Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
A disappointing financial performance of SAP in Q1 2006 has sparked renewed speculation that IBM may be getting set to for a take-over bid of enterprise applications software giant.
According to UK-based research group Ovum, although SAP was ahead of
market expectations on revenues, with an increase of 18% year-on-year
to €2.04 billion, the profit figures came in below expectations, with
an operating profit of €409 million, a fall of 1.6% over Q1 2005.
Ovum comments that the undershoot in profits has caused renewed
speculation that IBM is going to buy SAP. However, the rumour is not
new and Ovum believes that there are factors against the merger, not
least because IBM has a very strong consulting business in Global
Services, which would object to being forced to give up its
applications vendor neutrality. Being an SAP owner, would mean Global
Services would find itself locked out of doing work on projects
involving SAP's rivals Oracle, Microsoft and others.
On the plus side, however, as Ovum points out, is that IBM may be
tempted to build a complete stack of software in a similar manner to
what Oracle has speculated on doing recently, with its Linux musings.
Ovum has even speculated that Microsoft may one day become a buyer of SAP.
What Ovum does not say, however, is whether the IBM Global Service
business could be viewed as an inhibitor for the rest of IBM's business
as a technology provider. IBM makes about the same profit today as it
did six years ago. The lack of growth in the company has been a subject
of discussion recently. In order to grow, IBM needs to get into new
technologies and new markets. If IBM has to stay out of a potential
growth market because its services business wants to maintain vendor
neutrality in software and hardware, then perhaps it is time to look at
how the services business fits in to the rest of the organisation. And
even whether it should be spun off as a separate company.
David Bass
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