Accenture Sees Light At The End Of The Tunnel

The IT services and consulting space, which until mid-2009 was on a declining trend, seems to be stabilizing. Key players in the industry such as Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, IBM, Tata Consultancy Services, and Accenture are sounding more confident going into 2010 than they were six to nine months ago. The companies are making small to mid-sized deals in application maintenance and development, infrastructure outsourcing, risk management, cost takeouts, data analytics, and business process outsourcing (BPO). A pickup in the financial services vertical is another positive for the industry. The larger players are seeing business trickling in, and the continuing need for clients to rationalize costs will ensure that the outsourcing business grows in 2010. >>>

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Optics Overview: Better Time Ahead?

Last year was tough for the optical component manufacturers JDS Uniphase and Finisar as telecom operators reduced their IT spending. However, the two companies recently reported good quarters as the economy recovers. >>>

Adobe Projects Optimistic 2010

Last month, Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) reported its fourth quarter and fiscal year 2009 results. It swung to a loss in the quarter as it faced a $192 million tax charge relating to its recent $1.8 billion Omniture acquisition. >>>

Semiconductor Stocks See Light

The year just ended must have been one of the worst for the semiconductor sector. However, the recent strong earnings results from Infineon, Micron, and National Semi indicate that 2010 may be more promising. >>>

Changing Networking Sector Dynamics

It is not just the HP-3Com deal that is worrying Cisco, the networking Goliath. In a recent analyst meeting, Cisco CEO John Chambers conceded that over the past 12 months, Cisco has lost market share in both routing and switching, its core franchises. In the niche area of application delivery controllers (ADC), F5 overtook Cisco in the second quarter while Alcatel-Lucent is poaching market share from Cisco in the edge router market. Let’s take a closer look at the changing dynamics in the networking sector. >>>

Oracle’s Plans Beyond Sun?

Last week, Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) reported a strong second quarter and gave strong guidance that exceeded expectations. This year, with the economy recovering, the company made quite a few acquisitions. The biggest was Sun Microsystems for $7.8 billion, a deal that has yet to be approved by European regulators. >>>

EDA Market Stabilizing?

The economy is limping back on track, as is evident from the increase in the number of PC shipments and smartphones, sales of which grew in Q309. In fact, silicon revenues were up in Q309 over Q209 in a reversal of the declines of the last few quarters. This is of course good news for the semiconductor industry. The EDA industry though will take a few more quarters to recover as its growth lags that of the semiconductor industry growth by a few quarters. >>>

Seagate, SanDisk Recovering Nicely

Last year, Seagate was expected to take over SanDisk as part of its plan to enter the solid-state drive (SSD) market. That did not happen, but Seagate has entered the market organically. The company recently launched Pulsar, its first enterprise SSD for blade and general servers. On the other hand, pSSD Gen2 SSD from SanDisk was recently adopted by Sony for its new Vaio X ultra-thin laptop. SSDs act as replacements for hard disk drives (HDDs) in PCs by using flash memory to store data. The rising demand for notebook PCs that have low storage needs has boosted the prospects of the SSD market, which is expected to grow at CAGR of 143% from 2008 to to 2013 to reach $10.8 billion. Let’s take a look at Seagate and SanDisk in this post. >>>

Moving To The Cloud: Informatica And Autodesk

The business intelligence (BI) tools market continues to grow at a healthy pace, primarily driven by maintenance revenue rather than new license revenue. According to an IDC report published in mid-2009, the BI tools market is estimated at $7.8 billion in 2008, up 10.6% over 2007. SAP is the market leader in BI with a 20% share, followed by SAS with 11%. In another report published in 2009, IDC estimates the worldwide data warehouse platform software market to have grown at 11% to reach $7.2 billion in 2008. The key players in the data warehouse platform software are Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. >>>

Samsung, Motorola Filling Smartphone Gaps

Samsung, which started out as a small manufacturer of black-and-white televisions, was able to celebrate its fortieth birthday last month as the world’s leading manufacturer of not just television sets but also memory chips and LCD panels. It is also the No. 2 cell phone handset vendor with an approximate 21% share, while Motorola has slipped to No. 5 with a 4.7% share. However, Motorola’s luck seems to be changing with its new smartphone, the Droid, which was launched at the end of October and which Time magazine recently named the “Gadget of the Year.” >>>