Dropbox files for IPO

Paul Booth.

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The Dropbox initial public offering (IPO) filing was the highlight of the international ICT market last week.

At home, government announcements following the 2018 Budget speech dominated the local market.

* Mixed interim numbers from Silverbridge Holdings, with revenue up 2.8% but profit down 56.8%.
* Satisfactory interim numbers from Blue Label Telecoms, with revenue up 2.3% but profit up 148.2%; and Mustek, with revenue up 1.5% but profit up 32.5%.
* Satisfactory year-end figures from Cell C, with revenue up 7.3% and profit up 660%.
* Jasco acquired 51% of Ramm Technologies, an IOT player, for R30.6 million.
* Workday has expanded its operations into SA with the opening of an office in Johannesburg, which will be led by former country leader for SAS, Zuko Mdwaba, who was recently appointed country director for Workday.
* The 2018 Budget announcement revealed the Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services (DTPS) plans to establish a state IT company and a state ICT infrastructure company by 2020, although the exact functions of these new companies remain a mystery. According to the DTPS, establishing these two new entities will involve merging different functions of the State IT Agency, Sentech and Broadband Infraco.

* The South Atlantic Cable System has landed in Fortaleza, Brazil, providing super-fast subsea connectivity between Africa and South America for the first time.

* Adecco, a staffing company, bought US-based online recruitment platform Vettery, in order to increase its footprint in the digital permanent recruitment market.
* Fatfish Internet Group-backed Cloudaron, a Singapore-based IT solutions company, purchased Realtors8, a subsidiary of 8common that owns and operates SaaS provider Ubertor. The deal was worth $3.2 million.
* Garmin acquired Trigentic, a privately held provider of intelligent products, solutions and services in the areas of embedded systems, power supply and power distribution for the marine and recreational vehicle market.
* Global Brands Manufacture bought a 70% stake in Japan-based Elna Printed Circuits for $32.7 million.
* New Ulm Telecom purchased Zayo Group Holdings' Scott-Rice Telephone Company, an incumbent local exchange carrier.
* Quanta Services acquired Northwest Lineman College, the industry-leading educational and training institution serving the electric power industry.
* Temenos, a Swiss software company, bought Fidessa Group, a UK-based peer, for £1.4 billion.
* Toutiao, a Chinese media start-up, purchased augmented reality-based selfie app Faceu for $300 million, as part of its bid to expand its business scope.
* Tencent Holdings ($140 million) and JD.com ($117 million) invested minority stakes in a Chinese retail chain, Better Life Commercial Chain Share, as China's tech giants extend their battles in the retail space.
* CommScope, a global leader in infrastructure solutions for communications networks, and Clearfield, the specialist in fibre management and connectivity platforms for communications providers, have agreed to terms of a settlement that would resolve the patent infringement lawsuit CommScope filed against Clearfield in January 2017.
* FairPoint Communications has changed its name to Consolidated Communications.
* Qualcomm has agreed to a $44 billion deal for the acquisition of NXP.
* A US national security panel has blocked US semiconductor testing company Xcerra's $580 million sale to a Chinese state-backed semiconductor investment fund, the latest such deal to be thwarted.
* Excellent quarterly results from SailPoint Technologies (back in the black).
* Very good quarterly figures from Stamps.com and Universal Display.
* Very good year-end numbers from Csun Manufacturing.
* Good quarterly numbers from American Software, Envestnet (back in the black), GoDaddy (back in the black), HP, HPE, Inovalon, Quanta Services, Roku, Tyler Technologies and Verisk Analytics.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Cotiviti, EchoStar, Garmin, Iridium Communications, MDC Partners, Telefonica, Telefonica Brasil, Tower Semiconductor and US Cellular (back in the black).
* Satisfactory year-end figures from Atos, Bouygues Group, Chilisin Electronics, Deutsche Telekom and Nova Technology.
* Mediocre quarterly results from ATN, Applied Optoelectronics, Convergys, CyberOptics, Grupo Televisa SA, and InterDigital.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Ansys, Cardtronics, Interface and Zebra Technologies, with revenue up but net income down; and from Conduent (but back in the black), DISH Network and Visteon, with revenue down but net income up.
* Mixed year-end figures from Orange, with revenue up but net income down.
* Quarterly losses from Acacia Communications, Alteryx, Appian, AXT, Bandwidth, Cogent Communications, CTG, Daktronics, Digimarc, Everbridge, Faro Technologies, Intuit, Mitel Networks, Pandora Media, Synopsys, Vasco Data Security International, Vonage, Windstream and Zix.
* A full-year loss from FIH Mobile.
* The appointment of Gerrard Schmid as CEO of Diebold Nixdorf.
* Data-sharing business Dropbox filed for an IPO on the Nasdaq.

South Africa:
* More than 90% of South African organisations are either already engaged in digital transformation or in the process of planning and evaluating their transformation strategies, according to IDC.

Look out for further government ICT developments following the 2018 Budget announcement.

Worldwide:
* Global sales of smartphones to end-users totalled nearly 408 million units in Q417, a 5.6% decline over Q416, according to Gartner.
* Worldwide spending on the technologies that enable smart cities initiatives is forecast to reach $80 billion in 2018, according to IDC. It expects spending to accelerate over the 2016-2021 forecast period, growing to $135 billion in 2021.
* The worldwide hardcopy peripherals (HCP) market increased 1.2% year-over-year to nearly 28 million units in 4Q17, according to IDC. The growth driven by a solid performance in the inkjet market, which grew 3.3% year-over-year. Shipment value, on the other hand, decreased 1% year-over-year, to $13.7 billion in the quarter.

* JSE All share index: Down 0.7%
* FTSE100: Down 0.7%
* DAX: Up 0.3%
* NYSE (Dow): Up 0.4%
* S&P 500: Up 0.6%
* Nasdaq: Up 1.4%
* Nikkei225: Up 0.8%
* Hang Seng: Up 0.5%
* Shanghai: Up 2.8%

International:
* BT Group putting its cable-making arm up for sale.
* Daisy Group putting itself up for sale with a price tag of more than £1 billion, as the UK telecoms company plots a path to doubling in size in an effort to take the fight to BT in the small and medium-sized business market.

Africa:
* Details of MTN's listing in Ghana of its subsidiary in that country.

South Africa:
* Further government ICT developments following the 2018 Budget announcement.

CRN recently published its "20 Coolest Cloud Software Vendors" of the 2018 Cloud 100. The list includes:

* Cloudera, a provider of big data management, machine learning and analytics software that's optimised for the cloud.
* Cloudify, which offers an open source cloud orchestration platform for managing and automating application life cycles and for designing, building and delivering core business applications and network services in the cloud.
* Cloudinary, which describes its mission as freeing companies from the headaches of building complicated, expensive and time-consuming in-house image management systems.
* Confluent, a developer of commercial software and services around Kafka, an open source, stream-processing platform for processing and analysing streams of data in real-time.
* Datadog, which offers a monitoring service for hybrid cloud applications, providing visibility into the performance of those systems and helping IT managers improve system agility and efficiency.
* DataRobot, the developer of an automated machine-learning platform that captures the knowledge, experience and best practices of data scientists and uses that information to build and deploy predictive models much more quickly than previously possible.
* Domo, a start-up that has attracted a lot of attention with its cloud-based data management, analytics and collaboration system that's designed to help decision-makers identify and act on strategic opportunities.
* Fuze, a fast-growing company in the unified communications as a service market that has garnered attention for its broad portfolio of communications and collaboration products for mid-size and enterprise customers, including video, audio and Web conferencing; persistent group chat and team collaboration; contact centre and analytics; instant messaging; and mobility.
* IT Glue, a developer of a documentation platform that businesses and managed service providers use to store and organise IT information, helping to increase the efficiency of their technicians.
* LogicMonitor, a provider of a SaaS-based performance monitoring system for on-premises and cloud IT systems; everything from data centre servers and network hardware to cloud applications running on AWS and Microsoft Azure.
* Matillion, a developer of data ETL (extract, transform and load) software specifically for Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and Snowflake Computing cloud data warehouse systems.
* New Relic, a leading developer of a cloud-based application performance management platform that provides IT operations managers, developers and executives with information they need to improve the performance of their complete software stack.
* Nimble CRM, which combines the strengths of traditional CRM applications, contact management software and social media, integrated with Google G Suite and Microsoft Office 365, to create a comprehensive selling solution.
* Plotly, which has developed a number of open source tools for composing, editing and sharing interactive data analysis and visualisation charts, graphs and dashboards via the Internet.
* The Reltio Cloud service that combines master data management, analytics and data-driven applications to deliver insight and recommended actions in such areas as customer engagement, key account management, supplier management and compliance.
* Snowflake Computing, which offers a cloud-based SQL data warehouse that competes with traditional on-premises data warehouse systems and cloud data warehouse offerings from AWS and Google.
* Splunk, a developer of operational intelligence software that collects machine-generated data and applies analytics and machine-learning technology to help companies optimise their IT, security and business performance.
* Turbonomic, a provider of workload automation software for hybrid clouds that offers a way to manage applications and workloads, identify performance issues, optimise IT infrastructure utilisation and help businesses set and meet quality-of-service levels.