Month in review
- Reduce text size Decrease text size
- Increase text size Increase text size
- Print article Print
- Jump to comments Comment
- Share this article Share
- Email article to a friend Email
IT sector news digest for March 2009
Beleaguered Indian IT outsourcer Satyam revealed that a fifth of its staff have quit since chairman Ramalinga Raju admitted falsifying billions of dollars worth of revenue in January. The loss of 13,000 staff will add to the fears of potential acquirers, not to mention Satyam customers, currently caught between the uncertainty surrounding the company’s future and the difficulty of switching suppliers.
A $500 million bid by Tech Mahindra, an Indian IT services provider part owned by BT, to aquire a controlling stake in Satyam was successful.
Security researchers unearthed evidence of what they believe was the world’s largest cyber-espionage network after finding the Dalai Lama’s office computer had fallen victim. Beyond Tibet, the investigation discovered the botnet, dubbed ‘GhostNet’, had also infected another 1,295 hosts in 103 countries, 30% of them ‘high-value’ targets including computers located in foreign affairs ministries, embassies, international organisations, NGOs and news media outlets.
Cisco set itself on a collision course with the world’s largest systems vendors following the much-anticipated launch of its Unified Computing System (UCS), a mainstream data centre computing platform that promises to seamlessly integrate processor, storage and network systems in a virtualised architecture. UCS will throw down the gauntlet to HP, IBM, Dell, Fujitsu and others by offering medium and large enterprises a single architecture that “links all data centre resources together”, overcoming the “assembly-required” nature of today’s distinct virtualisation environments.
The European Commission (EC) clairified its position on European companies who want to store data in the US; it is legal as long as ‘safe harbour’ agreements are in place. The move is likely to ease the legal concerns of companies who are worried about storing data in the US, where the Patriot Act allows federal officials to inspect any data stored on US soil if it relates to a national security investigation, possibly clashing with European data protection law. The (very short) list of countries where EU-based businesses can legally store data now reads: the US (with safe harbour), Switzerland, Canada, Argentina, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.
Despite the fact that its financial performance has held up against credit crunch pressures, IBM is reportedly planning to lay off 5% of its US head count, cuts that will affect 5,000 employees. The redundancies will have greatest impact in the company’s Global Services division – the world’s largest IT services organisation.
The Wall Street Journal reported that ‘many’ of those jobs would be moved to India.
Meanwhile, IBM reportedly entered acquisition talks with troubled hardware and software platform vendor Sun Microsystems. However, later reports suggested that those talks broke down after Sun rejected IBM’s proposed price tag of $7 billion.
