Friday, May 29, 2015

Equinix Bids $3.6 Billion for TelecityGroup

Equinix is bidding to acquire TelecityGroup for £11.45 per share, 35% premium to the closing price of February 10, 2015, and representing an equity value of $3.6 billion.  The offer is composed of 50% stock and 50% cash.

Equinix said the merger would complement and extend its geographic footprint in Europe.

TelecityGroup operates 39 data centers with 1.2 million gross square feet of capacity in 12 metros across Europe. The business serves approximately 2,500 customers and generates about $574 million in annual revenue.

Equinix operates 105 data centers with 11 million gross square feet of capacity across 33 metros worldwide. Equinix serves approximately 6,300 customers and generates approximately $2.5 billion in annual revenue, of which about $650 million is from European operations.

The Boards of Equinix and TelecityGroup have reached agreement on the terms of the recommended cash and share offer.

http://www.equinix.com/


In February 2015, TelecityGroup plc and Interxion, both leading operators of data centers across Europe, announced plans for a merger. 


Under the deal, Interxion shareholders would receive 2.3386 new TelecityGroup shares per Interxion share. As a result, Interxion shareholders would own approximately 45%, and TelecityGroup shareholders approximately 55%, of the combined group. The primary listing for the combined group would be in London with a New York Stock Exchange listing for TelecityGroup’s existing ADR programme.


TelecityGroup, headquartered in the United Kingdom, operates 39 data centers in key European cities. It has annual turnover of £349 million.

Interxion, which is based in Amsterdam, operates 39 data centres across 11 countries.  It has annual turnover of £274 millio

Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 to Power Google's Project Tango

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor has been selected to power Google's next generation Project Tango smartphone development platform.

Project Tango devices combine the camera, gyroscope, and accelerometer to estimate six degrees of freedom motion tracking, providing developers the ability to track 3D motion of a device while simultaneously creating a map of the environment. This capability is especially useful for applications such as real-world 3D gaming, indoor navigation, and virtual and augmented reality experiences. The development platform will be available for purchase in Q3 2015.

The Snapdragon 810 processor is designed to deliver the most advanced connected mobile computing experiences across video, imaging and graphics, making it ideal for applications that require complex 3D mapping. The Qualcomm Adreno 430 GPU is designed to deliver fast graphics and compute performance while reducing power consumption. It offers support for camera image and video post-processing, hardware tessellation, geometry shaders and programmable blending, as well as advanced GPU security for secure composition and management of premium video and other multimedia. The Snapdragon 810 processor also supports superior camera functionality, including dual 14-bit Image Signal Processors (ISP) with fast autofocus, depth sensing, and advanced imaging software that helps enable advanced camera features particularly in low light environments. High quality 4K HEVC Ultra HD video encoding and decoding is also supported by Snapdragon 810.

"Qualcomm Technologies is pleased to power the next generation Project Tango development device," said Raj Talluri, senior vice president of product management, Qualcomm Technologies. "We're excited to work together with Google and Android developers to help deliver new, innovative visual expqtechnology on mobile devices."

http://www.qualcomm.com

Telefónica Becomes Largest Operator in Brazil

Telefónica Brasil completed its acquisition of Global Village Telecom (GVT) from Vivendi, making it the largest operator in Brazil both in terms of clients—with over 105 million accesses after the integration —and revenues.  The deal was first announced in September 2014.

Telefónica Brasil now has national coverage and is the leader in the mobile business and fixed ultra-broadband, while also strengthening its position in pay TV. Vivo has the largest national 3G network, with coverage in 3,200 Brazilian municipalities, as well as 4G (which covers more than 140 cities nationwide), while GVT has an extensive fibre optics network reaching 156 cities in 20 Brazilian states, besides the Federal District.

The purchase price included a total of 4,663 million euros (by means of cash settlement and debt assumption), as well as the handover of 12% of the share capital of the new Telefónica Brasil—resulting from the integration. In the coming weeks, Vivendi will exchange 4.5% of this interest for 8.3% of the ordinary shares of Telecom Italia, according to the terms agreed by the parties.

http://www.telefonica.com

ASUS Announces Servers Based on Cavium's 48-Core ARM

ASUS confirmed plans to build servers and server boards based on Cavium's ThunderX 64-bit, 48-core ARM platform, which promises extreme efficiency, expandability and enhanced-usability design for data centers, high-performance computing and enterprise, as well as small and medium business (SMB) environments. ASUS aims to deliver two-socket ARM servers and server boards from Q4 2015.

Gopal Hegde, Vice President and General Manager of Cavium's Datacenter Processor Group remarked: "With two-socket capability, great power efficiency, and built-in hardware acceleration, customer demand for our high-performance ThunderX ARM processors continues to grow. We are delighted to be working with ASUS, and we look forward to supporting this industry leader on a number of innovative new server designs."

http://www.cavium.com
http://www.asus.com

Singtel Plans 10G Residential Service

Singtel will be soon be deploying Next Generation GPON on its Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network. A pilot service will begin in the next quarter and Singtel plans to make the service available to all fibre customers in the later part of the year.

The technology will give customers the option of a 10 Gbps fibre broadband service, useful for applications such as running multiple 4K video sessions. The maximum bandwidth currently available to customers is 1Gbps on Singtel’s Unlimited Fibre plan.

“Over 70 per cent of our customers are on fibre. We believe in constantly innovating and looking for ways to bring them better speeds using the newest technologies,” said Mr Tay Soo Meng, Chief Technology Officer. “Most of these households already have multiple devices connected to their home network. The adoption of this technology will help us meet demand as the number of applications increase and become even more bandwidth intensive.”  

http://info.singtel.com/about-us/news-releases/singtel-first-singapore-launch-next-generation-gpon-pilot-service-residential

ABB Chooses BT for Global Communications

The ABB Group, which has over 140,000 employees in over 100 countries, has selected BT to transform its global communications infrastructure across Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. ABB, a world leader in power and automation, will also benefit from improved application performance and additional IT security delivered by BT.

Specifically, BT was selected to connect more than 700 ABB locations in more than 100 countries with its Internet Connect and IP Connect services, allowing ABB employees to work more securely, with a standardised experience for all users. The global network infrastructure designed by BT will connect users to data and applications stored in ABB’s hybrid cloud and will be the foundation for ABB’s future use of cloud services from a variety of suppliers. This includes the management of 400 firewalls and the provision of BT Assure cyber protection and analytics services to protect ABB’s network and IT systems against threats.

“The alignment with BT will enable us to move to a globally consistent, high quality network”, said Andy Tidd, Chief Information Officer at ABB. “This key component of our new IT infrastructure will support ABB’s three focus areas of profitable growth, relentless execution and business-led collaboration.”

http://www.btplc.com/

Sony Acquires Optical Archive Inc.

Sony Corporation of America acquired Optical Archive Inc. (OAI), a start-up developing optical storage systems for the data center market.  Financial terms were not disclosed.

OAI was founded by Frank Frankovsky, who previosly was a lead hardware engineer at Facebook and who served as Chairman/President of the Open Compute Project.

Sony said it plans to leverage OAI to develop new optical disc library systems that will meet the technological demands from the growing cold archive market.

The term "cold archive" refers to a class of data that must be retained over a long period of time but isn't accessed frequently, such as cloud-based photo storage and data retained for legal or regulatory reasons. Cold archive is the largest and fastest growing portion of the data center storage market.

"This acquisition marks the beginning of our commitment to this growing market," said Terushi Shimizu, Senior Vice President and Deputy President, Device Solutions Business Group, Sony Corporation.  "Optical disc libraries will provide many advantages to customers who are currently using tape or hard drive technology to store cold data, such as lower costs, extremely durable media life, and higher data throughput rates. We plan to leverage and expand our existing optical disc production lines in order to accommodate the growing demand for this media."

"We are thrilled to be part of Sony," said Frank Frankovsky, CEO of OAI.  "Merging Sony's excellence in optical engineering and manufacturing with OAI's experience and capabilities in data center hardware design and operations will deliver innovative new storage solutions to customers."

http://www.sony.com

Harris Completes Acquisition of Excelis

Harris completed its previously announced acquisition of Exelis, which supplies solutions for the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance market. Excelis, which was previously part of ITT Corporation, serves  military, government and commercial customers in the United States and globally.

“The Exelis acquisition is transformative for our company and marks a major milestone in Harris’ 120-year history,” said William M. Brown, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Harris. “With about $8 billion in combined pro forma revenue, the acquisition creates significantly greater scale, bringing together two engineering-driven companies and workforces with similar cultures that value technology leadership. Together, the two companies’ complementary technologies and capabilities strengthen core franchises and provide new opportunities for innovation to solve our customers’ most complex challenges.”

http://www.harris.com