Rackspace Hosting goes private

The privatisation of Rackspace Hosting was the main story in the international ICT market last week.

At home, MTN's announcement of a new BEE deal was one of the main local stories.

* Good year-end figures from Blue Label Telecoms, with revenue up 18.9% and profit up 25.9%.
* Mediocre year-end numbers from Net 1 UEPS Technologies, with revenue down 5.6% and profit down 13%.
* A full year loss from Broadband Infraco, although revenue up 23.9%.
* A positive trading update from Silverbridge Holdings.
* Negative trading updates from Datacentrix and Mustek.
* Net 1 UEPS Technologies made a $40 million investment in One Mobikwik Systems, India's largest independent mobile payments network.
* The MTN Group announced its intention to implement a new R9.9 billion broad-based black economic empowerment (B-BBEE) transaction, MTN Zakhele Futhi, on 12 September. MTN Zakhele Futhi will replace the company's existing special purpose empowerment vehicle, MTN Zakhele, which contractually unwinds on 24 November. The mobile operator believes the new transaction will ensure it maintains its BBEE targets, in line with the ICT Sector Code (ICT Charter) and B-BBEE Act.
* IBM has opened its second research location in Africa, at the Wits University Tshimologong campus.
* Withdrawn JSE cautionaries by ISA and MTN Zakhele.

* Good year-end figures from Ethio telecom (Ethiopia), the country's sole telecoms operator, with net income up 30.2%. Its total subscriber base rose significantly in 2015/16 to 47.5 million, a growth rate of 19%.
* The former CEO of Comverse Technology pleaded guilty to securities fraud, and was ordered to be detained a decade after fleeing the US for Namibia to avoid prosecution.
* Intelsat has successfully launched its Intelsat 36 satellite, which is designed to enhance Intelsat's media neighbourhoods serving Africa and the Indian Ocean regions. The Ku-band payload was built to support MultiChoice, the leading direct-to-home platform in SA. The C-band payload provides in-orbit resilience for Intelsat's video content distribution neighbourhood at 68.5^0E. Intelsat 36 will be co-located with Intelsat 20.

The US International Trade Commission ruled that Fitbit did not steal rival Jawbone's trade secrets.

* Accenture acquired Redcore, a privately held Australia-based consulting company that specialises in providing identity and access management services, as well as security services for cloud, network management, public key infrastructure, cyber defence, applications and the Internet of things.
* Apple bought Gliimpse, a three-year-old start-up that aims to help patients make sense of their medical records.
* Apollo Global Management purchased cloud computing provider Rackspace Hosting for $4.3 billion.
* A group of Chinese investors acquired advertising technology start-up Media.net, founded by tech entrepreneur Divyank Turakhia. The group is led by Zhang Zhiyong, chairman of telecoms firm Beijing Miteno Communication Technology. The deal was worth $900 million.
* Manpower Group bought Ciber's business in Norway.
* Microsoft purchased Genee, an artificial intelligence-powered scheduling start-up.
* Pinterest acquired article-bookmarking app Instapaper.
* Proofpoint bought Return Path's Email Fraud Protection business unit, which provides standards-based DMARC authentication and proprietary sender-analysis capabilities.
* Tele2 purchased Swedish IOT company Kombridge.
* Qualys and Wipro have formed a strategic partnership, whereby the latter will leverage Qualys' vulnerability management, policy compliance and Web application security services in its managed enterprise security service offerings for its customers, worldwide. As part of the agreement, it will also integrate the Qualys Cloud Platform with its existing managed security services.
* The US International Trade Commission ruled that Fitbit did not steal rival Jawbone's trade secrets.
* Online media outlet Buzzfeed will split itself into two new departments that will focus on news and entertainment.
* Vadim Lavrusik, former product manager of Facebook Live, has co-founded Alively, an app meant for users who want to share live videos with a handful of people rather than their entire social network.
* One of China's most popular 'selfie' app makers is preparing to raise up to $1 billion through a listing on the Hong Kong exchange, in a test of whether that market can compete with New York and mainland China for a wave of expected Chinese start-up offerings.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Daktronics.
* Satisfactory half-year figures from ZTE.
* Mediocre quarterly results from American Software, QAD and Tech Data.
* Mixed quarterly figures from Gemalto, with revenue down but profit up; and HP, with revenue down but profit up.
* Mixed half-year figures from Sunrise, with revenue down but back in the black.
* Quarterly losses from Autodesk, Bottomline Technologies, Intuit, Nimble Storage, Pure Storage, Splunk, Talend, Workday and Zayo Group.
* A half-year loss from Uber.
* The appointments of Bruce McClelland as CEO of Arris; and Adam Selipsky (ex-Amazon Web Services executive) as president and CEO of Tableau Software.
* The resignation of Christian Chabot, CEO of Tableau Software (stays on as chairman).
* An IPO filing for Nasdaq from VC-backed Apptio, a provider of on-demand IT management solutions.
* An IPO filing for Nasdaq from Gridsum, a Chinese provider of Web, video and mobile big data analytics.
* A withdrawn IPO by Digicel group, the Caribbean wireless operator.

Worldwide:
* Global tablet shipments will bounce back 16.3% sequentially in Q3 to reach nearly 47 million units, but will still be down over 10% from Q315, according to Digitimes Research.
* Video communications platform as a service is a radical new approach to building real-time video communications applications, according to IDC. Video PaaS makes it easy for developers to embed real-time video into mobile apps, Web sites, or business processes. With the potential to enable millions of niche communications applications, it forecasts the US video PaaS market to grow from $60 million in 2016 to $1.7 billion in 2020, a 130% CAGR.

* JSE All share index: Up 1.4%
* FTSE100: Down 0.3%
* DAX: Up 0.4%
* NYSE (Dow): Down 0.8%
* S&P 500: Down 0.7%
* Nasdaq: Down 0.4%
* Nikkei225: Down 1.1%
* Hang Seng: Down 0.1%
* Shanghai: Down 1.2%

International:
* Japan's Renesas Electronics bid for US rival Intersil in a deal that could be worth $3 billion.

South Africa:
* The future of Broadband Infraco.

Wired magazine has published its 'First Global Wired 100', which is its ranking of the key influencers of the wired world. It includes:
* 1: Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX
* 2: Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook
* 3: Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
* 4: Ma Huateng, founder of Tencent Holdings
* 5: Larry Page, co-founder of Google
* 6: Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba
* 11: Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon
* 13: Travis Kalanik, co-founder of Uber
* 16: Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
* 19: Oliver Samwer, co-founder of Rocket Internet
* 22: Bob van Dijk, CEO of Naspers
* 25: Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google