August 21, 2004
The IT industry passed another milestone in its return to financial health last month, recording a full year of uninterrupted growth. According to the Infoconomy Index, which tracks the aggregated growth rate of the world's 200 largest IT companies, the industry's pace rose again in June to 12.5%.
However, the subset of European companies in the Index continue to be negative, with growth riding on -3%, even though that rate has been cut in half over the past year.
Fuelling the global growth, though, were highly positive results at companies big and small. IT services giant Accenture reported an 18% jump in revenues, document software vendor Adobe showed a 28% rise, and component and computer manufacturers Solectron posted growth of 29%.
There were also plenty of companies on, or around, par. In applications software, for example, Oracle recorded growth of 9% and GEAC posted revenues up 13%.
Dragging the index in the opposite direction were weak results from Europe, particularly from IT services companies. Growth at the UK's Xansa and Synstar was down 12% and 3% respectively; Sweden's Icon MediaLab shrunk by 2% and revenues at Franco-Dutch company Atos Origin dropped by 1%.
However, the trend is still towards the positive and next month's index graph should again be sloping upwards.
The Infoconomy 200 Index measures the overall growth rate of the IT industry by tracking the financial results of the world's most important publicly listed IT companies.
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