since December 2008.
The Economy – US
The US Conference Board reported its leading economic index rose 0.2 percent in September to 116.4 (2004 = 100), following a 0.3 percent increase in August, and a 0.6 percent increase in July. The board suggests that “The index is pointing to soft economic conditions through the end of 2011. The probability of a downturn starting over the next few months remains at about 50 percent.”
Information technology employment rose by 5,800 in September to 4,059,500, its 20th consecutive month of growth, according to the TechServe Alliance’s monthly index of IT jobs. On a year-over-year basis, there are 97,900 more IT jobs than September 2010.
US private sector employment rose 91,000 in September, seasonally adjusted, according to the national employment report released by ADP. The service-providing sector added 90,000 jobs in September, while the goods-producing sector added just 1,000.
U.S. real gross domestic product rose at an annual rate of 2.5 percent in the third quarter of 2011 from the second quarter, according to the advanced estimate released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the second quarter, real GDP grew 1.3 percent.
The Technisource information technology employee confidence index dropped in the third quarter to 47.3 from 56.3 in the second quarter. According to the index’s survey, 56% of participants believe that there are fewer IT jobs available, with only 11% being confident that more jobs exist.
The Economy – Outside North America
According to the most recent figures released by Statistics Netherlands, seasonally adjusted unemployment increased by +17,000 in September 2011 to 438,000, i.e. 5.6% of the labour force.
5.9% of Iceland’s labour force (10,700 people) were unemployed in Q3 2011, which is 1,000 less than one year ago, according to the latest data published by Statistics Iceland.
In Europe 900,000 new jobs were created in the last two years, mainly resulting from countries that have reformed their labour markets. However, the role of private employment services is still undervalued. Out-dated perception and inappropriate regulation prevent the potential of the private employment services sector from being realised, according to new research published by the Ciett and the Boston Consulting Group.
After a clear decrease between October 2010 and March 2011 (-2.4%, -555,000 persons) and an increase in the following three months (+1.0%, +222,000 persons), the number of people looking for work in the European Union (EU) stabilised in July and edged down slightly in August (-0.3%, 62,000 persons), to 22.8 million. However, the overall outlook remains gloomy according to the latest Monthly Labour Market Fact Sheet published by the European Commission.
Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the OECD area grew by +0.3% in the second quarter of 2011. Gross fixed investment was the main contributor, adding +0.2% percentage points to overall growth, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. Fixed investment is the investment in fixed assets, such as buildings or machinery.
The unemployment rate in the UK, for the three months to August 2011, was 8.1% of the economically active population, up +0.4 on the quarter. The last time the unemployment rate was higher was in the three months to July 1996.
Hiring intentions in the ICT sector in New Zealand for the October-December quarter are up 2.7 percentage points on the same quarter last year, according to Hudson’s latest employment expectations survey. Compared to October-December 2009, employer hiring sentiment is up 26.4 percentage points, demonstrating the difference in sentiment between now and the recession-affected, candidate-rich market of two years ago.
> COMPANY NEWS
After 11 years of overhauling IBM, CEO and president Sam Palmisano will step aside for senior vice-president of sales and marketing Virginia Rometty in the new year. Rometty was one of four executives who were given more responsibilities last summer in a move that was seen as a preparatory step for a leadership change. Rometty becomes the second woman to head a major IT company after the appointment last month of Meg Whitman at HP.
Lenovo passed Dell to become the second-largest worldwide PC vendor behind HP in the third 2011 quarter. Global PC shipments hit a total of 91.8 million units in the third quarter of 2011, up 3.2 per cent from the same period last year, according to figures compiled by Gartner.
A global network crash at RIM brought down Blackberry services, including BBM and the entire Blackberry e-mail system, almost entirely this month and landed RIM on the hotseat once again. Possibly due to the unfortunate timing, after some run-ins with stockholders and Blackberry’s main competitor launching yet another successful handheld, everyone and their grandma piped up theorizing exactly what it’s doing wrong, what RIM can do to fix it and what exactly caused the disruption of service.
Steve Jobs, founder, former CEO and chief visionary of Apple passed away, after a long battle with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. Jobs (together with Wozniak and Wayne) founded Apple in 1976 and has been front and centre in almost all of their successes since then. Few individuals have had such an impact in the technology world.
> MERGER & ACQUISITION ACTIVITY
Cisco is paying $99 million for BNI Video, a privately held provider of video delivery software for service providers. BNI’s software is designed to help service providers deliver any type of video to multiple devices at large scale. Cisco said the acquisition would help to advance Videoscape, the vision Cisco announced earlier this year for video delivery to any device. BNI’s employees will be integrated into Cisco’s Service Provider Video Technology Group. It isn’t the first acquisition Cisco has made in pursuit of its carrier video vision. The company has also bought content-management-system vendor ExtendMedia and digital media processing company Inlet Technologies. Cisco was already an investor in BNI along with Time Warner Cable and Comcast Ventures. The company was founded in 2009. BNI is based in Boxborough, Mass., and Cisco said it will strengthen the company’s presence in the greater Boston area, where in recent years it has acquired network management vendor LineSider Technologies and mobile back-end system provider Starent Networks.
Online storage start-up Dropbox announced it has raised $250 million for its expansion, one of the largest fundraising rounds in Silicon Valley this year. The investment values the company at a reported $4 billion. The San Francisco start-up, founded in 2007, lets users access photos, documents and other files from almost anything that can be connected to the Internet. Its growth has been explosive: It currently has some 45 million users, nearly double of the 25 million it had in April. People in 175 countries save 1 billion files every three days using the service, the company said.
IBM Canada is buying Platform Computing, a privately-held Toronto company that will help IBM’s cloud computing strategy. The acquisition will accelerate IBM’s growth in smarter computing, a key initiative in IBM’s Smarter Planet strategy. Earlier this year, IBM said Smarter Planet projects are estimated to drive $10 billion in revenue for IBM by 2015. Platform Computing’s 530 employees will be integrated into IBM Systems and Technology Group. Platform Computing has gone through 19 straight profitable years and has amassed a client roster with many high profile names such as Citigroup, Pratt & Whitney, Red Bull Racing, and Harvard Medical School.
Oracle is buying RightNow Technologies for about US$1.5 billion in order to boost its recently announced Public Cloud with customer-service software. RightNow has positioned itself as a “customer experience management” provider, focused more on helping companies improve customer support in call centers, social media sites and the web, rather than just tracking sales cycles. To that end, Oracle’s move is a direct hit against rival Salesforce.com, which added customer-service capabilities with the 2008 acquisition of Instranet and has embarked on a broad strategy centered on tying enterprises to the social web.
Oracle is buying Endeca Technologies to bolster its capabilities for searching and analyzing unstructured information. The acquisition may also be a response to rival HP’s recent acquisition of Autonomy. Endeca’s technologies include the MDEX engine for processing unstructured information, such as emails and other text-based data, as well as the Latitude analytic application platform and InFront CEM (customer experience management) product. Companies are grappling with an ever-larger explosion of unstructured information generated by their websites, social networks, call centers and other sources. HP and Oracle both want to offer such enterprises the ability to analyze that data quickly and comprehensively to gain insights and cost savings. Endeca has 600 customers, among them Toyota, Ford, Raytheon and Walmart.
Red Hat is paying $136 million for Gluster to its storage portfolio. Gluster (a combination of GNU and cluster) builds GlusterFS, an open source, scale-out file system for storing and managing unstructured data–files, spreadsheets, and images–that is built with industry standard x86-based servers (nodes). As nodes are added to the cluster, either implemented in the cloud or on-premises, they are recognized and data distributed among them and managed by a global file system that can support petabytes of storage. This is not the first storage acquisition for Red Hat. In 2003, the company acquired Sistina and the Sistina SAN File System. It now markets Sistina as the Red Hat Global File System. In 2008, the company acquired Qumranet, the maker of the KVM virtualization hypervisor, which Gluster supports. Among Gluster’s customers are Pandora, Box.net, and Samsung.
Sony is paying $1.5 billion for Ericsson’s 50% share in their Sony Ericsson mobile phone joint venture, turning the company into a subsidiary in January 2012. Sony has until now launched its smartphones through the joint venture, which began operations in 2001. The deal will allow it to integrate phones into its overall product lineup, as rivals such as Apple and Samsung do now, and better leverage its broad music and movie holdings.
> 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
