I’m Bullish about the Market
IBM must be pretty confident in the IT industry’s future. It has added another $5bn to its share buy-back plan. This is added to the $4.2bn left in the pot from the last wave of buy-backs. A more cautious view on market conditions caused the IT giant to come off the gas in terms of buy backs earlier this year. Other major players including Cisco and Microsoft are similarly in buy-back mode. Possibly they all recognize that even if the poor economic conditions continue, businesses will eventually wake up to the fact that an increase in IT spend that will enable them to get their costs in line with their decreasing revenues.
Data centre war heats up
PC maker and data center aspirant Dell has signed a deal with Juniper Networks to provide network products such as routers and switches. This looks to be part of a power struggle for data centre dominance. Cisco has recently put noses out of joint by entering the server market, albeit in a niche capacity. Dell may be redressing this by going with Cisco’s rival. In any case, in the corporate IT market, the battle for dominance is being played out in the data centre. And Dell like the others knows that it has to be there.
Oracle disappoints EU
Software giant Oracle’s attempts to acquire Sun Microsystems took a blow when the European Commission expressed disappointment with the lack of evidence provided to demonstrate that the deal would not be anti-competitive. The US Department of Justice has already given the takeover the green light. Concerns are focused on the future of MySQL, a database solution acquired by Sun for $1bn not so long ago. It would be very tempting to think that Oracle may not have the MySQL user community’s best interests at heart, given that it is a competitor to Oracle’s own database offering. Given that Sun is apparently leaking $100m per month, it would be helpful if the EC could conclude on this at the earliest opportunity in order for Sun to revert to Plan C (Plan A – The IBM acquisition didn’t work out).
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