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Month in review

10 February 2006  

All the main IT industry news stories from August 2003.

  • Consolidation in the software industry cut into many executives usually quiet August - with acquisitions in business intelligence companies particularly active. Just a week after Business Objects announced its intention to buy Crystal Decisions for $820 million, Hyperion said it would scoop up a less glittering prize in the form of Brio for $142 million.

  • Systems vendor Sun Microsystems, which has hardly made a runaway success of its past software acquisitions, nevertheless paid a figure said to have been about $60 million for CenterRun. The start-up will help Sun flesh out its N1 grid computing strategy. It also has software to help users migrate to Linux, which will be increasingly useful to Sun.

  • Integration software vendor Mercator more than justified its decision earlier in the year to fend off a hostile $74 million takeover bid from a group of disaffected shareholders - by selling out for $32 million more to data integration software company Ascential.

  • Interwoven found a strategy to compensate for the continued moribund state of the content management market by buying collaborative software vendor iManage for $171 million in cash and stock.

  • SoBig-f became the fastest spreading virus of all time, managing to infect one email in 17, according to anti-virus scanning company Message-Labs. The virus was believed to have been made by spammers looking for a way to compromise home users' PCs so that they could get round increasingly effective anti-spam blacklists.

  • Asset management software supplier Peregrine Systems re-emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a leaner organisation in almost every respect. Staff numbers have plunged from around 4,000 before the filing to just 620 and revenues are forecast to weigh in at about $165 million in the year to the end of March 2004. (see Company Analysis)

  • The final shortlist for one of the largest ever UK public sector contracts, the £2.3 billion modernisation of the computer systems of the National Health Service (NHS) was announced. Contenders include Accenture, BT, Cap Gemini Ernst &Young, CSC, EDS, Fujitsu and LogicaCMG.

  • The saga of Oracle's hostile bid for PeopleSoft showed little sign of a resolution this side of Christmas as Oracle upped its bid by another $1.2 billion to $7.5 billion to take account of PeopleSoft's successful assimilation of JD Edwards.

  • Another saga that refuses to go away is SCO Group's legal action against IBM over Linux. After introducing a licensing system for Linux users to 'legitimise' their installations, CEO Darl McBride went on to claim that some one million lines of code had been filched from SCO and injected into Linux. However, open source advocate Bruce Perens said that two sections of code that McBride had displayed to delegates at SCO's annual user conference were included in Linux legitimately.


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