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

The European Committee for Interoperable Systems, a lobby group that includes representatives from IBM, Nokia and Oracle, has offered to provide the European Commission with technical expertise to assist in its long running antitrust battle with Microsoft. The software giant has previously been rallying support for its appeal against the €497 million fine imposed by the EC.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) surprised industry observers with the appointment of former NCR chief executive Mark Hurd as its new CEO. Hurd has a strong reputation in operations, having overseen both a dramatic and rapid turnaround in fortunes at NCR. Hurd has refused to be drawn on whether his plans for HP include spinning off any part of the technology heavyweight.

Oracle finally prevailed in its bidding war with SAP for retail software maker Retek. But the victory came at a substantial premium. SAP's initial bid for Retek was $496 million; Oracle's successful bid was $670 million. The acquisition strengthens Oracle's position in the retail sector, although SAP still retains the market leadership in terms of customer numbers.

Financial IT services company SunGard agreed to be bought by a consortium of private equity firms in an $11.3 billion deal. The buy-out group was led by technology-focused investment firm Silver Lake Partners, which has previously invested in technology companies such as disk drive maker Seagate, software maker Business Objects and analyst house Gartner. SunGard abandoned plans to spin off its business continuity unit as part of the agreement. The transaction is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2005.

Research by Indepen Consulting and industry analyst Ovum concluded that European governments were 20 years behind the US in their commitment to IT. The report predicted that Europe will fail to achieve the goals of its 'Lisbon strategy' - to make the region the leading knowledge-based economy by 2010.

IBM added to its already broad integration software portfolio with a $1.1 billion cash deal for data integration specialist Ascential. The acquisition strengthens IBM's data transformation, cleansing and profiling line up with extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tools. The two companies have been partners for four years, working on co-development and marketing.

Microsoft confirmed that it would begin shipping a version of its Windows operating system capable of running on 64-bit processors by the end of April 2005. The release promises to be a significant factor in creating demand for 64-bit chips, which has hitherto been stifled by the lack of applica-tions that can run on the technology. The new version of Windows also offers the capacity to handle larger amounts of data more effectively and provides greater manageability.