INDUSTRY
MONTH IN REVIEW Information Age Index: Europe still soaring
The UK’s Department of Work and Pensions cancelled its six year, £4.5 billion desktop modernisation project with Fujistu. The department gave no explanation for the contract termination. It did reveal that the work had temporarily returned to Hewlett-Packard, which had previously managed its desktop estate before Fujitsu won the deal.
The Ministry of Justice, meanwhile, became one of the first government departments to pursue cloud-based shared services. Under a five-year contract with Accenture, Steria and Savvis, various divisions of the Ministry will share back-office applications hosted on a scalable cloud infrastructure.
High-profile data breaches hit two well-known UK companies. The Co- operative Group revealed that the email addresses of 83,000 customers had been exposed by a data breach at a marketing services company, while BP told thousands of Louisiana residents seeking
compensation for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that their personal data had been lost after an employee mislaid an unencrypted laptop.
Web performance issues struck another pair of British institutions. The BBC suffered a total outage across all of its websites, which it attributed to a “major network failure”, and the National Lottery’s online ticket sales were temporarily unavailable following “unprecedented demand” just hours before a draw.
INFORMATION AGE INDEX OF IT SECTOR GROWTH 20%
15% GLOBAL INDEX
10% 5%
EURO INDEX
-5% 0%
Mar
Apr May Jun Jul Aug 2010
The rate of revenue growth among the world’s largest business IT vendors continued its downward trajectory in March 2011. The Information Age Index, which collates the revenue growth rates of the sector’s key players, fell 1.2 percentage points to 10.6% during the month – its lowest point for almost a year. Meanwhile, the European index, which averages
the growth rate among key IT vendors headquartered in Europe, continued to rise in March. It increased 1.4 percentage points, reaching 13.9%. This figure happens to be the highest point the global index reached before its recovery from the downturn peaked, and its current southerly course began.
The fact that the global index is decreasing does not mean the IT sector is performing badly, just that the sharp revenue uptick that immediately followed the recession is now over. Broadly speaking, most of the household-name suppliers that reported results in March 2011 turned in a good performance. IT consultancy and outsourcing provider
Accenture, for example, grew its second-quarter revenues by 17% to reach $6.1 billion, while Oracle’s third-quarter sales shot up 37% to $8.8 billion (see page 46 for more details). BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion reported a 36% sales increase to $5.6 billion for the closing quarter of its latest financial year, while document
The UK’s communications watchdog Ofcom revealed that it will auction licences to use electromagnetic spectrum for 4G mobile services next year. It expects such services, which provide mobile network speeds of at least 100 Mbit/s,
www.information-age.com Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb 2011
software vendor Adobe saw first-quarter revenue jump 20% to $1.0 billion. Other strong performances included integration
vendor Tibco, whose first-quarter revenues ticked up 20% to $186 million, and open source enterprise software vendor Red Hat, whose sales rose 25% to $245 million.
Slowing the pace were companies including
networking equipment supplier Brocade, whose sales grew by a sub-par 1% to $546 million, and systems and security vendor Novell, from whom business contracted by 6% to $191 million in its first financial quarter. In Europe, upward thrust came from French security component supplier Gemalto, which reported a 33% increase in sales during the second half of its financial year to €1.1 billion, and German software testing services supplier SQS, whose second-half sales also grew by a third, to $118 million. Dampening the European index’s upward momentum were French IT services supplier GFI Informatique, whose fourth-quarter sales dropped 7% year-on-year to €169 million, and telecoms services provider Colt Telecom, whose takings fell 1% to €820 million.
The Information Age Index measures the overall growth rate of the IT industry by tracking the financial results of the world’s most important publicly listed IT companies.
to become commercially available a few years after the auction in 2012.
A judge ruled that IBM had not mis-sold a master data management system to the London Borough of Southwark. The borough
sued IBM in 2009 after its MDM deployment suffered “severe deficiencies”. The judge found that the borough had fully understood the capabilities of the system it bought, clearing the IT supplier of any wrongdoing.
INFORMATIONAGE APRIL2011 39 Mar
Growth rate
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52