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IBM announced it would lay off between 10,000 and 13,000 workers over the next three months, with the majority of the cuts coming from Europe. After unexpectedly modest financial results last quarter, which IBM blamed on weakness in its services business, CEO Sam Palmisano has focused on giving the faster-growing Eastern European economies more autonomy.

The job cuts and restructuring will cost $1.7 billion, which will be taken as a one-off charge in the second quarter, wiping out IBM's profits. At $130,000 per redundancy, the calculation suggests that many senior staff are set to go.

Online travel and leisure company lastminute.com agreed to a £577 million takeover by US group Sabre Holdings, the owners of online travel agent Travelocity.

In spite of a solid brand name, rapid expansion and seven million customers last year, the dot-com era flagship never managed to report a full year of profits. In 2004 its losses worsened to £77 million from £47.8 million in 2003.

Hewlett-Packard's new CEO Mark Hurd delivered his first set of financial results since taking the helm, reporting a modest 7% increase from the second quarter of 2004.

HP Imaging and Printing provided nearly one-third of revenues, up 5% to $6.4 billion. That success contrasted with revenue decline in HP's storage unit and a profit drop in the services division, doing little to quell some shareholders' conviction that they would see better returns if HP spun off its printing division.

Mobile operators moaned that the introduction of a £150 million underground mobile phone network on London's Tube system was being delayed by bureaucracy and red tape.

While the UK mobile operators are convinced that without a laborious tendering process they could work together to build a system that would be operational within 18 months, Transport for London does not expect to deliver mobile services to passengers before 2008.

One year after publicly proclaiming an end to hostilities, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft revealed the first fruits of their 10-year collaborative pact. The two IT giants unveiled details of a single sign-on system, allowing users to bridge the gap between Microsoft's .Net platform and Sun's Solaris and Java software. The technology will be built into future joint releases, with the first products available in 2006.

A major breach of networking product giant Cisco's network last year was found to have been just one part of a wide-ranging operation also targeting systems at NASA and the US military.

According to the FBI and Swedish police, the single hacker or small band of cyber criminals responsible for stealing and publishing large chunks of Cisco's software source code on a Russian website had also gained root access to the University of Minnesota's computer network, breached several NASA sites and attacked the US Navy's computers at its White Sands Missile Range. In other security news, a new kind of digital hijacking has materialised: hackers encrypt files on a company's own network, then demand payment to unlock them.