Acquisition news raises profile of WebEx Communications in the Lighthouse Software Index

This month the star performer of the month in the Lighthouse Software Index is WebEx Communications. The firm has been acquired by Cisco for a hefty $3.2 billion in cash and has the analysts focusing on both the firms to see how the acquisition will affect Cisco and its current strategy of developing solutions with IBM. It would certainly be interesting to see how Cisco fares when we present the Lighthouse Telecom Index next week.

Also new this week is a different way of charting the Index. We’d love reader’s feedback about the diagram. The chart shows the top 100 firms, and then spotlights the 10 or so which have the greatest variance from their position last month. That means that we may pick out different numbers of risers and fallers. Should we make into a 2×2 quadrant? Or go back to the traditional listing?

Another high profile mover this month has been Hyperion. The firm is also riding the acquisition wave as analysis pours through about the potential impact of this $3.3 billion acquisition. Of course, the news has also resulted in the boost to the rankings of Hyperion’s rivals in the Business Intelligence market with Cognos and Business Objects increasing their rankings by 5 and 9 positions respectively. Oracle which has been on a roll on acquiring firms has not had any change in its position near the top of the Lighthouse Software Index.

The most notable decline in analyst focus has been in mentions of Gemalto, the firm formed by the merger of Axalto with Gemplus last year. The firm had a brief surge due to it being mentioned in some industry reports but due to no major news coming out, Gemplus/Gemalto has fallen 21 positions to end up at the 93rd spot. Amongst the top 10 Symantec has lost 2 positions to drop back at the 8th spot. This is the very position it held back in February 2007 before climbing to the 6th spot last month based on its announcement to acquire Altiris.

Firms that dropped out of the top 25 Software Analyst Index in April are Veritas (which is now part of Symantec, so its fall is unsurprising), SPSS and mySQL while Sage, Infor and Hyperion joined the top 25 list of firms.

If you wish to be sent the top 25 firms in Software Index each month, email us at analysts at lighthousear dot com. You can also read how we do our Analyst Index rankings.

Duncan Chapple