It’s only been a month since international recruitment, outsourcing and offshoring firm, Harvey Nash, reported its rather pleasing FY results (see A definite spring in Harvey Nash’s step), so we weren’t expecting any surprises in today's trading update. It seems that the good news story continues, with Q1 revenues (to 30th April) up by 23% yoy and PBT up 32%. Mainland Europe is driving the recovery, with “modest” growth in the UK.

CEO Albert Ellis told me that he expects revenues from their £100m+ p.a. UK ITSA (IT staff agency) operations to rise again this year, though I would imagine matching last year’s 27% growth might be a bit of a stretch. He noted that demand in central and local government remained subdued but the market for SAP consultants had bounced back. He is still seeing 'friction' in the pipeline, a rather apt term referring to extended procurement approval cycles. This is even happening with low-order vacancies such as help desk support but is more acute with higher value positions. However, demand is still "robust", especially in banking and financial services.

Support services and BPO giant Serco has made its first major foray into offshore BPO. It is acquiring Mumbai, India-based Intelenet Global Services for a total of £385m, which will give it an additional 34 delivery centres across seven countries and some 32,000 employees. Customers are predominantly in the UK, the US and India where it is focused on the on the BFSI, healthcare and transport verticals, with customers including Barclays, State Bank of India, Travelport, Apria Healthcare, BSNL and Aircel. Serco is paying 2.2x Intelenet’s revenue of c£170m made in its year to 31 March 2011, and 20x operating profit! It also made an operating margin of 11% (although it has averaged 12% over the past three years), and has grown organically by 12% over that time. Serco will be expecting this to at least continue following closure of the deal.

Only last week Serco signed a new extended partnership with offshore provider iGate Patni for SAP services (see here), and prior to that in January, it renewed a BPO deal with Genpact for F&A BPO (see Serco renews BPO deal with Genpact). This latter deal may now be superfluous however since Intelenet already provides F&A services (plus contact centre, transaction processing and BPO consulting).

Serco said it will now have 40,000 employees focused on ‘BPO-related operations’, or c40% of its soon-to-be 100,000 strong workforce. This compares to rival Capita’s total headcount of 37,000. The acquisition shows that there are clear lines now being drawn between these two UK BPO giants in their direction of travel and plans for expansion. I will speak to Serco management this morning and then comment further in UKHotViewsExtra.

Following hot on the heels of its acquisition of Call Centre Technology (see Capita acquires call centre partner), Capita has bought healthcare recruitment firm Team24 Limited for a total potential of £26m, on a cash free debt free basis. Surrey-based Team24 employs 80 staff and provides short notice and temporary placements for c4,000 doctors and nurses for the NHS, prisons, doctors' surgeries and private practices. It also operates under a number of framework agreements, including the London Regional Nursing Framework (LRANF). Capita is paying 0.8x Team24’s revenue of £32.7m made in the year to 31 March 2011, and 6x pro forma operating profit.

BPO M&A is becoming a hot area right now. Rival Serco is also seeking M&A opportunities (see Serco buys Intelenet for offshore BPO entry), but while Serco is looking for significant international expansion in new markets, Capita is sticking to its knitting in growing market share in the UK. We know which strategy we would back!

It’s amazing what hold Apple now has. ‘An announcement of an announcement’ makes the front page of Financial Times and about 600 other news reports within an hour.

As we reported a week ago – Another killer App from Apple – Apple has tonight announced that it is to announce the iCloud next Monday. On top of that Steve Jobs, in person, is to do the announcing. No further details were given but it is really rare for Apple to say even that much in advance.

As we conjectured last week, at the very least iCloud will be a music streaming service. We hope it will allow users to upload their entire music collections to the iCloud (including those not bought from iTunes) and play/stream them “Anytime, Anywhere and on Any device”. Holway’s martini Moment gets better and better. Thus un-tethering your iPod/iPad/iPhone from its docking PC. But, of course, the service could be used for anything else you wanted to store in the iCloud – from documents to photos.

Apple is more and more turning itself into a Services company. It did that with iTunes and the Apps Store. iCloud could become a significant new revenue stream for Apple. Of course, there is no reason why the iCloud should be just for consumers. As the ‘consumer-isation of IT’ (or is that the ‘Apple-isation of IT’?) continues apace, the dividing lines between the consumer and the enterprise become increasingly blurred.

As expected, the markets lapped it up – particularly the return of Mr Jobs. Apple shares up over 3% tonight.

Footnote - The iCloud logo used in this article is from the previous owners of the iCloud.com URL. Apple is reputed to have paid over $5m for it a few months back.

Nokia shares fell by 18% today as (the Financial Times says) Embattled Nokia hit by profits warning. "Even my Nokia's standards, it was a stunner" said Lex. The forecast 6-9% operating margin in their Devices and Services divisions has evaporated. We’ve made our views known on Nokia (search the archives) and in our Thumbs down to Nokia/Microsoft partnership. We were actually quite positive for its effects on Microsoft but we saw it as pretty disastrous for Nokia. Indeed it was difficult to understand why anyone would buy a Nokia smartphone in the meanwhile. So why Nokia didn’t fully expect its market share to plummet is a bit beyond me.

The stakes in all this are huge. Up until now, there were two worlds – the PC/Laptop OS and the Smartphone OS. I think that in future the smartphone OS will prevail. Indeed it will be the one used on tablets (and laptops and desktops – there will continue to be a huge market for these too!) There really are now only two smartphone operating systems in contention – Apple and Android. Even RIM is now a distant also ran. Microsoft’s very existence depends on getting its mobile OS established. Nokia is its route to market. But, by the time we get a Microsoft powered Nokia smartphone, its marketshare might have slumped to 15%/also ran status too.

Sell in May and go away? So far that wouldn’t have been such a bad thing to do with both the NASDAQ and FTSE100 down over 1% in the month. Indeed the FTSE100 has given up most of its gains on the year.

UK Hardware (down c6%), Mobile Telecom (down 1.5%) and Support Services (down 1%) all registered falls. But the FTSE UK SCS Index still managed a 3.5% gain in May – that’s a near 7% gain for the YTD.

Our ‘Best Performer’ Lists are dominated by ‘old-stagers’. Indeed I seem to have been reporting on these companies since dinosaurs roamed the earth.

In the UK, Gresham was up 37% on very strong quarterly results. See Gresham marches on. Another old-stager which is really performing is Harvey Nash. Up 23% in the last month and around double what they were this time last year. Well done Albert and the team! See Harvey Nash still springing ahead. A word of warning though. The performance at Harvey Nash is generated by mainland Europe (in particular) NOT the UK.

Innovation Group (TIG) has also had a renaissance under new CEO Andy Roberts. Shares up 15% this month. See TIG eyes the magic 20%. This month Roberts also stepped down from the board of Kewill so he can dedicate his attentions to TiG.

Although Misys momentum picks up in Q3, it was rumour of a possible bid that sent their shares up c15% this month. Anite’s Q4 upswing also saw their shares up 14%

We wrote an article - Autonomy and the ‘Bin Laden bounce’- which conjectured about how many of the US agencies investigating the huge amount of data taken from Bin Laden’s lair were using Autonomy’s software. Whatever, their shares are up 12% in May. They also spent some of their cash-pile. See Autonomy mines Iron Mountain. Although this wasn’t the ‘Big One’ the market had long expected.

Monitise and Sanderson were also both up 10% on improving results.

In the UK, at the other end of the scale, Mouchel was down another 17%. See Mouchel free at last. Remember the Costain bid was at 164p. Mouchel shares are now 63p. If I was a Mouchel shareholder I would be feeling rather sick. Poor old Maxima continued to tumble – down a massive 28% See Wheels fall off Maxima. Tribal sent its suitors packing too which sent its shares down 12%. See Tribal ends uncertainty over ownership. After selling two of its divisions, it is now left with education which is not exactly strong right now. See Still early days for trimmed down Tribal.

On the international scene, CSC fell 22% this month when it issued a warning. The UK was blamed here too. See CSC shares fall as NHS blamed for FY11 downgrade.

Patni, now of course controlled by iGate, suffered margin pressures in its limbo period. Patni shares are down nearly 19%. Mastek continued a slide which has been going on for a year now– down another 16% this month. Conversely, Satyam is up 13%. Clearly a case of hope over experience.

Finally, as we report elsewhere in HotViews today – see Nokia tumbles – Nokia got the Wooden Spoon this month with a 24% dive on a ‘stunning’ profits warning. Nokia is now at a 13-year low.

AIM-listed, acquisitive, multi-brand (eight and counting!) hosting play, Iomart, seems to be pulling the right levers to sweat the assets. Revenues for the year to 31st March soared by 38% to £25.3m, including a 9% contribution from the October acquisition of Essex-based Titan Internet (see Iomart hosts tiny internet Titan). But the magic was in the profit, with operating margins at 11.0% (26% adjusted EBITDA) having just broken even-and-a-bit the prior year. EPS jumped 34% to 2.85p.

Iomart presents itself as a ‘game of two halves’, with most of the revenue (and cost base) attributed to its Hosting division (6 brands), but with similar absolute levels of operating profit coming from its much smaller, asset-light micro/SME web and domain hosting brands Easyspace and switchmedia. Whatever – it all seems to be working very nicely, and CEO Angus MacSween foresees more of the same.

Following the more promising update from Xchanging last month (see Xchanging’s reshaping gets underway), Xchanging has now sold off Cambridge Integrated Services Group (CISG), its troubled US workers’ compensation claims business, to third party administrator Sedgwick Claims Management Services for $22.7 (£13.8m) in cash - $3m of which will be held back in escrow for 18 months. In a conference call with investors, CE Ken Lever said the deal will “stop the bleeding of cash” from the US claims business, which he expected to have increased over time if Xchanging was to be successful in the market. Investors were certainly pleased by the news and pushed Xchanging’s shares up 9%.

Sedgwick is taking on “virtually all” of the contracts, assets, employees, current liabilities and future service obligations of CISG, as well as the liabilities. This includes CISG’s Medicare healthcare claims subsidiary Cambridge Galaher Settlements & Insurance Services. CISG is a sizeable operation. In FY10 ended 31 December, it had revenue of $113.4m, but made a loss before interest and tax of $8.2m.

The disposal can be nothing but good news for Xchanging. It brings to an end a painful US expansion following the now disastrous acquisition of Cambridge Solutions in 2008 (see Xchanging takes control of Indian partner). But it shows just how damaging the Cambridge acquisition has been to the company. As we noted back in February in Xchanging founder falls on his sword (update), Xchanging wrote off £100m, or two-thirds of the Cambridge business, but is retaining the offshore capability where it still sees value. Yesterday, we noted Serco’s £385m acquisition of Intelenet Global Services (see Serco’s expensive offshore gamble), and consider this to have many of the same risks, so we will be sure to keep an eye on how this one progresses.

But there is still a long way to go in Xchanging’s turnaround plan. The CISG disposal more than halves Xchanging’s US business, leaving it with a US ITO operation, certain BPO contracts for US customers, and an insurance software sales operation. This remaining US business (technology and procurement and HR) isn’t exactly the picture of health. In FY10 revenue declined 4% to £47.3m, and operating profits fell 25% to £4.2m. But Lever can’t fight fires on every front all at once, and at least this remaining US business is still profitable. He will now turn his attention to other “unsatisfactory” performing divisions such as its Italian Kedrios business, which won’t break even till 2013, and also continental Europe, where Xchanging needs to improve profitability, particularly in procurement and HR.

The perils of being a small UK software player serving mostly international markets does rather leave you at the mercy of currency exchange rates. Such was the case for London-based supplier of business process management software for broadcasting companies, Pilat Media Global, which turned a £0.26m pre-tax loss in Q1 (to 31st March) due to a £0.4m currency headwind. This was after a rather pleasingly profitable 2010 (see Record results at Pilat).

Revenues grew by 4% yoy to £5m (just 6% from the UK), with gross margins 6 points lower at 44%, mainly due to more implementation services and pass-through revenues. Underlying maintenance revenues rose by nearly 13% - good recurring stuff.

And herein lies their other challenge. Pilat seems to deliver implementation services itself, so the more successful it is selling licences, the greater the bottleneck in delivery. I don’t know them at all well, but if they haven’t any services partners yet in place, now might be a good time to start looking!

In its maiden set of annual results, Digital Barriers, the ‘buy-and-build’ homeland security market specialist run by ex-Detica CEO Tom Black, reported revenue of £6.6m, for the thirteen months ended 31 March 2011, and a loss before tax of £4.6m. This was its first year of operation.

Digital Barriers has been extremely acquisitive in its first year as a public company, snapping up five companies, the most recent of which was of Essential Viewing Systems in March (see Digital Barriers acquisition is Essential Viewing). These deals have obviously eaten into its £55m cash pile raised at the IPO (see here) and subsequent executive and share fund raising for exactly that purpose, although at the end of the period it still had £33.5m in the bank, which no doubt Black could put to good use towards future M&A. Revenue in the current financial year is likely to be considerably higher due in large part to the acquisitions, although the bottom line needs to get into the black.

I was very pleased to learn today that the Intellect Regent Conference has been short-listed for the ‘Event of the Year’ by the Trade Association Forum. Now in its 17^th year, winning the award would be a great testimony to Peter Rowell, Chairman of Regent who died on 18th May and whose funeral took place today. See Peter Rowell.

Peter established the Regent Conference back in 1995 and I think either myself or Anthony Miller have presented at every one since. The only person who beat that record was Peter himself who gave the closing session every year. He will be greatly missed.

I’ve written many articles and answered many questions from the media, customers and at conferences about whether we are in another ‘Bubble’. After the “Dot.com Bubble” of the late 1990s, many think we are now in a 'Social Networking Bubble’.

My answer everytime is that the last time “A rising tide lifts all ships” applied. Stocks rose across the tech board – regardless of whether the companies had any connection with the internet. This time, the ‘Bubble’ seems to be confined only to those companies related to Social Media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and a thousand ‘me-toos’’) The vast majority of quoted SITS (and tech) stocks, we contend, are still fairly priced and have not ‘benefited/suffered’ from the bubble.

So I was really pleased to see George O’Connor (Panmure Gordon) latest sector valuation report entitled 'No froth here'. It contained an excellent chart which shows that the average ‘long run average P/E’ was 17.6x. Despite a modest increase since 2009, today it is still under that at 16.7x. And, of course, it is a half the high of 34x it reached in the Q1 2000 just before the dot.com bubble burst. Indeed Sage is currently on a P/E of 14.0. Back in early 2000, having been named as a UK Internet Stock, it was 182! It then had a share price of £10 and, despite increasing its EPS every year since, today Sage shares are 285p.

The BBC’s Today Programme is headlining on news that up to 100 'back office technical' jobs are to be offshored to India from Service Birmingham, Birmingham City Council’s IT and BPO joint venture with Capita, by the end of 2011. As we noted here Glyn Evans, Birmingham’s corporate director of business change, and man who led the transformation programme and subsequent Service Birmingham JV, moved last month to take the role of SOCITM president. Evans will no doubt be breathing a sigh of relief today.

While this kind of announcement is sure to enrage the unions, we are more sanguine since this is by no means the first time offshoring has taken place in local government outsourcing, or indeed in the broader public sector. In Tola Sargeant’s report Offshore suppliers in the public sector, there are a number of examples of offshoring taking place in public sector joint ventures and in local government. Suppliers have been using offshore services as part of their service delivery arsenal for some time, helping them reduce the cost of delivering application services, IT support and even back office administration for their clients. Some of this goes on ‘under the covers’ but there are plenty of examples where it goes on explicitly. So the offshoring issue really isn’t anything new.

But the trend is definitely accelerating as public sector now grapples to make unprecedented cost savings. In the past eighteen months, we have seen the first major local and central government outsourcing take place with Indian heritage company TCS at Cardiff Council (see here) and the £600m BPO deal at the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority (PADA) (see here) – PADA will have as much as 60% of its development staff located offshore, whereas Cardiff does not give any explicit plans.

Where things become less clear is how offshoring impacts plans for investments in the ‘onshore’ staff, such as in the retraining of personnel and moving them into other higher value areas such as front line services. In the Service Birmingham example, the council says it is on track to meet its target for the creation of 700 jobs by 2013. But if offshoring is to be seen as more than just a cost cutting exercise, more needs to be made of the resulting initiatives onshore to improve front line services through skills development, training and resourcing.

So Groupon is to be the latest in the IPO rush centred around social technologies. The IPO would raise $750m and might see a valuation for Groupon of c$20b. Groupon generated revenues of $713m and made a loss of $456m in 2010- although revenues of $645m were reported in the first 3 months of 2011. So growth is pretty impressive. In the interests of research, I both tested Groupon and tried to ‘stick with it’. But todate have never found any offer I found remotely of interest. But, clearly, others do so it must be just me and my peculiar interests.

But my real worry is how easy the Groupon business model is to copy. I can see the Google and, in particular, Facebook equivalents proving powerful competition to Groupon. The FT article today, however, believes that the Groupon model can expand beyond selling just coupons. “Groupon could become one of the most influencial forces in retail merchandising” – although the quote was ascribed to a Groupon investor!

As readers know, I am a huge supporter of the game-changing nature of the current social technologies ‘revolution’. But I am equally fearful that we are creating a valuation ‘bubble’ of the like we saw with internet stocks in 1999/2000. The problem with bubbles is that when they burst they created collateral and lasting damage. An orderly and fairly priced market is so much more preferable.

At the 2010 Regent Conference a year and more ago, I regaled the audience with a very personal view of how I thought the IT services world would look in 2020 (see 2020 Vision – IT Services: Visioners, Assemblers and Deliverers). I posited a fundamental restructure of the industry into three categories of players: Visioners (evolving from today’s consultants); Assemblers (nowadays often referred to as ‘service integrators’); and Deliverers (infrastructure provisioning). Visioners and Assemblers would be ‘asset light’ and rely on partnering with Deliverers to ‘deliver’ transactions (or, as I called them, ‘interactions’) to end-users.

Well, I think I may have found my first example of a real ‘Deliverer’, in the shape of Colt. Note – not Colt Telecom, as they were branded until a year ago. Just plain Colt. And they ‘do’ infrastructure, both network and IT. Their strapline, as I discovered when I met top management yesterday, is ‘The Information Delivery Platform for European Businesses’. Substitute ‘interaction’ for ‘information’ and there we have it – a true Deliverer!

Over the past couple of years, CEO Rakesh Bhasin has undertaken a major ‘refresh’ of the management team and re-plotted Colt’s course as a wholesale and retail supplier of network and IT infrastructure provisioning services. Earlier this year, Bhasin appointed ex-Computacenter UK MD, Simon Walsh, to run Colt’s European enterprise (i.e. ‘retail’) business (see Colt’s cloud challenge).

Bhasin has now eschewed any ambition for Colt to play directly in the traditional IT system integration and outsourcing game to concentrate on the ‘knitting’ i.e. infrastructure, shedding much of Colt's low-margin co-lo activities along the way.

There is much more to tell, and I am sure I will do so in future posts.

The stratospheric valuations blessing the major social networking players have yet to rub off on AIM-listed social media SaaS pure-play, SocialGo (see SocialGo – the DIY social network). The company was moved to issue a rather anodyne market update ahead of Friday’s AGM, prompted (I assume) by a massive sell-off of its stock last Friday which knocked over 25% off its share price.

SocialGo listed on AIM in 2004 as Bright Things, a developer of a prototype interactive educational children’s toy, the Genie, “a new educational games platform aimed at the pre-school market using the functionality of a DVD player”. Obviously the business model changed between then and now – as did much of top management. Current CEO, Alex Halliday, informed that SocialGo's sales are in line with management’s expectations and that they were operating in a “dynamic and fast-evolving market”. Ne’er truer word was spoke!

It's been another busy couple of weeks at TechMarketView.

We published three UKHotViewsExtra comments exclusively for our Foundation Service subscribers. In HP’s services margins in the clouds, our research director for Business Process Services, John O’Brien commented on how HP hopes to deliver higher value services in ‘the cloud’ following its recent EMEA analyst event. He also explored why Serco is making the bold move to acquire Indian offshore BPO provider Intelenet Global Services in Serco’s expensive offshore gamble. And our managing partner, Anthony Miller commented on the stalled integration of Mahindra Satyam and Tech Mahindra in Mahindra Satyam (update).

TechMarketView was quoted widely in the press once again. John’s comments on the impact of offshoring local government jobs in Service Birmingham considers offshoring were picked up by Computerworld, as was the interesting line up (and omission) of suppliers in Atos among winners in £300m Scottish IT framework, here. Anthony spoke with Computerworld on CSC’s increasingly troubled involvement in the NHS NPfIT here.

One of the highlights was our chairman Richard Holway’s Dinner with Sheryl Sanberg, COO of Facebook. Richard came away thinking she is one of the most impressive COOs he has ever met. Richard also commented on the signs of another potential dot com bubble appearing in the social media space following LinkedIn's 'fireworks' IPO here, and also in No froth here and FreeJellyBeans.com 2.0. You may also have seen his comments on Nokia’s continuing woes in Nokia Tumbles on CNBC.com, and his views on the need for new UK IT apprenticeships in Computing. He also paid tribute here to friend Peter Rowell, chairman of Regent Associates, who sadly passed away last month.

The Hotviews archive really is the most valuable repository of knowledge and views. We might be a bit biased but we never do anything without searching the archive for past views on a company or topic. Hugely valuable and only available to our paying Foundation Service clients.

To get access to the UKHotViews archive, UKHotViewsExtra and all the other TechmarketView Foundation Service research on the UK SITS market, just email Deborah Seth (dseth@techmarketview.com).

We didn’t think we’d have to wait long to see M&A activity from Calyx, which you may remember is backed by Jon Moulton’s investment fund Better Capital and led by CEO Fiona Timothy (whose achievements include transforming COA Solutions - see Calyx has three new faces). Today we can report on not one, but two strategic, bolt-on acquisitions by Calyx's Software division. Calyx Software is acquiring a division of Touchstone Group, which supplies integrated business software to mid-sized UK organisations, and Trinity Computer Services, which specializes in wholesale and distribution applications based on Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains. Touchstone is an 'old soldier' that we've been writing about for many years. It de-listed from AIM in 2009 (see the Hotviews archive for the whole story).

Calyx looks to have got a good deal. Better Capital is advancing £6m to Calyx for the two businesses suggesting the purchase price is roughly 1x revenues – Trinity turned over £2.9m in the year to September 2010, while the Touchstone division brought in £3.2m in FY11. The businesses, which Timothy says are both profitable and cash generative, add critical mass and vertical capability to Calyx's Great Plains reseller business and fit with its strategy of supporting mid-sized organisations. Indeed, according to Better Capital, the transactions will make Calyx the UK’s largest Microsoft Dynamics GP reseller with more than 500 customers.  

No doubt we'll be reporting on more bolt-on acquisitions from Calyx in due course. But the larger managed services side of the business (accounting for some 75-80% of Calyx's total revenues) could well be the next to benefit. 

To be honest, I haven’t been paying much attention to India-based Hexaware for quite some time. I had met management in India while I was in equities research, but as the company is a relatively small player in the market (2010 worldwide revenues of $230m) they hadn’t yet appeared on my UK radar.

But what piqued my curiosity to meet up with Hexaware Europe head, Ramanan Seshadri, was recent news of a $25m remote infrastructure management deal with an existing client in Europe (no names, no pack drill). Unlike its much larger peers, Hexaware’s European business – now 28% of total revenues – is heavily skewed to the Continent, with the UK making up a little over 20% of European revenues. But in recent quarters, Seshadri has signed 11 new clients in his patch, 8 in the UK – the mix is starting to change.

You can do the sums yourselves – Hexaware is unlikely to become a ranking player in the UK market any time soon. But it is winning share, mostly while working under the wings of the ‘usual suspect’ SIs. There is still room – and room to grow quite aggressively – in the UK market for small-scale India-based players with well-established reputations. Hexaware is now on my radar.

Within 30 minutes of Apple's Steve Jobs leaving the stage of the WWDC Conference, over 1600 news items on iCloud appears on Google News. So I won’t give you a blow-by-blow account of all the new features of iOS 5 and Lion – you can read all that elsewhere. (Eg See FT Apple iCloud and more) But the features just take Apple further and further ahead of the competition.

The real ‘meat’ was iCloud. As I listened to Jobs I really feared that  iTunes on iCloud would be limited to just the tunes you had bought from Apple. But then, in his usual ‘just one more thing’, Jobs announced iTunes Match which was exactly the kind of service we envisaged all those years ago when in 203 we introduced Holway’s Martini Moment “Anytime, Anywhere on Any Device”. For $29.99 a year. without uploading a single track, all the music on your ‘teathered PC’ which you currently have to laboriously sync with all those devices like your iPod, iPhone and iPad, will be mirrored on the iCloud and made available for streaming to any Apple device you might own. To repeat that includes all the CDs you have copied into your iTunes collection. There is no other service remotely like that. Google and Amazon require you to upload your music and even then doesn’t have licences in place with most music providers. Spotify cost $10 a month.

On top of that iCloud stores all your photos, videos, newspapers, magazines, Apps, documents, mail, contacts, calendars etc and renders them to any Apple device.

Apart from being just very neat, iCloud could just be the service – the glue – that tips many people to go ‘All Apple’. The beauty of the iTunes ecosystem is that once you’ve set up your library you really can only buy Apple products to play your music. Now iCloud really only works to maximum advantage if everything you use is Apple. Already, Apple share of the laptop market goes up and up. This is yet another reason to buy an MacBook rather than a Dell. An iPhone rather than an Android. An iPad rather than all those other ‘me-too’ tablets. Also, if you subscribe to our BYOT (Bring Your Own Tech) into the Enterprise, then the argument for that tech to be Apple just got even stronger. 

 Apple reckon they have sounded the death knell of the PC. For 30 years, almost every user has had one ‘central PC’ from which an increasing array of devices are synched. iCloud makes that redundant. Now you don’t need a PC at all. Apple has even dubbed it ‘PC Free’ – all you need is a WiFi network and iCloud.  If I was Microsoft I would have gone from concern to downright despair.

Footnote – It was interesting to see how far Apple had gone to integrate Twitter into iOS 5. New Apps now seamlessly integrate Camera, Photo etc into a one-stop Twitter. Bluntly, Apple should go the whole hog and buy Twitter. Afterall, social networking is the one bit of the current jigsaw that Apple doesn’t have.