Liste Newsletter

Index Performances
EPITEX, EPITA’S INDEX, Dec. 17, 2004: 81.80 (EPITEX set at 100 on Aug. 31, 2001)

News

MARKET FOCUS

U.S. stocks ended lower on Friday, as concern over cardio-vascular risk associated with Pfizer’s pain-killer Celebrex weighed on the drug sector.

The IT sector had some bearish news in store as well, with maker of handheld devices PalmOne issuing a profit warning, while network product maker 3Com after reporting smaller-than-expected sales.

The market is also running out of steam after getting a boost from a slew of merger announcements, including Sprint’s planned acquisition of Nextel Communications in a $36-billion deal, Oracle’s $10.3-billion takeover of PeopleSoft and Symantec’s $13.5-billion purchase of Veritas Software.

OUTLOOK

With the “quadruple witching” expiration of options and futures contracts, the market is headed for quieter trading, with the markets closed on Friday for the Christmas holiday.

THE NUMBERS

The Dow Jones Industrial Average gave up 55 points, or 0.5 percent, to 10,649. The Nasdaq Composite index lost 10 points, or 0.5 percent, to 2,135 while the Nasdaq-100 index of large capitalization tech and biotech stocks ended off 0.6 percent at 1,596.

Profile

Technology analyst firm The 451 Group said, in a 451 Special Report, the second wave of virtualization is carrying the storage industry.

Analysts at The 451 Group note that momentum is finally building after more than four years of product development and over $4.2 billion in reported deal values for M&A activity in this space since December 2000.

The report coincides with several key developments within the storage industry over the past few weeks, including the merger announcement between Symantec and Veritas Software; Maxxan securing $29 million in additional venture funding; and EMC’s plans for its Storage Router product, which performs virtualization out-of-band and will initially run on Cisco Systems’ intelligent switch platform.

Unlike the first wave of storage virtualization, which was focused on simple block-level virtualization, 451 analysts believe there is more substance and sustainability than hype this time around.

Storage virtualization will also be a key foundation technology that enables the development of heterogeneous storage services, which, in turn, will help enable emerging computing models, including ILM and utility computing.

451 analysts believe the core drivers of the second wave are storage infrastructures are becoming more complex and diverse; new virtualization technologies; new storage applications; and major storage array vendors are now embracing virtualization, with EMC, HDS and IBM driving this trend.