Megabuyte - Technology sector intelligence

Please note that today's was the last Megabuyte Newswire of 2011. We will of course be keeping up with sector news over Christmas and posting on the website as necessary but we will not be publishing the Newswire again until Tuesday 3rd January. So it just remains for us to thank all of our readers for their interest and support during 2011 and wish you a Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year.

We are delighted to announce the launch of Megabuyte@finnCap, a service delivered by I S Research on behalf of leading independent broker finnCap, which will bring the quoted company element of the Megabuyte service to many of the City’s leading fund managers for the first time.

The service, which is only available to a selected list of finnCap’s key institutional fund management clients, provides a subset of the content contained in the Megabuyte service including our analysis and commentary on the majority of the quoted companies covered under the Megabuyte service. In addition, the service includes our coverage of the results of many of the leading technology companies globally as well as our sector commentary giving regular features on themes in the sector around M&A, valuations and technology trends.

The service is designed to augment finnCap’s existing coverage of the technology sector and will only include companies not already covered by finnCap’s in-house research team.

For more details of the service, please visit www.finncap.megabuyte.com

We are delighted to announce that we have started work on a major new initiative for Megabuyte which currently has the working title of Megabuyte People (and may well end up being the actual title). As the name suggests, Megabuyte People will be a database of all of the directors sitting on the boards of the 200+ companies we currently follow in Megabuyte.

In addition to a brief biography of the director, each profile will show all of the current directorships of that individual and, as the database develops, a record of all of his or her past directorships. Also, as with our company database, the People database will be fully searchable so users will be able, for example, to look for all of the CEOs within privately owned banking & insurance software companies.

As well as a useful resource in its own right, we see the creation of the Megabuyte People database as the first step in enabling greater on-line communication and networking bewteen our community of users.

Our team of analysts is working hard on the database and we expect to launch it to Premium Plus subscribers in April. We will of course bring you more details on this exciting new element to our service nearer to the launch date.

Just a reminder for users that this morning was the last Newswire of 2010. We will of course be keeping up with sector news over Christmas and posting on the website as neccessary but we will not be publishing the Newswire again until 4th January. So it just remains for us to thank all of our readers for their interest and support during 2010 and wish you a Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year.

This is a final notice that we will shortly discontinue the Free element to the Megabuyte service as it currently exists. If you are currently a Free user, you have three options. First, if you qualify for Forum membership (main board director of a UK based technology company), you will automatically continue to be able to access the Free element of the Daily Newswire.

If, however, you do not qualify for Forum membership, you will need to subscribe to either the Premium or the Premium Plus Megabuyte service. If you think you might like to subscribe, please contact us using the contact box here or call us on 01189 001 360 and we will talk you through subscription options and pricing. As a reminder, our annual price increases will be effective from 1 Jan 2011.

If you do not fall into one of the first two groups, your account will be removed from the system next week. For more information on these changes, please visit the Service Update section of our website here.

As 2010 draws to a close, we can reflect on a year of substantial development for Megabuyte. Perhaps the most striking element to the development of the service during 2010 has been the dramatic increase in coverage. Earlier in the year, we started covering the telecoms sector and, because of this and our ongoing development in the software & IT services sector, the number of companies under coverage has doubled to 200 during 2010.

Private Company coverage

It is not only the number of companies under coverage that has increased; the type of companies we cover has also changed. Specifically, we have focussed on increasing the proportion of companies under coverage that are privately owned. As a result, nearly 50% of the companies we cover today are privately owned, compared to around 10% a year ago. Whilst we remain committed to our public company coverage, our users tell us that, by also covering privately owned technology companies, the value of the service has immeasurably increased.

Global View

In addition to building out our UK company coverage, we have also introduced our Global View service where we monitor the financial performance of around 50 of the world’s leading technology companies. We feel that this provides an important adjunct to the UK company coverage and helps users to put the performance and strategic direction of UK companies into an appropriate context.

More to come in 2011…

We are proud of what we have achieved to date but, equally, we also believe that we have only scratched the surface of the potential for Megabuyte coverage. So, during 2011, we intend to maintain the pace of new companies coming onto the database (around 2 a week) and, in doing so, we also expect to continue to broaden our coverage into adjacent areas of the technology sector such as IT hardware and new media.

As we continue to build our coverage, we are also increasingly aware that, as our database grows, we need to invest in tools and functions that will help subscribers to more effectively access our content. Consequently, we will shortly be introducing MyMegabuyte which is the umbrella title for a series of tools and functions (including MyPeerGroups, MySubscriptions and MyDashBoard) designed to help users access the content that is important to them more quickly and effectively. We will be releasing more details of MyMegabuyte nearer to the 1 Jan launch.

2011 pricing

As long standing subscribers will know, we review our prices each year and we will be doing the same this year. In recognition of the investment in content and technology over the last 12 months our Premium subscription price will increase from £1,295 to £1,795 and our Premium Plus subscription price will go up from £1,995 to £2,995. In addition, whilst Company subscribers will have the choice of Premium or Premium Plus; Investors and Advisers will be required to take the Premium Plus option. These changes will take effect from 1 Jan 2011.

As Megabuyte enters its fourth year, we are once again looking at the structure of the service and how we can best serve our subscribers. Much has changed since Megabuyte started as a free blog in August 2007. The service has matured from a simple news feed covering only quoted software and IT services companies to a company intelligence database monitoring over 200 public and privately owned software, IT and telecoms companies. At the same time, our readership and brand awareness in the industry have expanded dramatically. Also, importantly, we have launched the Megabuyte Forum; our networking group for senior directors of UK based mid and later stage technology companies.

Proud of our achievements; ready for the next step

We are rightly proud of what we have achieved but, equally, we feel that there is a great deal that we can still do to improve and enhance the service. Specifically, we now feel that the time is right to make changes to the structure of megabuyte.com to achieve two main aims. First, to provide users with a more coherent user experience across the three main elements of our content; Company Intelligence, Forum and Equity Research and, secondly, to put the user at the centre of our services, rather than the content, which is the case at the moment. By doing so, we will provide users with much greater control over how our content is presented to them on the website, how they can interrogate the database and, also, what content is pushed to them vie e-mail alerts etc.

With this in mind, we have just kicked off a major development project, entitled Megabuyte 2.0, which will facilitate these two main aims. We expect the bulk of these changes to be implemented over the next six months with the first main release in December.

Free Newswire switch off

Ahead of the first release in a few weeks, we need to notify all users of the free Megabuyte Newswire service that, as part of the Megabuyte 2.0 programme, from 1 January 2011, we will be restricting access to this free element to Megabuyte Forum members. Consequently, those users currently on the free service who are not eligible to become a Forum member will need to subscribe to one of two Premium subscription options in order to continue to benefit from the service. Our client services manager Monique Krefting will be contacting all free users over the next few weeks to help them understand their options ahead of the changes on 1 January.

As a reminder, membership to the Forum is free and open to main board directors of UK based public and privately owned technology companies with revenues in excess of £5m. Whilst we observe these criteria strictly, exceptions can be made but solely at our discretion. Not only will Forum members continue to receive our free morning Newswire, they will also see a substantial increase in the level of research available exclusively to Forum members as we move through 2011.

Just a reminder to all users that as we enter the summer quiet period, Megabuyte will be moving onto its summer running schedule. This means that for two weeks from today, there will be no morning Newswire. We will of course keep subscribers informed of any significant stories that come out during that period and we will be back with the full service from Monday 23rd August. .

This note concerns all Megabuyte Forum members who have already registered to attend the Megabuyte Quarterly Review – Making your investor relations effor count

We're sorry to say that we have had a double whammy of cock-ups on this event. First of all, the initial invitation contained the wrong date. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, we realised that the automated acceptance system wasn’t sending confirmations through at our end, so, as of today, we do not know who has registered to attend the event. Perhaps more importantly, we don’t know who has registered to attend on the wrong day.

Please could all members that have already registered to attend do so again. Immediately following this e-mail, we will resend the invitation and would be very grateful if you could click the accept button if you wish to attend, even if you have already done so. Alternatively, you can simply confirm your attendance at the event by replying to this e-mail.

Please note that this event is on 5th July not the 2nd as originally stated in the first invitation that went out.

Back in February, we added two new user tools to Megabuyte Premium which we feel have made mining our extensive database of companies much more efficient. We sent out a service alert at the time notifying users of the upgrades but it seems that, in many cases, our message has been lost in the e-mail tsunami. So we thought we would have another go – there are two main elements to the database search functions as follows:

Company filter

There are now around 160 companies in the Megabuyte database and we have plans to add over 50 more (mainly private) companies during 2010. Premium Plus users can now search for a company or group of companies using a number of criteria including size, ownership status or peer group. So, for example, a user might use the company filter to find all of the privately owned companies in the Business Management Software sector.

Archive Search

The Megabuyte database now contains over 1,500 individual items of research and commentary from the News, Analysis and Sector Commentary sections of the website. Furthermore, each item is tagged with one of five areas of interest (Industry trends, M&A, results & trading, fundraising and people moves). These criteria can be used together so that, for example, a user could search for all of the M&A news within the Government & Healthcare sector over the last 12 months.

Feedback from users that have already discovered the Company Filter has underlined just how powerful this tool can be so we are keen to encourage more users to unlock that power. The company filter and archive search functionality can be found in the side bar of the Megabuyte Database landing page here. It’s a quiet Friday – why not give it a go now?

As Cloud computing gains momentum, there has been a great deal of analysis on how it will impact the enterprise and how the technology stack will develop. However, there has been less research undertaken on how the move to Cloud computing will impact the vendor community outside of the US majors.

In response to this knowledge gap, I S Research is launching a major research study into the impact of Cloud computing on UK based software authors. In undertaking this study, which is supported by Rave Technologies, I S Research will interview many of the UK’s leading software CEOs in order to understand how the move to SaaS is impacting key areas of their businesses including R&D, offshoring, sales incentivisation, partners, channels and customer retention. Importantly, we will also assess the impact of SaaS on the business model, financial performance and corporate strategy of our respondents.

Over the remainder of 2010 we are aiming to interview at least 50 CEOs in a number phases. Each phase will focus on a specific group of software companies drawn either from a functional area (e.g. Business Management) or a vertical market (e.g. Government & Healthcare).

What’s in it for the participants?

By participating in the research programme, respondents will help us to provide them with a framework by which to benchmark themselves against their peers and, importantly, to provide them with a greater understanding of the strategic choices available to software CEOs as they make this exciting but challenging transition.

As we complete each phase of the programme, we will publish a comprehensive report covering our findings and key themes from that segment of the market. All respondents will receive a complimentary copy of the report on their part of the market and, in addition, a selection of participants will also have a chance to ask questions of the research team and discuss the issues with other CEOs at a series of launch events.

What’s next?

Our first area of focus is Business Management software and our research programme for this segment will run through May and June with the report due for publication in July.

If you are the CEO of a UK based software company and would like to participate in our research programme, please contract Ian Spence on 01256 768833 or (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Whilst it may seem like a relatively small change, the ability to print Megabuyte company profiles and other pages in a tidy manner has probably been the most requested functionality upgrade we have had for Megabuyte.

Well, it is finally here. A new ‘print page’ icon on all relevant parts of the site means that all Premium subscribers can now print a page from megabuyte.com in a neat format and only containing the bits you need. Also, for Premium Plus users, we have introduced a ‘Print Profile’ and ‘Print Peer Group’ button on all company profiles and Peer Groups on the database so that users can print a whole company profile with the latest news and analysis, financials, estimates and peer group valuation tables. Enjoy!

We are delighted to announce the formal launch of Megabuyte Forum, our networking group for company directors and investors in the technology sector. Under the banner of the Megabuyte Forum, we will run a series of events each year with two main aims. First, to help members gain greater insight into key industry trends, valuations and the M&A environment in area of the sector which is of interest to them. Secondly, to enable members to network and make new contacts amongst their peers in the industry.

The Megabuyte Forum is made possible by our four sponsors College Hill, Finncap, Taylor Wessing and Westchester Associates.

Get more information and find out how to join

Membership to the Forum is free and open to technology company directors (public and privately owned) and investors in the sector (institutional or private equity).

To find out more about Megabuyte Forum and whether is could be of interest to you, click here

In order to become a member, you will need to complete additional information in your Megabuyte profile. For instructions on how to become a member – click here

Once you have become a member, you can register to attend our all comers events including the inaugural Megabuyte Quarterly Review presentation on April 13th. To see a list of events and register to attend an event – click here

We are pleased to inform Premium Plus users that new on-line tools, which will enable users to interrogate our extensive company database, are now live on Megabuyte.com. There are three main elements to these new tools.

Peer Group valuations

In our last major upgrade, we added share price and consensus estimates data to company profiles in the Megabuyte database. We have now taken aggregation of this data one stage further in a new section of the website entitled ‘Peer Groups’. In this new section, Premium Plus users can monitor valuations in one of 12 sector peer groups or 6 industry peer groups as well as news and commentary on companies included in each area. For more detail, please visit the Peer Group landing page here.

Company filter

There are now around 150 companies in the Megabuyte database and we have plans to add around 100 more (mainly private) companies during 2010. Premium Plus users can now search for a company or group of companies using a number of criteria including size, ownership status or peer group. So, for example, a user might use the company filter to find all of the privately owned companies in the Business Management Software sector.

Archive Search

The Megabuyte database now contains over 1,000 individual items of research and commentary from the News, Analysis and Sector Commentary sections of the website. Furthermore, each item is tagged with one of five areas of interest (Industry trends, M&A, results & trading, fundraising and people moves). These criteria can be used together so that, for example, a user could search for all of the M&A news within the Government & Healthcare sector over the last 12 months.

The company filter and archive search functionality can be found in the side bar of the Megabuyte Database here.

As Megabuyte moves through its third year of operation, we are pleased to announce some exciting new developments to be launched in the first quarter of 2010. These developments will see a substantial increase in the breadth and depth of our research coverage as well as the launch of a range of new services and tools for Megabuyte subscribers.

Telecoms sector coverage

Having collaborated with Philip Carse at Telecom Equity over the last few months, we are delighted to announce that Philip will shortly become a full time contributor to Megabuyte and will merge Telecom Equity content into Megabuyte. This will mean that the 30 or so companies currently under coverage on Telecom Equity will be added to the Megabuyte coverage list and that Philip will be commenting on these companies in the Megabuyte Newswire. In addition, Philip will take over coverage of certain related areas of our existing coverage such as hosting & managed services and telecoms software. See here for Philip's bio.

Peer Group reports

The feedback we receive from subscribers clearly indicates that one of the main uses for Megabuyte is peer group analysis and benchmarking. Keen to develop this aspect of the service, in the last major upgrade to megabuyte.com, we added share price and estimates data into company profiles on the Megabuyte database which facilitated the Peer Group functionality where each company profile contains financial metrics and valuation data for related companies.

From early next year, we will be taking our peer group analysis to the next level by launching a series of in-depth quarterly Peer Group reports covering key areas of interest to subscribers. The Peer Groups will be drawn from vertical markets (e.g. Government & Healthcare) or product areas (e.g. Hosting & Managed Services) and will include data and commentary on the financial and share price performance, valuations and M&A activity within that peer group. Where appropriate, the Peer Group reports will also contain a ‘global perspective’ on the financial performance of key international players relevant to that peer group.

Megabuyte Forum

Over the last three years, Megabuyte has built up a loyal following in the sector and we increasingly find ourselves facilitating introductions between companies or between companies and investors. In 2010, we will formalise this activity with the launch of the Megabuyte Forum. Open to C-level executives, non-execs and investors in the sector, the Megabuyte Forum will stage a series of networking events through the year including CEO roundtable discussions, CEO master classes and a quarterly sector review by the analysts at I S Research (the company behind Megabuyte). Some events, such as a quarterly sector review, will be open to all Forum members whilst the smaller events such as the CEO roundtables, will be by invitation only. In many cases, the Megabuyte Premium service will carry research directly related to the Forum events so that subscribers who did not attend the events can also benefit from the discussion. Membership to the Megabuyte Forum will be free and will open to new members in January; all qualifying Megabuyte subscribers will be pre-registered as Megabuyte Forum members.

We are also delighted to announce our four sponsors for the Megabuyte Forum. They are Finncap, Taylor Wessing, College Hill and Westchester Associates. Each of the Forum events will be hosted by one of our four sponsors and the events will be free to Forum members.

Megabuyte company filter

We are currently working on a series of upgrades to megabuyte.com which will create the functionality needed to make these new services possible; the upgraded site will be launched in January. In addition to new sections for Peer Groups and the Megabuyte Forum, we will be significantly upgrading the search functionality on megabuyte.com. This enhanced search functionality will make it considerably easier for subscribers to interrogate our 125 company profiles and 1000+ news and analysis articles in the archive.

There will be two main aspects to this new search functionality; archive search and company filtering. Under a archive search, users will be able to look for news and analysis articles by key word, category (e.g. M&A or company results), date range or peer group. With the Company Filter, users will be able to search for companies on the database which satisfy certain criteria such as size (by revenue), peer group, industry, and ownership (public or private). This company filtering functionality will be the pre-cursor to dynamic Peer Group filtering which will be launched in the second half of next year.

We are very excited about all of these new developments and we will have more detail on each of them as they are launched in the early part of next year.

Please note that there will be no Megabuyte Service from Wedensday 28th October to Friday 30th October inclusive. The service will resume as normal on Monday 2nd November.

Leading independent research consultancy I S Research teams up with respected telecoms analyst Philip Carse to broaden its coverage into the UK telecoms sector.

I S Research is delighted to announced that it has joined forces with Philip Carse to provide coverage of the UK telecoms sector. Since 2003, Philip has successful run his own consulting firm, Teleq Consulting and is the author of the widely read blog Telecom Equity.

Philip brings some 20 years experience in the telecoms sector as an analyst at UBS, Citi and Commerzbank and as a consultant at PA Consulting. Philip’s full bio can be read here.

Building on ISR’s success in the software & IT services sector, Philip will be responsible for developing a newly formed telecoms practice providing equity research services to smaller listed telecoms companies. In addition, Philip will collaborate closely with ISR to provide market intelligence and consulting services to companies, investors and advisers in the broader IT & Telecoms market.

Readers can view the full press release here.

We are pleased to announce that we have now integrated share price data and consensus estimates for all public companies on the Megabuyte database. Importantly, by adding in this data, we are now able to provide comprehensive valuation data for all public companies under coverage. Perhaps the most powerful aspect to this upgrade is that it enables us to make valuation comparisons between related groups of companies.

Peer group valuations
As subscribers may know, each company on the Megabuyte database is tagged under one of 10 different sector categories (7 for software companies and 3 for IT services companies). With this tagging information we are now able to provide dynamic, real time average valuations for each sub-sector. To access peer group data on each company, simply browse to the profile of the company in which you are interested and click on the Peer Group tab.

Private companies included
Whilst there is clearly no valuation data for private companies on the database, we have still included a Peer Group tab on private company profiles so that subscribers can get a feel for what that company may be valued at if were public. A good example of this would be COA Solutions here.

Morning e-mail upgraded
Premium subscribers will also notice that we have upgraded the morning e-mail to provide quick links to company data, peer group valuations and relevant peer group news from each company covered in that morning’s Newswire.

Not a subscriber yet?
We are very excited about this upgrade and believe that its usefulness to users will grow as the number of companies in each sub-sector increases. If you are already a subscriber, please go ahead and try out this new functionality – as ever, honest feedback is most welcome. If you are not already a Premium subscriber and would like a free trial, please contact Ian Spence on 01256 768833 or fill in the on-line form here.

Look out for more upgrades in Q4
The next upgrade on the Megabuyte roadmap is a sophisticated company filtering tool which will enable users to identify lists of companies using a variety of criteria and also to dynamically create valuation peer groups. We will release this new functionality to users in Q4.

It is now four months since Megabuyte.com was launched to augment the daily e-mail service and the feedback so far has been excellent. However, we want to make sure that we keep improving the service and so, from tomorrow, Megabuyte subscribers will start to notice some significant changes to the service. In addition to some design updates to the site, not least the home page, we have reorganised the pages to make navigation of the site more intuitive. In addition, there are a few significant changes to the way the service operates that you need to be aware of.

We’re changing your titles

Up until now, the three levels of subscription have been called Free, Newswire and Premium. Going forward, these three levels of subscription will be rebadged Newswire (formerly the Free account), Newswire Plus (formerly Newswire) and Premium will remain unchanged. In addition, we have split Premium subscribers into two groups; Premium SP (Service Provider) and Premium CI (Company and Investor). Premium SP subscribers are PR companies, investment banks, law firms and other advisers whilst Premium CI covers our corporate, private equity and institutional investor subscribers. For a reminder of what your get in each subscription package, click here.

Some of you will now need to click through the morning e-mail

Going forward, Newswire Plus and Premium SP subscribers will now need to click through the morning e-mail and login to their Megabuyte account in order to access full company stories. Premium CI subscribers will continue to get the full company story in their morning e-mail. All Premium subscribers will continue to have full access to all of our content.

We have separated Company comments into News and Analysis

Previously, all of our company comments came under one banner but we have now added greater clarity to the categorisation of our Company Intelligence. Company News pieces, which will be published in the daily Newswire Plus e-mail will contain a quick summary of the news item as well as our popular ‘First thoughts’ comment where appropriate. Longer Company Intelligence pieces, which may follow a company’s results, a meeting with the company or analysis of another event such as an acquisition, will be called Company Analysis. Company Analysis will only be available to Premium subscribers and will not appear in the Daily Newswire. Instead, Premium subscribers will be alerted by e-mail when Company Analysis pieces are published and prompted to login to their account at megabuyte.com to read the full story.

Our sector commentary is changing

The Megabuyte Journal will cease to exist in its current form. We will still publish our review of share prices and valuations on a monthly basis but our M&A and trading reviews will now be published quarterly. We will continue to publish research pieces on key technology trends and sub-sector themes and, furthermore, Newswire Plus and Premium subscribers will now be alerted when a new piece of sector commentary has been published.

Also, we have now made our sector commentary subscriber-only and it will therefore only be available to Newswire Plus and Premium subscribers going forward.

Premium subscribers will be alerted to activity in the Megabuyte database

There is a great deal of activity on the Megabuyte Database that, until now, Premium subscribers may have been unaware of. We have therefore introduced a system of e-mail alerts which will notify Premium subscribers of changes and additions to the Megabuyte Database. Premium subscribers will receive an e-mail alert when we add a new company to the database and when we update the financial data on an existing profile. Later in the year, we will be enabling Premium Subscribers to configure their alerts so that they can track specific areas of the market and/or individual companies.

We very much hope that these changes meet with your approval; they are part of an ongoing roadmap of upgrades to Megabuyte that we hope will deliver continuous improvement in not only the quality of content on Megabuyte but also users’ ability to access that content.