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Technology Titan List

One thing has become very clear through the years.  The great powerhouse’s of the Information Technology industry continue to drive innovation- either through their own R&D or through purchasing innovative technologies for integration into their offerings. Those who want to track what is coming next should closely watch the big IT firms.

But which ones should we watch?  The bad news is there is no perfect method.  But a key measure of note is the market capitalization of a company. The market cap is the total dollar value of all outstanding shares of a company (share price times shares outstanding). It is a market consensus of a company’s equity. For a CTO or other technologist, it can also be a general indicator of staying power, vision and ability to deliver, since you don’t get a high market cap in the IT world without those factors.

The CTOvision.com list of Tech Titans includes IT firms with a market cap of over $14B.  I’ve built a Google spreadsheet, tied it to live financial data, and now have a dynamic graphic of the market cap of the biggest tech firms. I also use automated search tools to scrub news feeds from these sources and use that information to help drive assessments elsewhere on the CTOvision.com site, including assessments on the future of IT.

In the past, Bob had been vigorously keeping up with the Titans of the Tech industry. His posts are here and here. These posts should give a picture of how the technology world is moving (and over time, identify trends). We have used market capitalization as our key indicator, but that’s just for ranking purposes. We intend to continue our Tech Titans list in 2012, and the first post will be an update of his old tech titans list. That said, we will begin to break them into sections and examine how the market affects them, and they affect the market.

Feb 1 Tech Titan list

Apple has clearly blown by all other tech firms (and almost all corporations worldwide). But at least this analyst believes that the Apple bubble will burst, and may burst sooner than later. Their commitment to patent trolling and ‘the destruction of Android’ do not bode well for the future. That said, due to the impact of consumer technology on enterprise, as well their huge footprint, they and Google (via their Android Mobile OS) are a large part of technology steering. The other Titan that we cannot forget is Microsoft. They have already sold over 550M Win7 licenses (which out performs any estimates for both Android and iOS – around 500M total devices in the past few years).

In the enterprise, IBM has moved from selling millions of PCs a year to providing primarily service driven offerings as well as server technology. Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems, but that hasn’t changed their position. HP and Dell have been hit hard, Lenovo is taking over much of their US business (especially in large and small business). HP has been devastated by a myriad of issues, which include the WebOS bungling and a commitment to “stopping PC manufacturing.” The rest of the Tech Titans are soldiering on – fighting for constrained IT dollars and integrating cloud and mobile capabilities.
Please look for continued Tech Titans coverage here and our next article on the Tech Titans of Mobile.

The following graphic is a up to date snapshot of the market cap of these top tech titans:

There have been some changes since last report.  In general, market caps remain strong!  That sounds good for American IT, since most of these firms are US firms. The order has shifted around a bit.  Microsoft is still number one.  Apple has moved back to the number two spot.  Google and IBM are pretty much even, and Cisco rounds out the top five.  Oracle, HP and Intel round out the top leadership positions and then there is a definite cut between them and the next tier of firms which run from Qualcomm down to Symantec.

Want to kick off a search for more data/news on these Technology Firms? Click on the links below to bring up news on each:

Microsoft (MSFT) |  Apple (AAPL) |  IBM |  Google (GOOG) |  Cisco (CSCO) | Intel (INTC) |  Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) | Oracle (ORCL) | QualComm (QCOM) |  SAP | EMC | Sony (SNE) |DELL | Yahoo! (YHOO) |  Adobe (ADBE) | VMware (VMW) | Symantec (SYMC)

For tracking purposes, a snapshot  from December 2009 is presented below.  Notice the shift from the one above?

The September 2009 List is below: