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

All the top stories from January 2008, from HM Revenue and Customs' crashing tax site to Microsoft's $44.6 billion overture to Yahoo

Middleware maker BEA Systems finally succumbed to Oracle’s advances, agreeing to be acquired for $8.5 billion. BEA’s executives highlighted that the agreed price was nearly $2 billion higher than Oracle’s ‘final’ offer, which they rejected in late 2007. The deal will strengthen Oracle’s applications integration, business process management and service-oriented architecture line offerings.

Demand for IT staff has hit a six-year high, according to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, causing salaries to rise by an average of around £100 per week. The REC said that demand for staff was driven by an increase in corporate investment in IT. The average salary for a full-time permanent IT professional is now £40,300.

The chairman of high street bank Barclays became the victim of identity theft, having £10,000 stolen from his personal bank account. Marcus Agius, who became Barclays chairman last January, lost the money after a con man exploited weaknesses in the bank’s call centre processes and convinced the operator to issue a new card in Agius’s name.

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) was embarrassingly forced to offer an extension to the 31 January deadline for returning self-assessment forms, after the Revenue’s online system crashed. The system was brought down by the sheer volume of taxpayers trying to access the website on the deadline day. Opposition politicians criticised HMRC for not testing the website adequately to ensure it could meet demand.

Millions of Internet users across the Middle East and India lost services for several days. Confusion surrounds the cause of the disruptions – reports emerged of up to four submarine communications cables being cut – but early suggestions that they could have been cut accidentally by ships’ anchors were refuted by Egyptian authorities. No boats were in the vicinity at the time, they said, hinting at sabotage.

Storage titan EMC inched towards its oft-stated goal of delivering storage services through its latest offering, MozyEnterprise. Using technology inherited through its Berkley Data Systems acquisition, EMC will offer enterprises online back-up services as part of its software-as-a-service push, using a multi-tenant architecture to perform back-up services on desktops, laptops and servers.

Microsoft made a surprise $44.6 billion offer to buy Internet portal Yahoo. The software giant believes the combination could create a serious challenger to Google’s domination of online search and advertising. But the deal is far from concluded: Yahoo’s executives may prefer to look for alternative partners and competition regulators could object.