AT&T becomes largest US pay-TV firm

The finalisation of the $48.5 billion AT&T/DirecTV deal dominated the international ICT market last week.

At home, it was very quiet, with the new SAP appointments featuring in local ICT news stories.

* Positive trading updates from Adapt IT and Vodacom.
* A negative trading update from Altron.
* Vox Telecom acquired Internet services company Frogfoot Networks in a deal that is part of Vox's plan to build its own fibre-optic network to serve business clients in SA.
* NEC Europe has invested in local company XON in order to leverage the expertise in the region to provide greater sales coverage in the sub-Saharan African market and accelerate regional growth for both companies in the telecoms, government, enterprise and energy sectors.
* A renewed JSE cautionary by the Huge Group.

* Brett Parker was appointed MD of SAP Africa (was MD of SAP Southern Africa); Jo"el Ryser as sales lead for NetApp in East and West Africa; and Pfungwa Serima as chairman of SAP Africa (was CEO).

* AT&T finalised its $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV, in a move that creates the US's largest pay-TV company.
* Accenture bought EnergyQuote JHA, a pan-European energy management and procurement services provider.
* Aveva, a UK-based software engineering firm, purchased France's Schneider Electric's industrial software unit, Schneider Software, in a deal worth £1.3 billion. In practice, this is a reverse take-over and will result in Schneider Electric owning 53.5% of the enlarged Aveva Group.
* BlackBerry acquired AtHoc, a crisis communications software firm.
* Descartes Systems Group bought MK Data Services, a US-based provider of denied party screening trade data and solutions.
* Descartes Systems Group also bought BearWare, a US-based provider of mobile solutions to improve collaboration between retailers and their logistics service providers.
* IBM purchased Compose, a privately held company that provides MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, and other database as a service offerings targeted at Web and mobile app developers.
* Microsoft acquired Adallom, an Israeli cyber security company.
* Technicolor, a French media and entertainment technology group, bought Cisco's home equipment business for EUR550 million.
* Wal-Mart Stores purchased the 49% stake of Yihaodian, a Chinese e-commerce firm, which it didn't already own.
* A strategic partnership has been formed between Tata Consultancy Services and FICO, an analytics software firm, in a move intended to accelerate the development of innovative decision-centric applications.
* Nasdaq announced JD.com will become a component of the Nasdaq-100 Index prior to the market opening on Wednesday, 29 July.
* Flextronics has formally changed its name to Flex.
* HCL and CSC have created a joint venture for banking software and services.
* Excellent quarterly results from Cirrus Logic, GoPro (back in the black) and Mellanox Technologies.
* Very good quarterly figures from Apple.
* Very good half-year figures from Huawei Technologies, Infinera and Skyworks Solutions.
* Good quarterly numbers from ARM Holdings, Equifax, F5 Networks, Manhattan Associates, SK Hynix and Telenor.
* Good year-end figures from Amazon (back in the black), Infor and LG Display.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Amphenol, Check Point Software Technologies, Comcast, EFI, Infosys, Syntel, Verizon Communications, VMware and Vodafone.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Altera, CA Technologies, Celestica, DST Systems, EMC, Flextronics, IBM, Juniper Networks, Logitech International, Netgear, Omnicom Group, Qualcomm, SanDisk, STMicroelectronics, Wipro and Xilinx.
* Mixed quarterly figures from AT&T, with revenue up but profit down; FIS, with revenue down but profit up; Fortinet, with revenue up but profit down; Linear Technology, with revenue up but profit down; Maxim Integrated Products, with revenue down but profit up; Polycom, with revenue down but profit up; Rambus, with revenue down but profit up; Rogers Communications, with revenue up but profit down; Sanmina, with revenue down but profit up; SAP, with revenue up but profit down; Tele2, with revenue up but profit down; Texas Instruments, with revenue down but profit up; and VeriSign, with revenue up but profit down.
* Very poor quarterly figures from Xerox.
* Quarterly losses from Cypress Semiconductor, Lexmark, Macronix, Microsoft, Millicom Cellular International, NetSuite, Pandora Media, PMC-Sierra, Qlik Technologies, Unisys and Yahoo.
* The appointments of Jim McGeever as president of NetSuite; Chris O'Neill as CEO of Evernote; Masashi Muromachi, Toshiba's chairman, who will take over as interim chief executive; and Alejandro Plater as CEO of Telekom Austria.
* The resignation of Phillipp Humm, CEO of Vodafone Europe.
* IPO filings from First Data, an e-commerce company; Square, a payments start-up; and Vizio, a TV maker.

South Africa:
* The South African telecoms market will grow at a compound annual rate of only 1.4% over the next five years, according to BMI-TechKnowledge.

EMEA/Africa:
* For sub-Saharan Africa, the migration from analogue to digital broadcasting and subsequent release of digital dividend spectrum to mobile in 2015 could result in an extra $49 billion in GDP over the period 2015 to 2020, according to the GSMA.

Worldwide:
* Global mobile data traffic is set to reach 52 million terabytes (TB) in 2015, an increase of 59% from 2014, according to Gartner. The rapid growth is set to continue through 2018, when mobile data levels are estimated to reach 173 million TB.
* Public cloud computing will reach almost $70 billion in 2015 worldwide, with the top five verticals (discrete manufacturing, banking, professional services, process manufacturing, and retail) accounting for approximately 45% of the total spend for the market, according to IDC.
* Vendors shipped a total of 337.2 million smartphones worldwide in 2Q15, up 11.6% from the 302.1 million units in 2Q14, according to IDC.
* The global smartphone applications processor market registered a solid 20% year-over-year growth to reach US$5.3 billion in Q115, according to Strategy Analytics.

* JSE All share index: Down 2.6%
* Nasdaq: Down 2.3%
* NYSE (Dow): Down 2.9%
* S&P 500: Down 2.2%
* FTSE100: Down 2.9%
* Nikkei225: Down 0.5%
* Hang Seng: Down 0.1%
* Shanghai: Up 2.9%
* Top SA share movements: Adapt IT (+7%), AEEI (+15%), Ansys (-10.2%), Jasco (-7.7%) and Stella Capital Partners (+9.8%)

International:
* A possible break-up of Qualcomm.
* The sell-off by Orange of its Armenia operations.

Africa:
* The possible acquisition by Orange of Bharti Airtel International's (Airtel) subsidiaries in Burkina Faso, Chad, Congo Brazzaville and Sierra Leone.

South Africa:
* News from the Competition Tribunal regarding the outstanding local telecommunications mergers.

Information security governance practices are maturing, according to Gartner's annual end-user survey for privacy, IT risk management, information security, business continuity or regulatory compliance.

"Increasing awareness of the impact of digital business risks, coupled with high levels of publicity regarding cyber security incidents, are making IT risk a board-level issue," said Tom Scholtz, VP and Gartner fellow. "Seventy-one percent of respondents indicated that IT risk management data influences decisions at a board level. This also reflects an increasing focus on dealing with IT risk as a part of corporate governance."

The nature of the reporting lines of the information security team is one of the key attributes of effective governance. Thirty-eight percent of the survey respondents indicated explicitly that the most senior person responsible for information security reports outside of the IT organisation.

"The primary reasons for establishing this reporting line outside of IT are to improve separation between execution and oversight, to increase the corporate profile of the information security function and to break the mindset among employees and stakeholders that 'security is an IT problem'," said Scholtz. "Organisations increasingly recognise that security must be managed as a business risk issue, and not just as an operational IT issue. There is an increasing understanding that cyber security challenges go beyond the traditional realm of IT into areas such as operational technology and Internet of things security."

The South African telecoms market will grow at a compound annual rate of only 1.4% over the next five years.

The seniority level from which security programmes are sponsored is also improving. Sixty-three percent of the respondents indicated they receive sponsorship and support for their information security programmes from leadership outside of the IT organisation. This is a significant increase from 54% in 2014. CEO and/or board-level sponsorship has remained constant at 30% (29% in 2014), while sponsorship from a steering committee increased from 7% to 12%. There are interesting regional differences, with 57% of respondents in North America indicating sponsorship from outside IT, considerably lower than 63% in Western Europe and 67% in Asia/Pacific.

"A senior executive mandate for the security programme is fundamental. Without it, the security programme has little chance of getting the requisite support from the rest of the organisation," said Scholtz. "Because a corporate information security steering committee (CISSC) should consist primarily of business representatives, we expect that the level of sponsorship from such bodies will continue to increase as governance functions continue to mature. Indeed, an effective governance forum, such as the CISSC, becomes the authoritative representative of the CEO, the board and the senior business unit managers."

On the effectiveness of security policies, although half of the respondents indicate the governance body is involved in assessing and approving the policies, only 30% of respondents indicated the business units are actively involved in developing the policies that will affect their businesses. While this is a considerable improvement from previous years (16% in 2014), it still indicates a lack of active engagement with the business. This lack of engagement is a major cause of different risk views between the security team and the business, which can result in redundant and mismanaged controls, which in turn result in unnecessary audit findings and ultimately in reduced productivity.