• An attempt to prevent Internet service providers from giving preferential treatment to purchasers of priority content, thus impairing service to others, was thwarted in April. The Markey Amendment, which proposed measures to protect ‘net neutrality’, gained support from online businesses such as eBay and Google, but was rejected by a US Congressional committee. In a related move, wireless service provider T-Mobile said VoIP calls were banned under the terms of its new flat-rate business data tariff.

• IBM launched an initiative to revive the mainframe software development community. It claims that data stored on mainframes doubles each year, but that the tools and skills to support these systems are lacking. The IT giant announced several new development tools for the COBOL language, commonly associated with mainframes. It is also to sponsor a ‘Mastering the Mainframe’ contest to encourage students to learn how to operate the machines.

• Scott McNealy resigned from his position of CEO of Sun Microsystems in April. The iconic evangelist for network computing stepped down after 22 years as CEO, but will stay on as chairman of the board. Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO, takes McNealy’s place. McNealy denied suggestions he had been nudged in the direction of the door, saying: “This was my decision, which was supported by the board.”

• In an auction of spectrum bandwidth licenses, used to set up local mobile voice and data networks, European telecoms provider Colt Telecom revealed itself as quite the big spender. While Cable & Wireless came away from the sealed-bid auction with a license for just £51,000, Colt paid a whopping £1.5 million, almost 30 times more.

• Microsoft saw $32 billion wiped off its stock market value in a single day after it announced an investment plan to sacrifice short-term profitability for long-term sustained growth. CFO Chris Lidell said that the company would be investing heavily in areas of business in which it is not the market leader, including business intelligence, security and voice over IP.

  Meanwhile, analyst house the Yankee Group issued a warning that the long delayed release of the Windows Vista operating system will be the nail in the coffin for many small security software vendors. Software vendors offering anti-virus and desktop firewall software, a Yankee report found, would be the first to see their market dis-appear, as Vista will provide these functions as standard.

• Borland’s bid to reinvent itself as an application lifecycle management provider claimed 300 jobs at the company in April, roughly a fifth of its workforce, even before the planned divestiture of its developer tools. Tod Nielsen, who became CEO in 2005, had previously said he believed that the company was “spread too thinly”. Borland expects to save $60 million a year in reduced HR costs.

Infoconomy Index: A stable economy

The global IT industry is finding its new base growth level. During April, the Infoconomy Index, which charts the rate of revenue growth at the world’s 200 largest IT companies, held steady at 6.8%.

At a regional level, the story was slightly different, with the subset of European companies in the index bucking the global trend with a drop of a full percentage point to 8.1%.

Globally, the trend was kept upward by strong quarterly revenues from a number of prominent vendors. In particular, Research in Motion, the maker of the popular Blackberry handheld email device, lifted the overall rate with a 39% increase in revenue, despite further lawsuits alleging its device infringes others’ patents. At the same time, Sun Microsystems reported uncharacteristically high growth of 21%, although the bulk of that uplift came from its acquisition of StorageTek. Other notable revenue increases were reported from server applications enabler Citrix (29%), offshore IT services vendor Cognizant (57%) and storage giant EMC (14%).

But keeping the index in check were below-par earnings from other global vendors. IBM’s quarterly revenues are still showing a downturn: they fell 10% largely as a legacy of the sale of its PC business to Chinese systems giant Lenovo; sales at chip manufacturer Intel fell 5%; the pace at networking vendor Lucent dropped 8%; and security vendors Check Point and Verisign saw growth slow to 3% and 4% respectively.

Among companies with European origins there were some strong performances. Growth was up sharply at business intelligence vendor Business Objects (12%), applications software maker Exact Software (10%) and engineering design software vendor Dassault Systemes (27%). But others contributed to the index’s decline of 1%, including a 1% drop in revenues at services group Atos Origin.

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.