Climate Change, Software Edition

The smell of global warming is in the air – and no, I’m not talking about greenhouse gases. The second half of April has seen some changes in the somewhat glacial economy that’s bogged down the IT industry for the past seven years. This is a welcome change.

The most visible sign of the thaw, of course, is in the stock market. While stock indices aren’t always the best indicators, there’s no hiding from them, especially when the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit new highs this week and last, and on Wednesday, passing 13,000 for the first time ever — largely driven by technology stocks and their huge profit reports. The technology-heavy NASDAQ index also is in recent-record territory, doing better at any time since the bubble burst.

Not satisfied with stocks? On Tuesday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “For the first time since the state lost tens of thousands of jobs after the dot-com collapse, California companies have added tech workers to their payrolls, according to a report that tracks nationwide employment in the industry.”

The story continues, “The Cyberstates report unveiled today by the American Electronics Association said the state added 14,400 net jobs, an increase of 2 percent that boosted the tech industry total to 919,322 in 2005, according to the most current state data available. California’s gains mark “the first net increase in jobs (here) since the tech bubble began to burst in 2000,” the association said.”

That’s good news all around, and is cause for cautious celebration. Does that mean that the tech economy is truly turning around, or is this just a blip? Stay tuned.

Closer to home, we’ve had a number of interesting deals just in the past couple of weeks, though it’s hard to assess their broader impact.

• CollabNet bought VA Software’s SourceForge Enterprise Edition software for a deal that includes some money and some stock; we don’t know how much. This is potentially a big shift in the collaboration software business, as VA focuses more on its online communities. It’s unclear how customers will be affected by putting both the Collabnet and SourceForce EE applications under one roof.

• Oracle snapped up AppForge. Okay, is was an odd one, because for a while it looked like AppForge just went out of business, and even now, Oracle’s not talking. But it’s noteworthy, just the same
• Sun picked up the intellectual property from SavaJe, which sold embedded Java SE software. This deal also looks like the acquisition of assets from of a failed company, and it’s unclear if there’s any benefit to Sun beyond boosting its patent portfolio.

What do you think about software climate change… is it real, or is it illusionary?