Dell regains its third spot in this month’s Systems Index which has been relatively stable. The top ten firms are virtually identical to those topping last month’s chart and, unusually for any of the Indexes that we publish, there hasn’t been a single new entrant into the top 25.

Unsurprisingly, Nintendo leapt six spots in the rankings. Sales of Nintendo’s Wii peaked at just under 280,000 in the third week of December last year. That was almost four times the volume of Playstation 3 units sold. NetApp had a great month too, rising up four places and entering the top 30.

EMC has increased its share of voice by two places and almost entered the top five. EMC enhanced its core capabilities of information protection and recovery management with the completion of its purchase of Avamar. This, it is hoped, will accelerate the widespread move from tape to disc-based recovery solutions. Gartner also named EMC as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays.

Not much further down our chart, Apple had a great month moving into the top ten. The long awaited Apple phone was announced this week. Steve Jobs called it an iPhone which is a trademark held since 1996 by Infogear, which Cisco aquired in 2000. However, the validity of the trademark is disputed. This branding may be a very shrewd business move by Jobs to publicly lock horns with Cisco as the PR generated may well drive sales noticeably beyond the cost of disputing the iPhone trademark with Cisco. Time will tell.

The losers this month include OCE, ATI Technologies, Qualcomm and Panasonic, which despite inventing a lithium-ion battery that doesn’t overheat (which might please Sony after its recent recall of laptops because of overheated lithium-ion batteries), Panasonic still fell 4 places.

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