Good morning, Data Sheet readers. French IT services firm Capgemini is paying $4 billion to expand its U.S. market presence. Contrary to reports, Nokia doesn’t plan to make branded mobile phones, and the high-tech earnings onslaught continues this afternoon with Apple. Plus, the devastating earthquake in Nepal has touched Silicon Valley. Sadly, Google privacy engineer Dan Fredinburg—who worked on the Street View and Loon projects—lost his life in the related Everest avalanche. Both Google and Facebook are donating “people-finding” technology to help with ongoing rescue efforts. Have a safe and productive Monday.
TOP OF MIND
Why the Apple Watch is far more than a consumer gadget. Track employee locations. Find an empty conference room. Anticipate upcoming deliveries. Control building access. Gather data for a sales call. The list of corporate applications is growing quickly. Fortune’s Stacy Higginbotham riffs on the possibilities.
TRENDING
This could be a record second quarter for Apple. Investors and analysts sure expect one, and its stock is up 20% since January in anticipation. Here’s New York Times columnist Jeff Sommer’s take on the company’s “outsize influence,” and why it won’t last. Apple is due to discuss its latest financials after the market close Monday.
Nokia: We won’t manufacture smartphones. But the company said it would be “crazy” not to consider licensing its technology to others. By the way, even as Nokia contemplates future possibilities, Microsoft just filed papers with the SEC suggesting that it might need a write-off related to its September 2013 acquisition of Nokia’s original handset business.
Indian services firm Infosys still isn’t turning things around. The company, which counts Apple and Volkswagen as clients, lost money in its latest quarter. Regardless, it’s touting a pretty aggressive outlook—revenue could hit $20 billion by 2020, compared with $8.7 billion this year.
Meanwhile, Capgemini is expanding its U.S. presence. The French company is paying $4 billion for iGate, which sells application development and business process services to the likes of General Electric and Royal Bank of Canada.
Xiaomi’s cutthroat mobile phone pricing is paying off. The company expects its related services revenue to triple this year to $1 billion. That’s still small in the scheme of overall sales but growing fast. Plus, respected Indian entrepreneur Ratan Tatan just bought an undisclosed stake in the Chinese company.
What can your company expect to pay for IT talent? CIOs still command the most (almost $170,000 per year, including bonus), but security execs aren’t far behind and their total compensation is rising faster. Computerworld reports on key benchmarks, hot jobs and regional trends in its annual salary survey.
THE DOWNLOAD
Apigee defies the drought of Silicon Valley tech IPOs
It’s been a slow year for initial public offerings. Fortune writer Jonathan Vanian spoke with Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor about why his developer software company decided to take the plunge.
Wall Street welcomed the second Silicon Valley technology company of the year to public markets Friday with business software company Apigee's first day of trading following its IPO.
Apigee's debut is an anomaly in that many enterprise tech startups have decided in recent month to take on big rounds of funding instead of undertaking an IPO, underscoring how companies can rake in millions of dollars in investment without having to open up their books to the public. For example, cloud company Docker raised $95 million earlier this month while security company Illumio received $100 million.
Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor acknowledged in an interview with Fortune that there is a lot of “private money” flowing about. But, he described an IPO as too good of an opportunity to turn down.
For Apigee, going public means more than just getting a huge cash infusion; it raised $87 million. It’s also about the veneer of legitimacy that comes with being a publicly traded company and how that could help with getting more customers down the road, Kapoor explained.
Apigee specializes in a type of technology known as an application program interface, which is essentially the software middleman that connects different software languages, data, and services used by companies like ride-hailing app Uber and Yelp, the local listings site.
To show users a map of nearby restaurants, Yelp must use an API to bring in restaurant location data and user reviews.
But as software gets more complex, developers have to add more APIs to connect everything, which can be a complicated mess. Apigee casts itself as a potential remedy to the problem.
Apigee helps companies manage all of their APIs and also provides them with security so that only the right people on staff have access to the right APIs. A retail company that does online transactions, for instance, would only want certain developers and staff members to access the appropriate APIs for its payment processing.
Over the past few years, Kapoor said that more companies have realized a need for the type of sophisticated software used by Uber for fear of losing out to more innovative rivals. By going public, Apigee is hoping to tap into that market and sell companies on the idea that they need help managing all the APIs to modernize their businesses.
As for the company's stock performance on its first day on Wall Street, Apigee started off the morning at $17 per share, which dropped to $16.70 by the close of the markets. Its initial market cap was roughly $500 million. The company now joins cloud-storage company Box as one of the two Silicon Valley based tech companies to have gone public in 2015. According to the company's SEC filings, Apigee counts legacy enterprise companies Oracle and IBM as competitors.
For now, Apigee is unprofitable. Read the rest of Vanian’s article to learn how Kapoor plans to turn things around.
ALSO WORTH SHARING
Pinterest has added more tools for marketers. The new technology allows content to be created and scheduled from social media management applications, such as Sprinklr.
Facebook just lost its engineering director. TechCrunch reports that Lars Rasmussen, who was behind the Facebook at Work project, is leaving to co-founder a startup in the music business.
There’s a long list of complainants (19 to be exact) behind the European Union’s antitrust case against Google. Apparently, competitor eBay isn’t one of them.
Xerox cut its full-year forecast. It’s scrambling to expand its services business, as revenue from printers and copiers continues to slide.
There’s real revenue to be had in technology for alternate realities. $150 billion to be more specific, and the applications go far beyond games. Texas startup MergeVR hopes to benefit with a $130 headset planned for release this fall.
Strangely, your smartphone is still relatively safe from hackers. Mobile malware is rare, in North America at least. That’s partly because Apple and Google have focused on security for their app stores. It’s also apparently because would-be criminal hackers haven’t really figured out how to make money doing it.
Does Bigcommerce have an acquisition up its sleeve? Re/code reports the e-commerce software company is close to buying Zing, which specializes in point-of-sales systems and inventory management.
MY FORTUNE BOOKMARKS
Activision gives away $1 million every year to gamers. Here’s why. by John Gaudiosi
Solar power will soon make it possible to fly planes continuously—but is that a good thing? by David Z. Morris
Meet the men who wear man bags, proudly by Colleen Kane
The 5 most underrated CEOs by Paul Hodgson
Startups … inside giant companies by Jennifer Alsever
The hotly disputed black magic of data breach cost estimates by Robert Hackett
ONE MORE THING
Even though the industrial benefits of 3D printing have yet to be realized, this researcher is talking up a fourth dimension.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
MicrosoftIgnite: Business tech extravaganza. (May 4 – 8; Chicago)
NetSuite SuiteWorld: Cloud ERP strategy. (May 4 – 7; San Jose, California)
EMC World: Data strategy. (May 4 - 7; Las Vegas)
SAPPHIRE NOW: The SAP universe. (May 5 – 7; Orlando, Florida)
Gartner Digital Marketing Conference: Reach your destination faster. (May 5 – 7; San Diego)
Cornerstone Convergence: Connect, collaborate. (May 11 - 13; Los Angeles)
Cloud Foundry Summit: Open source development. (May 11 - 12; Santa Clara, California)
Annual Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference: JP Morgan’s 43rd invite-only event. (May 18 - 20; Boston)
Signal: The modern communications conference. (May 19 - 20; San Francisco)
MuleSoft Connect: Tie together apps, data and devices. (May 27 - 29; San Francisco)
MongoDB World: Scale the universe. (June 1 - 2; New York)
HP Discover: Trends and technologies. (June 2 - 4; Las Vegas)
Apple Worldwide Developers Conference: Future of iOS and OS X. (June 8 - 12; San Francisco)
Hadoop Summit San Jose: Mainstreaming adoption. (June 9 - 11; San Jose, California)
Red Hat Summit: Energize your enterprise. (June 23 - 26; Boston)
Brainstorm Tech: Fortune’s invite-only gathering of thinkers, influencers and entrepreneurs. (July 13 - 15; Aspen, Colorado)
LinuxCon North America: All about open source. (Aug. 17 - 19; Seattle)
VMworld: The virtualization ecosystem. (Aug. 30 – Sept. 3, 2015; San Francisco)
Dreamforce: The Salesforce community. (Sept. 15 - 18; San Francisco)
BoxWorks 2015: Cloud collaboration solutions. (Sept. 28 - 30; San Francisco)
Workday Rising: Meet and share. (Sept. 28 - Oct. 1; Las Vegas)
HP Engage: Big data, big engagement. (Oct. 4 - 6; San Diego)
Gartner Symposium ITxpo: CIOs and senior IT executives. (Oct. 4 - 8; Orlando, Florida)
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing: World's largest gather of women technologists. (Oct. 14 - 16; Houston)
Oracle OpenWorld: Customer and partner conference. (Oct. 25 - 29; San Francisco)
