• ATM and point-of-sale technology maker NCR said it would spin off its data warehousing software division, Teradata, to shareholders of NCR common stock. This oft-suggested move will create two independent, publicly traded companies. But the spin-off will expose Teradata to the threat of takeover by its IT rivals.
  
•  A report by E-skills, the skills council for IT and telecoms sector, highlighted a growing shortfall in IT skills. Many IT workers currently lack substantial training, with one in five UK employers admitting a general skills shortage among their staff. E-skills says there has been a 10% decrease in skill availability since the end of 2005. Medium to large organisations are the worst affected, with the services industry identified as the black spot.
  
•  Networking equipment giant Cisco Systems announced plans to buy security appliance maker, IronPort Systems in a $830 million cash and stock deal. Cisco intends to integrate the email and message protection technology into its existing network security products. Cisco had previously made several unsuccessful attempts to buy IronPort.
  
• Juniper Networks, the world’s second largest maker of data-networking equip-ment, is set to take a $900 million charge to account for improperly dated stock grants made to its top executives. “In prior years, we should have had better stock option granting processes, controls and oversight in place, and we did not,” said Scott Kriens, Juniper’s CEO.
  
• The UK government abandoned plans to build a single database that would support its national identity card programme. Instead, the government will rely on data it has already obtained. Home Secretary John Reid said it will be quicker and safer to use the existing infrastructure.
  
• Financial services company Skandia UK agreed a five-year, $200 million contract to outsource its application optimisation requirements to HCL Technologies, the Indian IT services provider. The new contract is expected to result in the loss of 126 Southampton-based jobs, as 250 Skandia roles are transferred to HCL.
  
• NHS patients are to be given the chance to opt-out of the health service’s IT reforms, which could increase the sharing of clinical records. Patient groups had feared that the confidentiality of sensitive medical data could be harmed by the introduction of electronic patient records.
  
• James Schneider, the chief financial officer at computer maker Dell resigned unexpectedly after a series of probes by the US Securities and Exchange Commission into accounting practices at the company. He was replaced by board member Donald Carty, who also assumes the role of vice chairman. 
  
•  UK broadcaster Channel4 chose service-oriented architecture (SOA) as the basis for its forthcoming video-on-demand service, which enables users to view TV shows on their home PCs. Video-on-demand is expected to provide the next wave of growth in broadcasting.

Infoconomy Index: Heading for double figures

The strengthening of the global IT sector continued into November, supported largely by a strong set of results from mid-market application vendors. As a result, the Infoconomy Index, which charts the rate of revenue growth at the world’s 200 most influential IT companies, grew by 0.7% to finish the month at 8.4%.

Likewise, the European Index, which tracks the performance of Europe-headquartered IT vendors, carried on its upward momentum for the seventh successive month to settle at 11.8%, a rise of 0.8%.

This strong growth was achieved despite a moderate 7% revenue growth from Hewlett-Packard, now the world’s largest IT company, near flatline results from PC maker Lenovo (1%) and the absence of comparative results from Dell (currently undergoing an investigation into its accounting practices by the US Securities and Exchange Commission).

Overall, the strongest results came from networking vendor Cisco, for whom increased demand for routers and switches to support bandwidth-heavy services for Internet video and phone services pushed revenue up by 25%. Elsewhere, strong demand for storage helped vendors Brocade and Network Appliance boost quarterly revenue by 44% and 17% respectively. There were also good growth reported in November at BEA Systems (19%), Borland (21%) and HCL Technologies (36%) and Nortel (17%).

Within the European subset, aggressive acquisition combined with solid organic growth in its business software line lifted Sage’s revenue by 24%, while acquisitions also helped raise revenue at engineering software vendor Dassault Systèmes by 29%. Other good performances were recorded at networking company Dimension Data (16%), and IT services vendors Detica (57%) and Steria (11%).

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 companies. For more details, go to www.information-age.com.