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Month in review

10 February 2006  

A round-up of the month's key IT industry news.

  • Oracle's antitrust trial with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) over its proposed merger with PeopleSoft produced some revealing evidence from witnesses during the month-long hearing. A Microsoft executive told the Court that the software giant's attempt to buy SAP earlier this year was prompted by fears that it would lose important sales in the database market. Meanwhile, despite the software company deciding against a merger with SAP, a vice president of the German company testified that he still believed that Microsoft planned to enter into the large-scale business applications market and compete with SAP and Oracle. The DoJ retorted that Microsoft was only interested in selling software to smaller companies.

  • The US Appeals Court upheld Microsoft's two-year-old anti-monopoly settlement with the Department of Justice, dismissing objections made by the State of Massachusetts, which was pushing for stiffer penalties.

  • Plans to establish a list of email addresses that have permanently opted out of direct marketing were ditched by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the US government agency leading the war on spam. The FTC has concluded that a 'Do Not Email' registry of opted-out email addresses would be unworkable. Its feasibility study found that such a database might actually lead to an increase in unsolicited messages since spammers could use it to obtain 'live' email addresses. The FTC admits it was unable to devise a secure and effective method of authenticating access to the database.

  • The European Commission (EC) agreed to suspend its earlier ruling that aimed to force Microsoft to unbundle its Media Player product from Windows - at least until Microsoft's appeal against the anti-monopoly ruling can be heard (which could take between three and five years). As a result, Microsoft can now continue to sell the combination of products.

  • The world's first mobile phone worm emerged. Fortunately, the worm was not released 'into the wild' but emailed anonymously to antivirus software companies by a group of international hackers. Known as 29a, the group specialises in creating worms and viruses to demonstrate that no technology is reliable and safe from attack. But if it had been released, the consequences could have been devastating as it is capable of infecting smartphones and other mobile devices running the Symbian operating system.

  • The growing popularity of the Linux operating system led to concerns about how open source security issues should be handled. A program, 'evil.c', was discovered which uses lines of code written in the C language to crash several versions of Linux, thereby locking whole systems. Distributor SuSE says that a hacker would need access to the Linux machine in order to launch an attack. However, experts believe that hackers could gain remote access to the Linux code through an Internet port or via the file transfer protocol.

  • The European Commission (EC) appeared set to revive a long-dormant anti-monopoly investigation into Intel. The EC has delivered formal letters to computer makers after one of Intel's closest rivals, AMD, submitted a fresh complaint. One area of concern that the EC is believed to be probing is a claim that Intel threatened PC markers with retaliation if they used AMD's new 64-bit Opteron server chip and its 64-bit desktop processor Athlon.

       
     

    Infoconomy Index: Stable high

    The IT industry passed another milestone in its return to financial health last month, recording a full year of uninterrupted growth. According to the Infoconomy Index, which tracks the aggregated growth rate of the world's 200 largest IT companies, the industry's pace rose again in June to 12.5%.

    However, the subset of European companies in the Index continue to be negative, with growth riding on -3%, even though that rate has been cut in half over the past year.

    Fuelling the global growth, though, were highly positive results at companies big and small. IT services giant Accenture reported an 18% jump in revenues, document software vendor Adobe showed a 28% rise, and component and computer manufacturers Solectron posted growth of 29%.

    There were also plenty of companies on, or around, par. In applications software, for example, Oracle recorded growth of 9% and GEAC posted revenues up 13%.

    Dragging the index in the opposite direction were weak results from Europe, particularly from IT services companies. Growth at the UK's Xansa and Synstar was down 12% and 3% respectively; Sweden's Icon MediaLab shrunk by 2% and revenues at Franco-Dutch company Atos Origin dropped by 1%.

    However, the trend is still towards the positive and next month's index graph should again be sloping upwards.

    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.

       
     
    Infoconomy 200 Index - June 2004
    		 
       
     
    		 
       

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