Blogs

Is Windows Phone Development a Passing Trend?

Mon, 05/14/2012 - 18:04 — Juhana Peltonen

The success of any software platform rests upon available apps, and if Windows Phone (WP) wants to establish itself as a part of the “third ecosystem”, it needs to close its app gap compared to iOS and Android.

What happened for the Finnish software industry in 2011 - some early results

Sun, 05/13/2012 - 22:42 — Mikko Rönkkö

We have now around 200 responses to the survey, although a third of these are still in paper form and need to be entered into our database. Nevertheless, this is plenty of data to restart our research blog.

Publishing the final report is just around the corner

Wed, 06/22/2011 - 13:38 — Mikko Rönkkö

I wanted to write a small blog post to celebrate two key milestones in the project: Today the length of our report draft exceeded 100 pages and we also finally agreed on the cover background for the report.

The main results of the Finnish survey were published on June 16th at Aalto Venture Garage. Although we were sending out the invitations on a short notice, the event attracted a nice audience. The presentation slides and the press release are available on our publications page.

The Software and IT Services industry in Austria

Wed, 06/22/2011 - 12:53 — Timo Leimbach

Normally Austria is known as a destination for holidays or for its cultural heritage, but Austria is also a country that experienced a fast development in the last 20 years. This development also includes high technology areas like software and IT services. Moreover Austria is an example for a country with very progressive attitude towards eGovernment services. This development also led to a constant growth of the industry, which nearly tripled its share of the private GDP since 1990. Although the share of 1,81% is only around the EU average, this is still an impressive growth.

Who will hire former Nokia employees: Will the demand meet the supply?

Sun, 05/22/2011 - 18:17 — Juhana Peltonen

This blog post probes deeper into the Finnish software sector’s ability to employ the people whose jobs Nokia and its subcontractors will be shedding in the near future. Though Nokia has guaranteed the continuation of work until the end of 2011, many employees particularly from its software suppliers will be on the market much before this time is up. The question then becomes, where will these engineers and managers be headed?

Exit stage left - The ultimate goal of an average Finnish software company?

Thu, 05/05/2011 - 13:40 — Dani Pärnänen

We already have enough data to start doing some preliminary analysis, though responses to this year's survey are still being collected. As a thesis worker, I have a personal stake in figuring out how Finnish software companies view exits - Which exit avenues they consider most plausible? Do the companies include M&A in their strategy, e.g. for boosting growth? How exit-oriented are the Finnish software companies overall? My questions are not limited to these three, but this is where I'll start my data crunching.

First results from the 2011 survey: Nokia and mobile platforms

Fri, 04/29/2011 - 10:51 — Mikko Rönkkö

The 2011 survey has been going on for approximately a week now. The first invitation letters arrived at the companies in last Thursday, the day before easter vacations. We sent out the email invitations on this week's Tuesday and Wednesday. The total number of firms that were sent the postal mail was 5 490 and we have a working email address for estimated 3 169 firms. Compared to last year, these numbers are slightly smaller because we eliminated all sole proprietors from the mailing list and generally have improved the screening process for firms when creating the address list.

How Important is Nokia for the Finnish Software Industry?

Mon, 03/28/2011 - 17:19 — Mikko Rönkkö

Since Nokia announced the change in their software strategy and decided to partner with Microsoft instead of continuing to rely on Symbian, we have been approached several times by media with the question:

"How important is software development that is done for cell phones for the Finnish Software Industry?"

M&A Trends During the "00s"

Wed, 03/16/2011 - 14:23 — Dani Pärnänen

We still have to wait a couple of months before this year's Software Industry Survey data is collected, so I decided to do a warm-up exercise using data from the Zephyr mergers and acquisitions database.

In last year’s Software Industry Survey report we highlighted consolidation through mergers and acquisitions as on of the main trends in the software industry. Now that the first decade of the 2000s is behind us, we can have a look at how the trends of mergers and acquisitions have changed during that era.

Where do international growth intentions come from? (Part I)

Tue, 03/08/2011 - 16:35 — Juhana Peltonen

Growth entrepreneurship is very much on policy makers' minds and everyone wants us to have more of them. Therefore the first post of this blog looks at Finnish software firms' intentions to internationalize from day one. Armed with our surveys and statistical software, we have been chasing this issue for some time now.