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

Telecom's giant SBC Communications moved to buy its former parent, AT&T. The $16 billion deal will combine SBC's strengths in local voice and broadband services, mostly for consumers, with AT&T's global data communication networks serving three million corporate customers.

A US judge ordered IBM to turn over two billion lines of its source code from its AIX and Dynix Unix operating systems to SCO, the software company that claims it owns the intellectual property rights to Unix. The court order, which also covers the design documents of 3,000 most programmers who worked on AIX and Dynix, was a rare victory for SCO's in $1 billion lawsuit against IBM.

Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina came under intense pressure to shake up the company after being scorched by Wall Street analysis and highly influential business publications Fortune, the New York Times and Business Week for failing to increase shareholder value as a result of the company's May 2002 acquisitions of Compaq. Calls for action range from the devolution of some of Fiorina's power to other executives and the appointment of a COO to the selling off of the company's highly-lucrative printer business.

BT signed one of the UK's largest ever business processing outsourcing deals with the handing over of its HR administration to IT services company Accenture. The 10-year, £306 million contract renews a previous 5 year deal and expands Accenture's remit form the UK to 37 other countries around the globe. Accenture currently provides HR services to BT's 87,000 employees and 180,000 pensioners.

Database and applications software company Oracle laid off 5,000 staff - mainly former PeopleSoft employees - bringing the merged company's headcount to 50,000 worldwide. To appease the worries of customers about the future of PeopleSoft products, Oracle said it would only fire 10% of PeopleSoft's development and support team.

IBM, the world's largest patent holder, handed over 500 of its software patents to open source developers. IBM claimed its pledge marked the "beginning of a new era in how IBM will manage intellectual property to benefit our partners and clients."

Speculation mounted that Google plans to expand its portfolio to include IP telephony services, a move that would set it up against fixed line incumbents such as BT. According to The Times, Google is intent on launching a directory service that would combine with a voice-over-IP service. Users could then search Google's directory for a desired company, and then speak to that business for free using the Internet.

The Viennese local government became the latest European public sector body to announce plans to migrate its users away from Microsoft software. The city of Vienna's IT department intends to migrate 4,800 users away from Windows to a tailored version of the Debian Linux distribution, called Wienux, and switch users from Microsoft Office to the free alternative, OpenOffice.