This is the latest in a series of blogs in which PAC looks at key end user accounts and analyses the dynamics likely to drive future SITS investment. Overview: The Spanish infrastructure giant Ferrovial is back on the front foot with a £385m bid for UK maintenance and engineering services group Enterprise plc. The Enterprise takeover will double the size [...]

Oracle made an unexpected, creative and strategic move yesterday with its purchase of Acme Packet for $1.7bn. Acme Packet is a US-based “global provider of session border control technology:” It facilitates delivery of voice, data and unified communications services and applications over IP networks. Acme is used particularly by telcos but also by large enterprises and service providers such as [...]

PAC spent time last week speaking with HCL’s senior management about its business and prospects, particularly in Europe. HCL is one of the biggest India-based IT services providers, but some way behind the “big four” (including Cognizant). What’s notable is that it’s taking share: the fastest growing IT service provider of Europe’s Top 30 over the last two years. Notably, [...]

The European Court of Justice yesterday ruled that Oracle cannot block the resale of its software online. The US software company was trying to stop Munich-based UsedSoft, a second-hand software dealer, from reselling Oracle software licenses.

When SAP bought Sybase back in 2010, it appeared that the main target was its mobility software. Sybase’s core and original business – database – was widely perceived as a ‘nice to have.’ It was making money and it had some very loyal customers – and a good position in financial services, a vertical SAP is targeting for growth. But the [...]

Sopra has become one of the 50 largest IT services suppliers in the UK following two quick-fire acquisitions that have doubled the size of its local business. Paris-based Sopra has paid undisclosed sums for the UK operations of two continental IT services peers: Finland’s Tieto and fellow French vendor Business & Decision, to take its annual revenue run-rate past the [...]

The ink was hardly dry on Oracle’s deal to buy software-as-a-service SaaS CRM company RightNow (for the minor consideration of $1.5bn!) than it announced a deal to buy another SaaS leader, HCM applications company Taleo, for a cool $1.9bn. Part of the reason these prices are so high is that SaaS remains hot – the purchase is a relatively modest [...]

Even as cloud computing offerings seem to have pushed everything from the front burner, enterprise vendors are still looking to make on premise implementations more palatable. One of the ways to achieve this is through slimmed down applications suites that trim the customization options but have customers up and running in short order. SAP has had success with this approach [...]

The relational database swept to prominence in the 1980s, becoming popular first as a reporting tool and then as the strategic platform for operational systems, notably SAP. By the early 1990s its dominance was unquestioned. There was some discussion of “what next?” as start-up companies and database pioneers like Michael Stonebraker pushed other models, such as object databases. However that [...]

Sixteen years ago, Oracle’s charismatic CEO, Larry Ellison, declared that the PC was “a ridiculous device,” championing instead the “Network Computer”, a thin-client device designed to run applications hosted in a data center. Oracle actually trademarked the term “network computer.” At the time this was a radical vision, deeply controversial, even: going against a decade of putting compute power in [...]