Weekly Digest
Weekly Digest Issue No. 530
26-08-2010
by Deirdre McArdle
HP and Dell spar for 3PAR | To IPO or not to IPO?
CAO offers sent out, site suffers DoS attack
Following last Wednesday's Leaving Certificate results, this week saw students receive and reply to their CAO (Central Applications Office) offers. A record number of students applied for third-level courses this year, with the figures rising to 67,640 from 64,774 last year. The high number of applicants has pushed up the CAO points for the majority of college courses. Points have risen for 700 courses, while remaining the same or dropping for the other 560. Some of the biggest point surges are in science and computing, reflecting higher student demand.
According to the Irish Times, by Tuesday evening 23,000 students had accepted CAO offers; however, dozens of courses at third-level colleges remain unfilled. A total of 21 third-level colleges are reported to have vacancies, in 140 courses. The vacancies arise because there are not enough qualified applicants for all the places. The Tipperary Institute, for example, has been unable to fill 22 of its 23 courses on the first round of offers. Athlone Institute of Technology has vacancies on six courses in the areas of science, accounting and tourism. Cork Institute of Technology has vacancies on its chemical and biopharmaceutical engineering courses and on its structural and biomedical engineering degree courses. Second round offers will be sent out around 2 September.
In related news, students logging on to the CAO website on Monday morning to check for offers were left frustrated as the site was hit by a denial of service (DoS) attack that meant students were unable to log in until after 1pm. The majority of visitors to the site were met by a message that the site was undergoing maintenance, and they were unable to accept their course offers. The Irish Times reports that the CAO is to carry out an internal investigation into the cyber attack and will attempt to identify the source of the attack before a decision is taken on whether to report the matter to Gardai. The CAO said it will launch the enquiry after the second round of third-level offers is issued next month.
Then on Wednesday, the CAO was again forced to shut its website for part of the day after an early-morning cyber attack resulted in new passwords being issued to 22,000 third-level applicants. It is not known if Wednesday's cyber assault is related to Monday's DoS attack.
New Google jobs mapped out for Dublin
There was some good news on the jobs front last Friday when internet giant Google announced it was to create 200 new jobs in Dublin. The jobs will be based in a new Operations Centre in East Point Business Park and will focus on Google's location tools, such as Google Maps and Google Local. Recruitment for the positions has already begun for entry-level graduates with one or two years' experience and strong IT skills. The new centre is expected to be up and running before the end of this year.
David Martin, director, Geo Operations for Google in Europe, said Dublin will become a "centre of excellence" for Google's location-based products. "Google Maps… now incorporates rich data from thousands of sources in different languages from across the world and also includes local business listings. This Operations Centre will help to manage these data sources to give Google Maps users even more local information than before."
Google is quickly becoming one of the largest employers in Ireland. Its EMEA base in Dublin already employs over 1,500 staff. The facility in Dublin was set up in 2004 and is now Google's largest base outside of the US. "…[We] have been successful in attracting very talented people from across Europe to work in Dublin. The new Operations Centre will build on this success and will strengthen the importance of Dublin to the company as a whole," said John Herlihy, vice president, Global Ad Operations, Google.
HP and Dell spar for 3PAR
Two tech rivals went toe-to-toe this week when Hewlett-Packard launched a counterbid for 3PAR, the storage company that Dell made a bid for last week. HP's bid of USD24 per 3PAR share values the firm at USD1.6 billion, way ahead of Dell's USD18 per share offer.
In an SEC filing in the US, 3PAR said the HP offer was "reasonably likely to lead to a 'superior proposal'" and that it would give Dell until Thursday to submit a better bid. Bloomberg reported that Dell was considering a sweetened offer, but there has been no official word from Dell yet, and no indication on a possible price. HP's offer is around a third greater than Dell's original bid, which itself was an 87 percent premium on 3PAR's closing price on 13 August. Industry analysts suggest the HP bid is already over-priced and that both HP and Dell shareholders may not be too happy with a bidding war. Both firm's share prices have dropped this week -- Dell's by 3.5 percent and HP's by 3.7 percent.
Both Dell and HP are keen to expand their product portfolios to become one-stop-shops as corporate IT spending rebounds. And as interest in cloud computing grows, storage is a key component in any big tech firm's product range. This situation brings to mind storage giant EMC's bidding war with NetApp last year for Data Domain, which eventually saw EMC paying out a massive USD2.4 billion for the smaller storage firm. It'll be fascinating to see whether this interest in 3PAR will hit a similar price tag.
To IPO or not to IPO?
Over the past couple of weeks we've had news of a number of high-profile tech IPOs that have whet investors' appetites. All of the talk about the likes of Skype and Hulu going public has built up hype around Silicon Valley, which has had the knock-on effect of investors buying up shares in other tech firms in the hopes that if and when they do float, their share prices will rocket.
Unsurprisingly, the firm garnering the most attention is Facebook, with investors buying common stock for as much as USD76 a share, valuing the company as high as USD33.7 billion based on secondary market transactions, according to the Financial Times. To put it into perspective, the paper said this implied valuation for Facebook is greater than the current market capitalisations of publicly-quoted internet giants Yahoo and eBay.
The scramble for Facebook stock is understandable; analysts have suggested its IPO, when it does come, could be the biggest technology IPO since Google's USD1.67 billion flotation in 2004. For its part Facebook has indicated it may remain unlisted until at least 2012. But who knows, a successful Skype IPO could potentially entice Facebook to reschedule that date, and it could well draw other social networking firms like Twitter and LinkedIn out of the IPO shadows.
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