Good week

Clearswift
If you scour the beaches of Barbados for long enough, you just might find one or two Clearswift executives supping a big, fat piña colada. The Brit outfit has become the latest in a string of security vendors to sell up to a private equity house - Sophos and SonicWall being other recent examples. Sources whisper that Lyceum parted with a cool £25m to £30m to get its man.
Clearswift chief executive Richard Turner said (presumably as he applied another
dollop of sun cream): "We are delighted to have the backing of Lyceum Capital to support the next phase of our ambitious growth plans."

White-collar criminals
As if swingeing public cuts and reduced consumer spending weren't enough, a report last week reveals that fraud and cybercrime remain growing problems for UK firms.
PricewaterhouseCoopers claims economic crime in the UK has risen eight per cent in the past two years. More than half of firms have had a crime perpetrated against them in the past 12 months, with about a quarter enduring more than 10 separate offences.
Cybercrime is up, although internal frauds are down somewhat. However, PwC finds that, unlike the world as a whole, UK middle managers are far more likely to commit an offence than their senior exec bosses.
Clearly that old saying is right: to get ahead in life, it's not what you know, or who know - it's how much you can embezzle.

Server market
As most resellers will testify, server revenue dropped off a cliff last year but the sector's gradual recovery has been underlined by the latest
figures. The numbers junkie says global shipments pogoed 7.2 per cent on an annual comparison in the third quarter, with shipments rising 5.2 per cent. Not one to offer false hope, Gartner research director Adrian O'Connell brought everyone crashing back down to earth by emphasising that both volume and revenue are still below Q3 2008 - the point when the economy started to go Pete Tong.

Bad week

Ebuyer
Online electronics retailer Ebuyer incurred the wrath of the interweb after its website crashed within minutes of the launch of its £1 Christmas sale.
Would-be shoppers took to Facebook and Twitter, with many complaining that, despite appearing to have bagged a bargain, their orders had been cancelled.
Ebuyer issued a grovelling apology on both sites, but at the time of writing the number of tweets featuring variations of the phrase "@ebuyer sucks" was still rising.

Email
Gallic IT provider Atos Origin is to ban its staff from sending emails to each other, claiming that responding to them is a drain on the firm's productivity.
Instead, it wants staff to use instant messaging and social networking tools. Both of which are renowned for helping people get on with what they are supposed to be doing.
Some doom mongers claim the news is a sign that email will soon be as relevant to modern-day communications as carrier pigeons and smoke signals. A point of view that may have carried more weight if their declarations hadn't been sent to CRN in electronic form.

Everyone
However Gorgeous George tries to spin it, much of the news emanating from last week's Autumn Statement is clearly of the ‘bad' variety.
UK GDP is now predicted to grow 0.9 per cent this year, down from the 2.5 per cent projections of less than six months ago.
The chancellor will also have to borrow £111bn more than previously announced and debt will reach an eye-watering 78 per cent of GDP, up from his earlier forecast of 70.3 per cent. Ouch.
Meanwhile, some eight million of us will be working at least a year longer. And, speaking of retirement, the public sector - which employs around a fifth of the UK workforce - went on strike last week to protest broken pensions promises.
And the weather's finally turned, with temperatures plummeting across the country.
Still, at least...erm...no, we're drawing a blank.