Vendor strategy N57

Sagem and Snecma will merge as expected and the combined entity will take the name of Safran. Sagem has gained control on more than 83% of Snecma equity. Safran will have some 55,000 employees.

Benefiting from real successes with air flight companies with its Connexion by Boeing (an in-flight cellular connexion system), Boeing will start marketing the product to the maritime market next year. Remember (Telcoflash N54) that Ericsson has entered this market through a deal with Norway’s Maritime Communications Partner.

IBM and Novell teamed to accelerate the development of new applications based on Novell's free OS LINUX on IBM eServer and middleware platforms.

IBM targets to increase sales of its WebSphere family of middleware, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Portal, and WebSphere Information Integrator, as pieces of a platform on which a hosted-application service could be built. While IBM does not intent to address this market directly, it will address the software-as-a-service vendors.

Oracle has bought Retek for $681m, beating SAP in the last mile.

Alcatel could be in talks with Thales on the future of its satellite business. Synergy on that domain between Alcatel (civil) and Thales (defense) is obvious, but a previous pact prevents one to eat in the other plate, except if…. they agree to combine their businesses. In exchange of the deal, Thales should be prepared to give Alcatel up to 30% stake. Alcatel CEO recently said that he wanted Alcatel's relationship with Thales to evolve, but at the same time has cut its stake in Thales from 25% to less than 10%, and expressed interest in selling it.