Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

IBM Celebrates Its 100th Birthday, Set To Pass $100 Billion Annual Revenue Mark

IBM could be forgiven for getting a bit misty eyed, at least on a corporate level, on the auspicious occasion of its 100th birthday this week. 100 years … think about that for a minute. IBM is so old, its Australian division opened shop in 1932.

IBM has topped the list of companies receiving U.S. patents for 18 years running. But on its 100th birthday, IBM focused not on its innovation, but staying power. In an ad that ran in The Wall Street Journal this week, IBM noted that "Nearly all the companies our grandparents admired have disappeared", and that companies that wish to achieve longevity need to "manage for the long term."

Fittingly, IBM this week also said it's on track to pass $100 billion in annual sales this year. A Happy Birthday indeed for a company that has definitely come to win for the vast majority of its history.

HP Ready To Battle Apple, Google In Cloud Music Arena

HP is gearing up to launch its TouchPad tablet next month, a move that will put it into direct competition with Apple and Google. This week, HP showed it's ready to take the fight to these foes in cloud music storage services as well.

According to Billboard, HP is in talks with major record labels about building a cloud service and storage locker that will include music, movies and TV shows. HP's overtures to the labels isn't a new developments, and these negotiations are notoriously slow moving, but this is at least sign that HP is ready to add a critical piece to the TouchPad feature set, and willing to spend to make it happen.

Cisco Launches Telepresence Blitz To Beat Back Rivals

Cisco has been taking hits left and right as it tries to reorganize its business and deal with its execution issues, and its rivals in the video market have been trying to step up their game to take advantage. But Cisco this week showed signs of life by unveiling a series of updates to its video telepresence portfolio, as well as interoperability with standards-based video endpoints from competitors.

According to Infonetics Research, Cisco, which acquired Tandberg in 2009, holds the No. 1 spot in overall enterprise videoconferencing revenue, having claimed 50 percent of the global revenue in 2010. Cisco is dealing with some organizational chaos at the moment, but it's clearly not going to sit around while smaller rivals try to nip away at one of its healthy businesses.

Microsoft Releases Its Kinect SDK To Developers

Kinect is the most innovative Microsoft product to come along in quite some time. This week, Microsoft released the target Kinect for Windows Software Development Kit to third party developers, who can now start getting their heads around the product's immense potential.

The Kinect for Windows SDK beta includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents, and resource materials. It provides Kinect capabilities to developers who build applications with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

Ericsson Ponies Up $1.15 Billion For Mobile Enterprise Vendor Telcordia

Telecom giant Ericsson this week said it plans to acquire Telcordia, a specialist in mobile, broadband and enterprise communications software and services, for $1.15 billion. It's a key move for Ericsson, which is trying to expand its footprint in operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS).

In 2010, the OSS/BSS software and systems integration market was worth $35 billion, and it's set to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of6 and 8 percent over the next three years, according to Ericsson's own estimate.