Leader: Private equity, Germany and badging RFID

The trend towards private equity firms taking an interest in - if not always a stake in or ownership of - major tech and communications outfits only looks set to grow.

Today we're digesting the thought of Carlyle of the US making a bid for Kingston Communications, the incumbent telco with the grey phone boxes up in the north-east of England. A week ago it was CA spinning off its database software arm to Garnett & Helfrich Capital that was making the headlines.

What conclusions can be drawn here? Some would argue against private equity firms and their ilk. Others point out their inclination to break up fairly large entities, making the future sum of the parts total more than the current value of the whole - an often lumbering whole at the point they come in.

But beyond that, what is it that the private equity firms are doing? By taking a company or part of a company off public exchanges, for at least a short time, they get a chance to make changes behind closed doors which a publicly scrutinised company would never get a chance to do.

In this way with both public and private companies, we have seen experts with their own funds - often wily old pros with decades of experience - shake up the management, get things back on track and sell for a profit, a year or two down the line

Think of anyone else out there that could do with such a makeover?

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A country in need of some serious work still is Germany. Just days after hearing about further job losses at Deutsche Telekom - and let's face it, it does feel like a surprising occurrence whenever it happens - we find out that Siemens is to make 3,000 job cuts outside its domestic market, in addition to the 2,400 it announced there.

With the messy election of 'Germany's Thatcher', it may look like the restructuring of that economy may finally be underway - with all the attendant pain for those involved with DT, Siemens and other giants. But don't expect changes to be smooth. Witness comments recently by BT chief Ben Verwaayen that his counterpart in Germany will get state protection over opening up its national network.

There's plenty more of that story to play out yet.

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And finally, when an industry collectively advocates the use of radio frequency ID chips - for plenty of good reasons, we may point out - it had better start leading by example. Following Nokia's example last month, CA this week is fitting attendees at a big annual conference with badges that feature RFID.

The idea is that delegates will be matched to certain places or maybe even people if they are in close proximity to them. Now, record all that data, throw it into a database - an Ingres database? - add some clever analytics and you could end up with interesting findings.

The idea most certainly isn't that those with the badges scupper the whole thing, for reasons of privacy (does that even exist in such an environment?) or simply to be difficult. We expect more of the same and wait to see whether it means anything more than a more convenient version of the old bar-coded badges.