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Storage giant EMC, a company that has suffered more than most during the IT spending downturn, sought to recapture some of its lost grandeur with the launch of its most comprehensive overhaul to its flagship Symmetrix line in over a decade. Rivals IBM and Hitachi Data Systems unveiled improvements of their own in an apparent bid to steal EMC's thunder.

Reports suggested that another former darling of the storage market, back-up software supplier Legato, had been put up for sale with a price tag of between $800 million and $1 billion. Possible suitors could include EMC, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Veritas Software. Legato has struggled ever since it was racked by an accounting scandal in 2000. Information Age's bet: Computer Associates.

Security software supplier Symantec maintained the drip-feed of alarming hacker statistics, saying that companies networks are typically subjected to 30 attacks in a typical week, with one in five suffered a 'severe' assault every six months. The scare stories seem to be having an effect: Symantec said earlier that revenue grew 29% in its third quarter, driven by strong demand from the corporate sector.

Europe's biggest software company, SAP, proved there is still buoyancy in the business applications market after posting slightly higher sales and greatly increased profitability in its closing quarter of 2002. However, the better numbers were thanks mainly to extra demand for maintenance deals, rather than a glut of new software contracts.

Systems vendor Sun Microsystems underscored a heavy marketing push into utility computing by giving its Unix server line a makeover, releasing a powerful new mid-range server and unveiling a line of blade servers and beefed-up storage management software. It also slashed the prices of some of its mid-range and high-end systems in a bid to stem the tide of defections from its Sparc/Solaris platform to increasingly powerful Wintel rivals.

Suggesting IBM's practice of charging premium prices for support was discouraging customers, Dell Computer dramatically scaled down a $6 billion, three-year-old partnership with IBM Global Services, saying that many customers of Dell kit needed to cut costs by finding less expensive support providers. Dell also formally ended a $16 billion agreement to source disk drives, flat screens and other components from IBM, a seven-year deal that began to unwind once IBM sold its disk drive making business to Hitachi.

Cisco Systems, the networking giant, moved to enhance its network security portfolio by acquiring privately held, four-year old Okena for a hefty $154 million in shares. Most of the Okena management team came from Raptor, the firewall software company sold to Axent Technologies (later to become part of Symantec) for $245 million in 1998. Okena's software seeks to anticipate threats rather than merely responding to attacks.

Supply chain management software company i2 Technologies admitted it is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission over allegations of improper revenue recognition and financial reporting practices. The company said it had instructed new auditor Deloitte & Touche to go over its books for 2000 and 2001. It also released preliminary fourth-quarter figures, showing another deep fall in sales, and announced it was leaving the full Nasdaq exchange for the Nasdaq Small Cap Market.

In yet another court filing, Microsoft rejected accusations that it stole technology secrets from UK mobile handset maker Sendo and sold them to rival manufacturers in Asia. Separately, Microsoft announced it had bought the rights to three products from emulation and virtual machine software vendor Connectix for an undisclosed sum. These included emulation software for Windows and Macintosh PC platforms and, most significantly, a beta version of Windows server virtual machine software that will be integrated with the next version of Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 operating system. Initially, Microsoft will use the software to encourage organisations running applications on Windows NT 4 to upgrade to Windows Server 2003, by offering them the opportunity to run NT 4 applications on Windows Server 2003.