Month in Review - May 2004

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21 May 2012

Month in Review - May 2004

10 February 2006

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

Computer Associates (CA) chairman and CEO Sanjay Kumar was demoted to chief software architect against the backdrop of a long-running federal probe into the company's accounting practices. Board member Lewis Ranieri became chairman, but CA waited before recruiting a new CEO. The systems management company also fired a number of people from its legal and finance departments. Meanwhile, an internal audit concluded that CA needed to restate revenue for 2000-2001 by $2.2 billion.

Another software boss to be stepping down, although for rather different reasons, was Siebel Systems' founder, chairman and CEO, Tom Siebel. The 51-year-old executive, who still owns 11% of the customer relationship management (CRM) software company, will stay on as chairman. He was replaced by IBM sales veteran Michael Lawrie. Siebel Systems endured a terrible time during the IT spending downturn. But lately it has shown signs of life, despite competition from Salesforce.com and other CRM application service providers.

The offshore outsourcing debate hotted up on both sides of the Atlantic. Embattled oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell said it planned to cut up to 30% of its 9,300 IT jobs by 2006 and move many to Malaysia and India. At the same time, a group of past and present IBM employees staged a protest outside IBM's annual meeting in Rhode Island, shouting slogans like "Offshore the CEO!" and "America's future is not offshore!"

PeopleSoft reported quarterly revenue up 40% from a year ago to $643 million, a rise mainly due to the enterprise applications company's acquisition of JD Edwards in 2003. Wall Street had hoped for better. PeopleSoft blamed Oracle's $9.4 billion hostile takeover bid for "distracting" management.

There were some disappointing results for Sun Microsystems, too. Revenue at the systems and software giant declined for the twelfth consecutive quarter, and yet another reorganisation was announced. Meanwhile, Sun said it was ceasing development of its UltraSparc V and Gemini dual-core chips as it shifted its focus towards multi-core processors.

A spate of major mergers and acquisitions were announced: integration software supplier Tibco is to buy business process management specialist Staffware for $217 million; US analytics specialist Fair Isaac will acquire London Bridge Software for $300 million; software tools vendor Compuware will buy Changepoint, a project portfolio management company, for $100 million; and systems management specialist BMC Software is to purchase 'push' software maker Marimba for $239 million.

IBM agreed to buy the disaster recovery unit of Schlumberger for an undisclosed sum believed to be about $200 million. IBM also bought Indian call centre management company Daksh eServices, one of the country's largest outsourcing businesses, for about $170 million.

Microsoft's record on security endured a difficult month. The software giant released four new patches to cover 20 security flaws across all current versions of the Windows operating system. Then a major new worm, called Sasser, disrupted computer systems around the world. The UK's Maritime and Coastguard Agency was among its embarrassed victims.

Cap Gemini Ernst &Young, Europe's biggest IT services supplier, changed its name to Capgemini in a EU60 million re-branding exercise forced on it by the terms of its 2000 acquisition of accountant Ernst &Young's IT consulting division. Ampersand enthusiasts everywhere expressed regret.

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