The Battle Road Tech Index™ rose 4.0 percent for the week ended November 13, 2009, closing at 1624. For the week, only Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO, $23.71) and Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO, $15.93) fell in value out of the 25 Index components. Year-to-date, the index is up 62 percent, having started at a value of 1000.

The following companies were notable movers for the week:

Shares of Western Digital (NYSE: WDC, $38.50) rose 5.7 percent for the week. The company announced on Tuesday, November 3, that it would be introducing a product for the enterprise hard-drive market, and the stock has continued to gain momentum. The mission-critical enterprise server and enterprise storage markets are dominated by competitor Seagate (NASDAQ: STX, $16.72), who holds about 60 percent market share, but margins are the highest of all hard-drive segments since there are only three significant competitors in the space. We think that Western Digital’s entrance will allow it to take share from the smallest player in the market, Toshiba, and the company will gain essential exposure to the higher-margin segment.

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM, $66.13) climbed higher with the market this week, gaining 8.4 percent, as its Q3 earnings announcement draws closer. The Software as a Service pioneer is expected to gain market share in the salesforce automation space, and it hopes to become a major cloud computing player with its Platform as a Service offering. Salesforce.com has dialed down its expenses as growth opportunities waned in the weak spending environment, but with spending beginning to recover, the company’s revenue growth could reaccelerate with a recovery in 2010.

Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM, $62.69) was up 6.8 percent this week. Earlier in the week, several analysts published bullish reports following the company’s developer conference on Monday, November 9. Some of the features demonstrated by developers include an updated Web Browser and a new user interface. RIMM also demonstrated Adobe Flash support. RIMM’s BlackBerry is still considered the standard in the corporate smart phone market. Some of the limitations of competitors include iPhone’s inability to multi-task and Android’s lack of push function in email delivery.

Shares of Cisco fell by 0.5 percent for the week following news that Hewlett Packard (NYSE: HPQ, $49.91) planned to purchase networking competitor 3Com (NASDAQ: COMS, $7.51) for $2.7 billion in cash. This deal makes HP a formidable number two player in the networking industry and particularly targets Cisco, the current number one, which announced its entrance into the server market earlier this year. The two companies will be competing head to head as customers continue to consolidate data center products, combining servers, storage, networking, and security into a single package.