• A power cut in Maidstone caused a systems failure affecting 80 National Health Service trusts in the UK. Hospitals in the North West and West Midlands had to resort to paper-based systems, and in some cases were unable to access electronic systems for three days. A statement from Connecting for Health, the NHS’s IT arm, said: “The nature of the incident meant service could not immediately be provided by the back-up systems. No data has been lost.”

• There were further problems elsewhere in the NHS. BT, which is contracted to build the Care Records Service for the London region, ditched sub-contractor GE Healthcare because of inadequate progress in building the system. The Care Records Service is a vital part of the overall NHS IT improvement programme. IDX Systems, the company which BT originally sub-contracted the work to and which was subsequently acquired by GE Healthcare, had also previously been dropped by IT services giant Fujitsu, which is developing clinical records software for the Southern regions.

• A record breaking heatwave in California was blamed for multiple disruptions to data centres. The highest profile incident hit social networking site Myspace.com where all 96 million user accounts were inaccessible for 90 minutes. UK users of Yahoo’s web-based email service also lost access following power failure in its server farms.

• ERP software vendor Infor announced the acquisition of financial planning software company Extensity, further enlarging what is now the third biggest enterprise software company after Oracle and SAP. Extensity and Infor are both funded by private equity firm Golden Gate Captial, which created the companies after it bought ERP vendor GEAC and divided it into its constituent parts. Infor CEO Jim Schaper said the decision to unite the companies, had only been taken after Infor had successfully acquired SSA Global. Before that deal took place, he said, Infor and Extensity had targeted their products at different markets, but the SSA acquisition brought Infor closer to the mid-market.

• Shortly after Hewlett-Packard announced its acquisition of software management tools vendor Mercury, IBM made its own move in the asset management space, purchasing MRO Software for $740 million in cash. “The real news in this announcement is IBM’s introduction of a grand new vision for the integration and unification of enterprise supply chain and IT asset-management processes and tools,” said Mary Johnston Turner of analyst firm Ovum. Johnston predicted that the acquisition would provide a strong pipeline of work for IBM’s service division.

• IBM also announced that licence costs will no longer be based upon the number of processors used in running its software, as customer are increasingly adopting multi-processor units. Instead, the cost will be based on the amount of processor value units (PVUs) used by the server in operating the software. Popular makes of server will be graded for their PVU consumption and graded in a tiered pricing model.

Infoconomy Index: Europe surges ahead of global IT growth

Momentum in the global IT sector has ground to a near standstill. The Infoconomy Index, which tracks the growth of the world’s 200 largest IT vendors, increased a mere 0.1% as many companies reported mixed results. However, this contrasts starkly with the European Index, where the smaller subset of 50 companies pushed the index up another 0.7%, to finish at 9.6%.

There were a number of positive influences on the global index, chiefly from security software vendor Symantec which increased its quarterly revenues by 80%. However, this figure includes its acquisition of storage management vendor Veritas; excluding those revenues, Symantec’s growth was a more modest 2%. Elsewhere, revenues increased at Citrix (30%), Sun Microsystems (29%), Microsoft (16%) and EMC (10%).

But weak performances from other vendors all but cancelled out these gains. Intel reported its second weak quarter with revenues dropping 13%, while at its bitter rival AMD revenue was down 3%. Other vendors who reported revenues below the previous quarters included IBM (down 2%), Unisys (down 2%) and Lucent (down 12%).

Meanwhile, the surge on the European Index was largely influenced by two companies: second quarter revenues at German-based business application software vendor SAP rose 9%, in spite of lower-than-expected sales in Europe and Asia, while French-headquartered IT services group Capgemini recorded strong growth in the UK and Europe to also post a 9% revenue increase.

There were also strong performances Software AG (10%), Business Objects (12%) and Misys (13%), while IT services group Atos Origin proved the exception with a 1% drop in revenues.

The Infoconomy 200 Index measures the overall growth rate of the IT industry by tracking the financial results of the world’s most important publicly listed IT companies. For more details, go to www.information-age.com.