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Services giant EDS bid farewell to its CEO of four years, Dick Brown. The departure was amicable, particularly for Brown who was given a 'good bye' package worth some $35 million.

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard were reported to be sniffing around EDS, not necessarily with a view to outright acquisition, but in relation to a strategic partnership and, perhaps, an equity stake. With a valuation of about $8.5 billion, an outright acquisition of EDS is well out of the price range of HP.

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers has rediscovered his love of shopping. He took his spending for the year to some $650 million with the acquisitions of IP telephony specialist SignalWorks and SOHO networking hardware maker Linksys. The latter buy is particularly significant. It signals Cisco's intention to dominate the networking market from top to bottom.

Hasso Plattner, co-founder and joint CEO of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software supplier SAP, announced his retirement. The job of running SAP day-to-day will now fall solely to Henning Kagermann, who has been joint-CEO alongside Plattner for the last five years.

Reports suggest that Unix systems vendor Sun Microsystems is considering dumping Sun Linux - less than a year after it was launched. It will adopt Red Hat, SuSE or both instead. The move will save Sun the cost of maintaining its barely-used distribution of Linux, which is, in any case, largely based on Red Hat.

Divine, the hyper-acquisitive software supplier founded by Andrew 'Flip' Filipowski, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after being sued by RoweCom. It filed suit alleging that Divine had fraudulently siphoned off $73.7 million from a unit it sold to RoweCom.

Storage hardware giant EMC reportedly emerged as an early front-runner to acquire Legato Systems, after the 'for sale' sign was put up over the company in January. However, EMC's bid of $750 million fell well short of Legato management's $1 billion valuation of the company.

Software giant Microsoft told buyers of its Windows Server 2003 operating system, launched on 24 April, that they would have to wait for up to six months for a number of key features to appear. (See Perspectives section)

European services vendor Getronics became more deeply mired in a bitter dispute with its stockholders over a debt-for-equity rescue plan that would see them emerge with just 4% of the company. (See Company analysis section)

The US Department of Justice revealed that it was joining in with a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation into Network Associates' accounts. The security software supplier has said that it will restate revenues for 1998, 1999 and 2000.