Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

Swedish telecoms group Ericsson said it would acquire most of the assets of beleaguer-ed rival Marconi in a £1.2 billion deal. Marconi, once a major force in telecoms equipment, has struggled ever since making a series of grave strategic errors during the dot-com era. The company will continue to offer network services under the name Telent. Ericsson is looking to strengthen its position in the fixed line and wireless Internet market.

Storage giant EMC has reached an agreement to acquire document imaging vendor Captiva Software for $275 million, boosting its content management portfolio. The acquisition is part of EMC's wider strategy to provide information lifecycle management (ILM) applications. Captiva specialises in input management - digitising paper-based information - which EMC executives reg-ard as a key component of ILM.

A dispute between two service providers that form part of the Internet backbone left some users unable to access parts of the Internet. The argument between Level 3 and Cogent centred on the service providers' agreement to share traffic over their networks. Up to 17% of web sites were rendered unavailable.

Elsewhere, the European Commission (EC) revealed it had finally hired an external technology consultant to help it monitor Microsoft's compl-iance with its anti-trust ruling. Professor Neil Barrett, a British IT security consultant, computing lecturer and industry commentator, has been appointed as an advisor. As part of its ruling, the EC insisted that Microsoft disclose interface documents that would enable rivals to improve the interoperability of their software. Barrett has been charged with assessing whether these disclosures are both accurate and complete.

CIOs at some of the largest US companies reported increases in their budgets as organisations intensify their reliance on IT to deliver top-line growth. In its latest poll, analyst group Forrester Research found that confidence is rising among those CIOs: 80% expect to increase IT spending in the coming nine months and just over half of those expect an increase of 5% or more. The forecast is accompanied by increased confidence in the current business climate, with 86% claiming it to be 'strong' or 'very strong', although hurricanes Katrina and Rita may have since dampened that optimism.

Microsoft heralded a shake up the business intelligence (BI) market with news that it will introduce a simple business analysis tools into the next release of its widely used Office suite. The market for BI software - which retrieves, analyses and presents salient business data - has been expanding steadily in the last few years, as businesses struggle to achieve a meaningful view of their ever-increasing data repositories. Microsoft's new product, Business Scorecard Manager, to be included in Office 12 when released in late 2006, will provide basic BI functionality, letting executives check on financial performance daily.

Technology giant BT faced censure from NHS IT executives, after it was revealed that the £996 million programme to develop an electronic patient record for London is running "nine months to a year" behind schedule. BT has already had to refund part of its payment for an NHS contract to build a national broadband network after the project overran.