IBM books Airbnb stay in court

The new flood of patent litigation dominated the international ICT market last week.

At home, Rob Shuter’s resignation announcement dominated the local ICT news.

• Very good interim figures from Cognition Holdings, with revenue up 75.1% and profit up 29.8%.
• Satisfactory interim numbers from Metrofile, with revenue up 8% and profit up 22.1%.
• Good year-end figures from MTN Group, with revenue up 12.7% and profit up 11.6%.
• An interim loss from Stellar Capital Partners.
• Dimension Data is pulling the plug on two of its biggest brands, Internet Solutions and Britehouse, in a major restructuring exercise aimed at putting the IT services group back on a solid growth footing and removing unnecessary friction and duplication.
• Johannesburg-based contact centre and IP telephony services provider Elingo quietly closed shop last month, with the liquidated company’s employees and customers being shipped to Pivotal Data, a local customer experience and contact centre solutions company.
• UK-based robotic process automation company Blue Prism is formalising its presence in SA with the opening of a local office in Cape Town.
• Norwegian-based Web company Opera is set to open a data centre in SA this year.
• Chinese smartphone brand Tecno has made its SA debut.
• The appointments of Khalid Abdulla as executive deputy chairman of Ayo Technology; Valentine Dzvova as acting CEO of AEEI; and Gerald Naidoo as CEO of Technologiks.
• The resignations of Khalid Abdulla, CEO of AEEI; and Rob Shuter, CEO of MTN Group (as of March 2021).

• Mediocre year-end figures from the Ooredoo Group.
• Orange Digital Ventures Africa made a $1.5 million investment in Youverify, a Nigeria-based digital identity and address verification start-up.
• The fifth submarine cable, the Djibouti Africa Region Express 1, has landed in Mombasa, Kenya, to bolster connectivity capacity within East Africa.
• The appointment of Bassam Yousef Al Ibrahim as deputy GM of Ooredoo Algeria.
• The departure of Ooredoo Algeria’s CEO Nikolai Beckers.

• Allied Motion Technologies acquired Dynamic Controls, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Invacare Corporation, a designer and manufacturer of equipment for the medical mobility and rehabilitation markets.
• Marlin Equity Partners bought Denmark-based Heimdal Security, as well as Lifesize, a video software company, which it has merged with Serenova. Serenova is a business software company that Marlin has owned since 2015. The combined business will be headed by Lifesize CEO Craig Malloy.
• NetApp purchased Talon Storage, a leader in next-generation software-defined storage solutions enabling global enterprises to centralise and consolidate IT storage infrastructure to the public cloud.
• OpenText acquired XMedius, a provider of secure information exchange and unified communication solutions.

Dimension Data is pulling the plug on two of its biggest brands.

• Accenture has agreed to buy ESR Labs, a German-based company that develops embedded software for leading German car brands and suppliers.
• The Australian privacy regulator has filed a lawsuit against Facebook, accusing it of sharing the personal details of more than 300 000 people with Cambridge Analytica without the regulator’s knowledge.
• Document Security Systems has entered a binding term sheet to acquire Impact Biomedical, a company engaged in the development and marketing of biohealth security technologies.
• DXC Technology is selling off its state and local health and human services business to Veritas Capital for $5 billion.
• Ericsson has signed an agreement to acquire Spain-based Genaker, a provider of mission-critical push-to-talk solutions.
• NorthEdge Capital has sold Cubic Motion, a UK-based provider of digital facial animation technology, to Epic Games, a video game and software development company.
• Nvidia has agreed to acquire SwiftStack, the provider of a data storage and management platform.
• ST Telemedia, a unit of Singapore state investment firm Temasek Holdings, has taken a majority stake in CloudCover, a cloud-native service provider with a presence in India and Southeast Asia.
• Twitter and activist hedge fund Elliott Management agreed to shake up the social media company’s board but leave CEO Jack Dorsey in place.
• WatchGuard Technologies has agreed to purchase endpoint protection mainstay Panda Security to create a security platform that bridges the network and user perimeter.
• Zhen Ding Technology has disclosed plans to acquire fellow Taiwan-based PCB company BoardTek Electronic.
• ZTE, allegedly, is the subject of a new bribery investigation at the US Justice Department, centred on suspected bribes paid to foreign officials to gain advantages in its worldwide operations.
• Silver Lake made a $1 billion investment in Twitter.
• IBM is taking Airbnb to court over what it claims is the illegal use of four patents, the latest in a string of suits against online companies involving historic and arguably broad innovations, in a move that threatens to cast a shadow over the short-term rental company’s road to a proposed IPO.
  
• Short-form streaming-video service Quibi, which is preparing to launch next month, faces claims that one of its core tech features infringes on another company’s intellectual property.
• Israel’s NSO Group is asking a California judge to sanction Facebook for allegedly failing to abide by international law with regard to its lawsuit against the spyware maker.
• Sharp has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against US TV brand Vizio and two others, seeking an injunction to ban one of Vizio's TV products in the US.
• Xperi has reached an agreement with Toshiba to settle and dismiss the pending litigation between Tessera and Toshiba.
• Very good quarterly figures from Changyou.com.
• Very good year-end numbers from Gresham Technologies (back in the black) and Team17.
• Good quarterly numbers from Adobe, Allied Motion Technologies, Best (back in the black) and SMTC (back in the black).
• Good year-end numbers from Aptitude Software, Computacentre, FDM, Informa and Network International Holdings.
• Satisfactory quarterly results from Asure Software, Avid Technology, Magic Software and Sogue.
• Satisfactory year-end figures from Equiniti.
• Mediocre quarterly results from Semtech.
• Mixed quarterly figures from Broadcom, ChipMOS Technologies, Mobile TeleSystems and Oracle, with revenue up but net income down; and from Alaska Communications and Information Services Group (back in the black), with revenue down but net income up.
• Quarterly losses from Cloudera, CooTek, DocuSign, Domo, eMagin, Everspin Technologies, HannStar, Harte-Hanks, Identiv, Inseego, Intellicheck, Medallia, MicroVision, PAR Technology, Pinduoduo, Rimini Street, Slack, Sohu.com, Sonim Technologies, Synchronoss Technologies, Team, Telecom Argentina, The ExOne Company, TransAct Technologies, Volt Information Sciences and Zuora.
• A full-year loss from Helios Towers.
• The appointment of Kazuto Ogawa as CEO of Canon USA.
• The resignations of Bill Gates as a director of Microsoft; and Brian Lesser, chief executive of AT&T's advertising unit Xandr.
• The retirement of Yoroku Adachi, chairman and CEO of Canon USA.
• A planned IPO from Chinese-headquartered IOT technology innovator RocKontrol Technology Group on China’s Nasdaq-like STAR Market.

South Africa:

• According to InfoSource’s annual research, Kyocera Document Solutions South Africa attained the top position as market leader in the office automation industry for copiers/MFPs in Southern Africa.

EMEA/Africa:

• IT spending in the MENA region will total $160 billion in 2020, an increase of 2.4% from 2019, according to Gartner.

Worldwide:

• According to IDC:
• The worldwide market for wearable devices grew 82.3% in 4Q19, reaching a new high of 118.9 million devices shipped.
• The worldwide market for PC monitors grew 5% in 4Q19. Global shipments exceeded expectations, reaching just over 33.2 million, a number last exceeded in Q414.
• IT spending is projected to grow by 4.3% this year, reflecting a downward adjustment, which is down from the 5% forecast in January.
• Worldwide revenue in the combined consumer and enterprise wireless local area network market segments declined 6.5% in 4Q19 and fell 3.9% for the full year. The enterprise segment grew revenue 1.5% year-over-year in 4Q19 to reach $1.7 billion and 1.8% for the full year 2019, reaching $6.2 billion.
• The worldwide Ethernet switch market (layer 2/3) recorded $7.6 billion in revenue in 4Q19, a decline of 2.1%. For the full year 2019, the market recorded $28.8 billion in revenue for a year-on-year growth rate of 2.3%. Meanwhile, the worldwide total enterprise and service provider router market recorded $4.2 billion in revenue in 4Q19, a decrease of 7.7%. For the full year 2019, the router market finished at $15.5 billion, essentially staying flat with an increase of 0.4% over 2018.
• Vendor revenue in the worldwide server market grew 7.5% year-on-year to $25.4 billion during 4Q19. Worldwide server shipments grew 14% year-on-year to just over 3.4m units.
• Global spending on enterprise external OEM storage systems declined 0.1% year-on-year to $7.9 billion during 4Q19. Total external OEM storage capacity shipments were up 9.4% to 21.2 exabytes during the quarter. Revenue generated by the group of original design manufacturers (ODMs) selling directly to hyperscale data centres grew rapidly at 38.2% year-over-year, to $6.5 billion in 4Q19, while capacity shipped increased 64.5% year-on-year to 70.8 exabytes. Total capacity shipments for the market (external OEM + ODM direct + server-based storage) grew 30.8% to 120.2 exabytes.

• JSE All share index: Down 15.1%
• FTSE100: Down 17%
• DAX: Down 20%
• NYSE (Dow): Down 10.4%
• S&P 500: Down 8.8%
• Nasdaq: Down 8.2%
• Nikkei225: Down 16%
• Hang Seng: Down 8.1%
• Shanghai: Down 4.8%

International:

• Vista Equity Partners selling Infoblox, a provider of IT automation and security software, which it acquired for a reported $1.6 billion in 2016.
• Magic Leap, an augmented reality start-up, exploring options including a sale.

South Africa:

• Further ‘rationalisation’ at Dimension Data.

Fortune magazine has published its 2020 list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. Included are:

• 2: Ultimate Software (was number eight)
• 4: Cisco (was number six)
• 5: Workday (was four)
• 6: Salesforce.com (was two)
• 11: Intuit (was 24)
• 27: Nvidia (was 38)
• 30: HubSpot (was 64)
• 35: Adobe (was 22)
• 41: Accenture (was 61)
• 42: T-Mobile US (was 49)
• 48: Red Hat (was 50)
• 51: Pluralsight (new entry)
• 52: Kronos (was 78)
• 59: SAP America (was 28)
• 61: SAS Institute (was 60)
• 63: Dropbox (was 42)
• 64: Comcast NBCUniversal (was 71)
• 71: Box (was 93)
• 82: Cadence (was 73)
• 84: Nutanix (new entry)
• 85: Atlassian (was 70)
• 96: World Wide Technology (was 56)

Activision Blizzard, Alliance Data Systems and Workiva have dropped out of the list.