Liste Newsletter

Index Performances
EPITEX, EPITA’S INDEX EPITEX at close of trading, Nov. 4, 2003: 87.66 Combined share value in EPITEX: $567.40 Average per-share value in EPITEX: $ 28.37 (EPITEX set at 100 on Aug. 31, 2001)

News

MARKET FOCUS

U.S. equities retreated on Tuesday, as a worrisome employment-related report and news of more financial scandals dampened investors’ confidence.

The outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas said layoff announcements jumped 125 percent in October to 171,874 for the month, the highest in a year. This cast doubts about a recovery in the labor market ahead of the employment report for October, due out on Friday.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against former employees of the Prudential mutual funds.

The IT sector was lackluster after a strong run, with Hewlett-Packard a lonely exception, enjoying a broker’s recommendation upgrade to “overweight.”

Cisco Systems softened ahead of reporting its quarterly financial numbers on Wednesday. The consensus anticipates earnings of 15 cents a share on $4.86-billino sales.

Meanwhile, Network Appliance is buying Spinnaker Networks for $300 million in stock. Novell gained 25 percent on news it is buying Suse Linex for $210 million in cash.

OUTLOOK

The main market-mover comes out on Friday, with payrolls expected to have added 40,000 jobs in October following a gain of 57,000 in September.

THE NUMBERS

The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended down 20 points, or 0.2 percent, to 9,839. The Nasdaq Composite Index gave up 10 points, or 0.5 percent, to 1,958, while the Nasdaq-100 index of large-capitalization tech and biotech stocks ended down 0.9 percent to 1,429.

Profile

Network Appliance, a leading provider of enterprise storage solutions, is acquiring privately-held Spinnaker Networks for $300 million in an all stock transaction.

Spinnaker is a pioneer in scalable system architectures, distributed file systems, next-generation clustering technologies, and virtualization.

For Network Appliance, this is primarily a software technology acquisition that reaffirms the NetApp business model and extends NetApp leadership in scalability, simplicity, and total cost of ownership for enterprise storage systems.

This acquisition accelerates the delivery of the NetApp “Storage Grid” architecture enabling customers to leverage even more value from their storage and data infrastructures. The combination of Network Appliance and Spinnaker gives Network Appliance a competitive, leadership position in bringing Storage Grid architectures to market more quickly, and draws upon the technology prowess of each company to offer superior storage solutions today.

Equally applicable to SAN (storage area network) and NAS (network-attached storage) environments, Storage Grids are the ideal complement to the grid computing paradigm promoted by other technology industry leaders.

The Storage Grid architecture will enable tighter application integration with database and enterprise applications, provide superior data protection, have the ability to more easily manage data resources based on policies, and provide improved data security.