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IT Industry News
October 2015 brought some big deals with the biggest seeing Dell offer $26 billion to buy storage company EMC. Interestingly, an EMC subsidiary, VMWare, was also out shopping, picking up a small email startup, Boxer. In another deal involving "big bucks", Western Digital are paying $19 billion for storage competitor Sandisk. IBM were also writing a big cheque, paying $2 billion in a big data/internet of things play for The Weather Network (minus the TV operations), and IBM also picked up a storage company, Cleversafe. Cisco paid $522.5 million for cybersecurity firm Lancope; LogMeIn is paying $110 million for LastPass; Trend Micro is paying $350 million for next generation intrusion prevention systems company HP Tippingpoint; Red Hat picked up deployment task execution and automation company Ansible; Vasco Data Security is paying $85 million for solution provider Silanis; and Apple is buying a speech processing startup, VocalIQ. As industries converge it is interesting to see Securitas pay $350 million for Diebold’s US Electronic Security business.
Other companies in the news include Twitter who announced 336 layoffs; Apple lost a patent fight with the University of Wisconsin to the tune of $234 million (of course they also recorded record profits of more than $5 billion). Google are launching a neat project to bring the internet to 100,000 Indonesian people using balloons (Project Loon).
The US economy continues to impress, adding another 200,000 jobs and having generally positive indicators from surveys and reports. There are signs that the growth is slowing but this is just to be expected. Canada added 12,100 jobs in September but the unemployment rate rose to 7.1%. A new Liberal government was voted in, so we will watch how that works out.
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