Keynote

We were selected as one of the Nordic 50, the top investment prospects in the Nordic region as judged by the VC community. Klaus Holse Andersen, Area Corporate Vice President from Microsoft gave a keynote address on the state of the IT industry and investment.

On investment in the EU, he highlighted that investment has dipped, but the US is starting to recover. Interestingly, the UK has the most investment activity by some margin.

He then went on to discuss the study that Microsoft produced with IDC that indicates that IT spending and job creation in the sector are going to increase faster than the norm. IT spending will grow at 3% per annum until 2013, versus GDP growth estimated at 1%. With jobs the picture is 2.5% growth in the IT sector vs 0.7% in the general economy.

Klaus then turned his attention to the 3 screen world we now live in (mobile, PC, TV) and the blurring of the lines between them. The way they think about this new world is a mix of what is on the device and the cloud - they call it software+services. His view that if you are focusing on only one piece of this picture (either software or services) then you are not going to win. Microsoft believe the winners will be the companies that focus on both of these lines.

He then looked at BizSpark programme to get companies using MS technology for free, together with the DreamSpark programme targeted at students. There is also a great programme called EUGA that helps businesses get access to EU grants.

Finally, Microsoft have invested over 9.5bn$ in the last 12 months on new products, with a big push on cloud services. This is great news for HammerKit - this is where we have always believed the market will go, so it is really nice to MS investing so heavily into this space.