FireEye has sights set on iSight

Small acquisitions by FireEye and IBM were the main stories of the international ICT market last week.

At home, it was very quiet.

* A positive trading update from Jasco.
* A new JSE cautionary by MTN.

* Dakika online, a Kenyan owned e-commerce platform, has launched its operations in Kenya.

* Cameroon's anti-corruption body has levied fines worth US$160 million on Orange and MTN for failing to pay taxes on gambling and gaming services.

* Ericsson acquired FYI Television, the US-based entertainment metadata and rich media content supplier.
* FireEye bought iSight Partners for $200 million, in a move designed to boost its cyber intelligence offerings for governments and businesses.
* Fiserv purchased ACI Worldwide's assets of its Community Financial Services business for $200 million.
* IBM acquired Ustream, an online video streaming service provider, in a move designed to boost its cloud offerings for businesses. The deal was worth $130 million.
* Kyocera Communications Systems has bought Labellio from AlpacaDB. Labellio is an image recognition Web service powered by deep learning.
* Riverbed Technology purchased Germany-based Ocedo, a provider of software-defined networking and SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) solutions.
* Diebold and Inspur Group, a developer of IT hardware and software, cloud computing, big data and a self-service terminal provider, have established a joint venture named Inspur Financial Technology Service.
* IBM received the most US patents (7 355) for the 23^rd consecutive year. Samsung, Canon, Qualcomm and Google (in that order) made up the remainder of the top five places.
* Qualcomm and the provincial government of Guizhou in southwest China have entered a $280 million joint venture for the design, development and sale of advanced server technology.
* Former Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo, is starting a new company with Bryan Oki, co-founder and CEO of Fitify. They intend building a software platform that re-imagines the path to personal fitness.
* ChipMOS Technologies (Bermuda), a provider of outsourced semiconductor assembly and test services, and its 58.3% owned subsidiary ChipMOS Technologies (Taiwan) will merge, with ChipMOS Taiwan becoming the surviving company.
* Very good year-end figures from ZTE.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Amphenol, ASML Holding, Cree, Digital International (back in the black), F5 Networks, Linear Technology, Verizon Communications (back in the black) and Wipro.
* Mediocre quarterly results from Adtran, IBM, TE Connectivity and Xilinx.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Idea Cellular, with revenue up but profit down; Logitech International, with revenue up but profit down; Maxim Integrated Products, with revenue down but back in the black; Netflix, with revenue up but profit down; and SAP, with revenue up but profit down.
* Quarterly losses from 8x8, AMD, PTC and Zain Saudi Arabia.
* The appointments of Kirill Tatarinov as president and CEO of Citrix Systems; and Hilary Schneider as CEO of LifeLock.
* The resignation of Todd Davis, CEO of LifeLock.

* According to Cisco's findings, cloud traffic in the Middle East and Africa (including SA) is forecast to more than quadruple by the end of 2019. By 2019, 83% of all MEA data centre traffic will come from the cloud. These are among the findings from the fifth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2014-2019), which found the MEA region is expected to have the highest cloud traffic growth rate, at 41%, by 2019.

Worldwide:
* There were 157.4 million notebooks shipped globally in 2015, a decrease of 9% on year, according to Digitimes Research. The shipments will slip a further 2.5%, to 153.5 million units, in 2016.
* Increased security will displace cost savings and agility as the primary driver for government agencies to move to public cloud within their jurisdictions, according to Gartner.
* Worldwide combined shipments of devices (PCs, tablets, ultramobiles and mobile phones) are expected to reach 2.4 billion units in 2016, a 1.9% increase from 2015, according to Gartner.
* Worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow at a 19.4% compound annual growth rate, almost six times the rate of overall IT spending growth - from nearly $70 billion in 2015 to more than $141 billion in 2019, according to IDC.
* Global spending on 3D printing will grow at a 27% compound annual growth rate, from nearly $11 billion in 2015 to $26.7 billion in 2019, according to IDC.
* WiFi shipments have reached 12 billion units, and are expected to surpass 15 billion units by the end of 2016, according to the WiFi Alliance.

* JSE All share index: Up 1.5%
* Nasdaq: Up 2.3%
* NYSE (Dow): Up 0.6%
* S&P 500: Up 1.4%
* FTSE100: Up 1.7%
* DAX: Up 2.3%
* Nikkei225: Down 1.1%
* Hang Seng: Down 2.3%
* Shanghai: Up 0.5%

International:
* The buyer for AT&T's Latin American pay-TV assets.
* The buyer for Sharp, as a rescue by the government-backed Innovation Network Corporation of Japan competes with a potentially larger offer ($5.3 billion) from Taiwan's Foxconn Technology.
* The possible sell-off by Toshiba of part of its chip business.

South Africa:
* Further local telecommunications news regarding Vodacom/Neotel.

Gartner's latest forecast shows worldwide IT spending is expected to total $3.54 trillion in 2016, just a 0.6% increase over the 2015 spending of $3.52 trillion.

Worldwide IT spending forecast ($bn)

Source: Gartner (January 2016)