Technology stocks have had a nice run in 2007, largely thanks to healthy demand for PCs with new software products, and exciting new gadgets like Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. The sector moved up in the first half of 2007, then retreated during the summer and autumn, along with many other sectors, amid worries about the U.S. economy caused by the subprime mortgage meltdown. So far this year, through Dec. 13, the Standard & Poor’s Information Technology index gained 15.9%, handily beating the 4.9% rise in the S&P 500-stock index.

Standard & Poor’s Equity Research has an overweight opinion on the information technology sector and an associated positive fundamental outlook. We believe technology companies and stocks should benefit from healthy domestic spending from enterprises and on consumer electronics, strong international demand, and new product and upgrade cycles.

We also see valuations as attractive, especially on a price-earnings-to-growth basis. Moreover, we believe many technology companies are rightly focused on delivering shareholder value, and are employing buybacks, strategic mergers and acquisitions, and restructuring/realignment efforts to provide it.

Here’s the first of a two-part rundown of our IT analysts’ outlooks for tech subindustries and stocks, covering semiconductors, chip equipment, computer hardware, storage, electronic manufacturing services, and systems software. Part 2, featuring outlooks on application software, Internet software and services, home entertainment software, IT consulting and data processing services, and telecommunications services and communications equipment, will follow on Dec. 24.

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IBM is buying Solid Information Technology, a maker of high-performance databases and a close partner of IBM rival MySQL.

Solid makes an embedded database with in-memory database engine, which means it can store and retrieve data from main memory, giving faster performance than traditional disk-based systems.

That makes it popular for applications that require very fast processing times, such as routing calls in a phone network or trading stocks. Solid’s customers include Cisco Systems, Siemens, TeliaSonera and Nokia, according to its Web site.

IBM agreed to acquire the company for an undisclosed sum and expects the deal to close in the first quarter of 2008, IBM announced Friday. It said the deal will enhance its database line-up by adding real-time data access capabilities. IBM rival Oracle acquired an in-memory database two years ago, from TimesTen.

The IBM acquisition may be seen as a setback for MySQL, since it marks the loss of independence of another company that makes a high-performance transaction engine for MySQL’s database.

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After holding off on the release of a faster iPhone because of concerns about battery life, is Apple really prepared to take a step backward with Intel’s Silverthorne chip?

AppleInsider reported Friday that Apple has decided to use Intel’s upcoming low-power Silverthorne chip in “not one but multiple products currently situated on its 2008 calendar year product roadmap.” Silverthorne is Intel’s latest push to capture the handheld/mobile phone market as part of a product concept called the Mobile Internet Device.

The report goes on to say that the most likely candidates for Silverthorne are a 3G iPhone and the Newton-like tablet computer that AppleInsider reported on earlier in the year. Based on what we know about Silverthorne, I think the subtablet rumor might make sense, but a Silverthorne iPhone is unlikely.

Intel plans to release more details about Silverthorne at the Intenational Solid State Circuits Conference in February, but we already know from the advance program, and from what Intel said about the chip last year, that we can expect Silverthorne to behave like a much smaller 2004-era Pentium M processor that consumes just a watt or two of power, compared with the 35 watts consumed by Intel’s Core 2 Duo notebook processors of today.

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Microsoft Corp. said today that it would post the release candidate of Windows XP Service Pack 3 to its download site tonight.

The move marks the first opportunity for all users of the six-year-old operating system to try out its final upgrade. Previously, several thousand users were given access to test builds of SP3 only by Microsoft’s invitation.

According to a company spokeswoman, the version that debuts today, dubbed a “release candidate” to note progress from earlier betas, will be available from the Microsoft Download Center. She was unable, however, to say when the service pack would post to Windows Update so users can download and install it with the company’s update service.

The final version of Windows XP SP3 remains slated for delivery sometime in the first half of 2008, the spokeswoman said. She also warned off casual users from trying the preview. “As this is a release candidate, we strongly encourage only those who are comfortable installing prerelease code to download Windows XP SP3,” she said.

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Google is working to fix a bug in the Google Toolbar that could allow criminals to steal data or install malicious software on a system, a security researcher warned Tuesday.

The flaw lies in the mechanism Google Toolbar uses to add new buttons on the browser. Because the toolbar does not perform adequate checks when new buttons are being installed, a hacker could make his button appear as though it was being downloaded from a legitimate site when in fact it came from somewhere else. By spoofing the origin of the toolbar button, an attacker could download malicious files or launch a phishing attack against the victim, wrote security researcher Aviv Raff in a blog post on the issue.

Raff has posted proof of concept code, showing how such an attack would work with the Internet Explorer browser. A Google spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday that the company is working to fix the problem.

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After sitting on the sidelines for about five years, PC giant Dell (DELL) is making its first foray into the market for touch-screen computers known as tablet PCs.

The devices hit store shelves in the late 1990s amid high hopes their introduction would help reverse the PC industry’s flagging fortunes. Things didn’t quite work out that way. So why is Dell dabbling in tablets? Analysts say the move is indicative of a newly aggressive Dell, eager to win business lost to such rivals as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Lenovo.
Filling a Product Gap

Tablets PCs typically boast a touch-sensitive screen that lets users “type” with a finger or a pen-shaped stylus. The devices should account for roughly 7% of the personal computing market in a matter of years, from about 3% now, says analyst Richard Shim of market research firm IDC.

Since other vendors like HP and Lenovo, and even Gateway, a newly acquired unit of Acer, have had tablet PCs in their product lineup, Dell may have lost some sales to large corporate customers, Shim says. “Dell needs to protect the accounts that it has, and so at least some of the motivation to launch this product is account protection,” Shim says. “Dell wants to offer its biggest accounts the widest product portfolio it can.”

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Nokia continues to pursue the emerging near-field communications technology with an investment in Inside Contactless.

Nokia Growth Partners, the private equity and venture capital arm of Nokia, led a US$38 million round of investments in Inside Contactless, the fabless semiconductor company that makes contactless chip platforms. Nokia did not reveal how much of the investment it contributed.

The French company plans to use the investment to speed up its expansion into international markets and broaden its product portfolio. Its MicroPass technology is already in place in U.S. shops including some McDonald’s and 7-Eleven stores, as well as in Coca-Cola vending machines, New York City and Philadelphia taxi cabs, and major sporting venues including Fenway Park.

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ISCDFW Success Story

Jack,

I just wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know we used the foam inserts you recommended for our rack mount drawers and they worked GREAT! The inserts were perfectly sized for our shallow 2U rack-mount drawers and the tear-out feature allowed us to easily create a custom shaped bed for a 17” free standing LCD flat screen monitor. The drawer itself is installed in a small portable video rack used for field work and will on occasion need to be shipped overseas. Normally I’d be packaging and shipping the monitor separately from the video rack itself but not now. I’m confident that your FI-2 foam insert will protect it perfectly on any trip it has to make. Before talking to you we had also briefly considered buying an “off the shelf” foam sheet and attempting to cut it into a suitable shape. Thankfully that hassle has been neatly avoided. Thanks again for your help with this!

James Rivera
Staff Engineer
Remote Systems Engineering – Video Inspections

Information Support Concepts (ISC) has discontinued the monthly product special. Since we are now running weekly specials with much deeper discounts, it made sense for the monthly special to be replaced. We will now have a featured product each month, and direct our customers back to the weekly special for discounted items.
To help us bridge the gap as we move forward, and to provide emphasis for the weekly special, this month’s featured product is a review of what you missed in November. So here are the items that were the weekly special throughout the month of November. You can click on this link to see the current weekly product special!
This is a special page on our main website showing that week’s special. Quantities are limited, so when the special sells out, they will no longer be available.
You never know what is going to be on special, so it will be well worth it for bargain hunters to check out our site every week. New items will appear each Wednesday, so you don’t want to wait as you might miss out on some spectacular deals.

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SAP unveiled on Tuesday the first in a new generation of business software products that focus on ease of use, borrowing tools that have drawn hundreds of millions of users to Google .

The German company is the world’s biggest maker of business management software and, while analysts generally praise its broad line of products for their deep functionality and analytical abilities, they say they are difficult to use.

SAP Vice President Ian Kimbell demonstrated the first in a new line of software dubbed SAP CRM 2007 at a conference attended by some 500 industry analysts and customers in Boston. “It didn’t look like SAP,” said Daryl Ganas, director of sales and marketing operations for Intel , one of several companies that has helped SAP test the software. “It felt and looked to me like something my sales people would use,” he said in an interview

The software can be customized by each user with as much flexibility and ease as one might be able to customize an iGoogle page, or myYahoo page, officials with SAP said.

They said SAP plans to roll out versions of software other than customer relationship management, or CRM, though they declined to discuss the timetable.

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Red Hat, Inc. has launched a real-time version of Linux, aimed at applications needing predictable responses, from process control to financial market traders.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG (Messaging, Realtime, Grid) includes features such as high-speed inter-application messaging based on the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), whose performance Red Hat reckoned it had improved 100-fold. At the U.K. launch, Red Hat VP Scott Crenshaw could not explain how this was achieved. Other representatives said that details will be available on the company’s blog.

MRG also allows customers to “steal” unused desktop CPU cycles, to manage distributed workloads, to schedule tasks across both local and remote grids and to use cloud capacity from Amazon EC2. The distributed computing capabilities originated from Red Hat’s collaboration with the University of Wisconsin and its high-throughput computing project, Condor. The code for this portion of the system is open source under an OSI-approved license.

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