The news comes as UK-based Misys has agreed terms of a merger with Swiss rival Temenos. Under the proposed terms of the deal, Temenos CEO Guy Dubois would become CEO of the merged company.

US-born Lawrie joins CSC at a troubled time for the company. In November 2011, it posted a $2.9 billion quarterly loss, having written down the value of intangible assets by $2.6 billion.

At the time, incumbent CEO Mike Laphan told investment analysts that the company's contract to provide the NHS with an electronic health care systems, much delayed and over budget, was one of the reasons why CSC has lost goodwill in the market.

CSC pointed to Lawrie's experience as chairman of Allscripts-Misys Healthcare Solutions, a healthcare-focused division that Misys divested in 2010. "His emphasis on innovative healthcare and improving patient care will help drive CSC’s strategic growth plan in the healthcare IT market," the company said in a statement.

Misys informed investors yesterday that Lawrie had "received an offer of employment from a third party. Accordingly, the board and Mike Lawrie have mutually agreed that he will leave Misys on 31st March 2012."

Google topped the table, overtaking last year's leader Cisco, thanks to its support of stronger US clean energy policy and the EU's more stringent carbon reduction plans, Greenpeace said. "Google tops the table because it’s putting its money where its mouth is by pumping investment into renewable energy”, said Greenpeace International IT analyst Gary Cook.

Casey Harrell, an IT analyst at Greenpeace who worked on the report, told Information Age that the leaderboard candidates were selected for their potential to help enterprises become more energy efficient through, for example by reducing the travel for executives through video conferencing.

Technology giants Apple and Facebook were not included in the table as they were not deemed to affect business emissions, Harrell said. "Apple's cloud isn't driving enterprise CO2 savings at the moment, it's mainly streaming movie and music to consumers," he said.

Greenpeace noted that Google, Cisco and Dell all sourced more than 20% of their energy needs with renewables, contributing to their higher scores.

Fujitsu ranked top for 'climate solutions' – a measure of greenhouse gas emissions saved through its technology – while Japan's Softbank received the highest score in the 'political advocacy' category for its demand for a rapid shift towards renewable energy and away from nuclear power in Japan following the Fukushima disaster.

"A failure has been observed where a MOSFET [metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor] power transistor failed in a manner that caused the MOSFET to overheat and emit a flash before failing," the company revealed in a field notice.

The company had previously advised the customers upgrade to latest version of its UCS Blade Management Controller firmware, but it has since been shown that this does not protect against all MOSFET failures.

It has therefore launched a hardware replacement programme for existing customers.  "Cisco is directly contacting UCS B440 Blade Server customers and will replace UCS B440 Blade Servers currently deployed at customer sites," the company said.

The field notice contains information on how organisations can identify whether their hardware might be affected.

When Cisco launched UCS in 2009, it was a bold step by the networking equipment vendor into data centre infrastructure. After the company's most recent financial quarter, Cisco CEO John Chamber told investment analysts that UCS is selling at an annualised run rate of $1 billion, having grown by 116% year-on-year.

"Results in this area have been particularly outstanding, given that we are taking on the big competitors in the data centre," he said.  

Anonymous also published an email conversation between a hacker named 'Yamatough' and a purported Symantec employee. In the exchange, 'Yamatough' threatens to the publish the source code unless Symantec pays a $50,000 ransom.

"We can't pay you $50,000 at once for the reasons we discussed previously," said one email from the purported Symantec employee, and instead offered to pay in installments. "In exchange, you will make a public statement on behalf of your group that you lied about the hack."

'Yamatough' now claims he only offered the ransom to make Symantec look bad, while Symantec told Reuters that the supposed employee involved in the conversation was "part of the law enforcement investigation".

The security software vendor  told customers to stop using pcAnywhere two weeks ago when Anonymous first claimed that it had stolen the source code. It later said that the software was safe to use as long security patches are up to date.

"Symantec can confirm that a segment of its source code has been accessed," it said in a statement last week. "Upon investigation of the claims made by Anonymous regarding source code disclosure, Symantec believes that the disclosure was the result of a theft of source code that occurred in 2006."

The company has commissioned Interior Services Group, a construction firm whose previous projects include London's Olympic Velodrome, to build two identical facilities, each with over 160,000 square feet of floor space, in an area that is being developed as a business park.

A planning application submitted in June last year reveals that Santander expects the data centre to employ 65 full time staff and 10 part time employees. "The number of staff per building will be in the order of 15 people on one shift, up to a maximum of 75-100 people at any one time to cater for the overlap in staff while employees change shifts," it says.

Each building will have four levels, the application revealed. Levels one and two, which will be below ground level, will contain the computing equipment while three and four will house the electrical and mechanical infrastructure.

An assessment of the "Project Fox" data centres' energy consumption revealed that "the efficiency of server components will be procured to allow them to operate at high temperatures. This has the knock on [effect] such that it is able to operate in free cooling mode ...for around 95% of the year."

Sustainable energy generation techniques including solar panels, biomass generation, ground source heat pumps and wind turbines were all rejected as impractical on the site.

Eight local residents objected to the facility but the planning application was approved in July last year.

Santander acquired UK building society Abbey in 2004 and bought Alliance & Leicster and Bradford & Bingley in 2008. In 2009, it told investors that it would save £180 million by consolidating the various companies' IT systems.

Logica takes the contract from troubled British BPO company Xchanging. BAE Systems chose not to renew its £18 million contract with Xchanging in November last year.

The company will use Oracle’s human capital management (PeopleSoft) and its payroll software (E-Business Suite) to "design, build and run a transformed HR service for BAE Systems", the outsourcer said in a statement.

The deal comes after Logica cut 1,300 jobs in December, warning of missed profit forecasts and responding to delayed spending from clients. With today's BAE deal, Logica claims to be one of the "fastest growing providers of next generation HR services in the market", building on a similar HRO contract win with international retailer Ahold six months ago.

Commenting on the deal, Anthony Miller of TechMarketView wrote that he assumes that the Logica deal will be on better terms than the Xchanging, which was worth £18 million a year, and generating a 5% margin.

"While it’s great to see Logica winning multi-million pound, long-term outsourcing contracts, we’re not exactly clear how a 5% deal will help Andy Green restore group margins in the medium term," Miller wrote

"We are aware of the video which relates to an FBI conference call involving a PCeU representative," a Met spokesperson said in a statement. "The matter is being investigated by the FBI. We continue to carry out a full assessment. We are not prepared to discuss further."

Anonymous posted the recording earlier on YouTube.com earlier today. The six participants on the call, two of which identify themselves as Met officers and four as FBI agents in Los Angeles, discuss the Met's progress in prosecuting Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis, two alleged hackers arrested in connection with LulzSec's hacking exploits last summer.

One participant, who identitfies himself as 'Stewart', explains how the arrests of two other hackers, named Kayla and T-Flow, have been delayed. "We’ve got our prosecution council making an application in chambers, i.e without the defence knowing, to seek a way to try and factor some time in that won’t look suspicious," 'Stewart' says on the call.

An FBI participant expresses their appreciation for the Met's cooperation, to which 'Stewart' replies: "Hey, we're here to help. We cocked things up in the past, we know that."

The recording is accompanied by a post of a group email discussing the time and date of the call. This information was presumably used by a member of Anonymous to listen in to the call, which took place on January 17th.

Also discussed on the call was the breach of gaming site Steam. Garrick says that a hacker going by the moniker 'tehwongz' had claimed responsibility for the theft of 32,000 logins and credit card details. Garrick said that tehwongz had posted a statement on his school website after hacking it, explaining how he became a hacker and claiming credit for hacking Steam. Garrick referred to tehwongz as "a bit of an idiot".

The FBI lead on the call, 'Thomas', says the admission is "fantastic" and that the Baltimore office is investigating the Steam hack.

The news comes one day after the Met admitted to inadvertently disclosing the email addresses of more than 1000 crime victims to other victims. In a statement, the Met said the disclosure was the result of human error.

Group sales fell by 5% down to £4.8 billion during the three months ending December 31st 2011. This made it the tenth consecutive financial quarter of sales decline for the company.

However, profit before tax shot up 48% to £652 million. The company attributed this to reduced operating costs and 'lower finance expense'.

Much of the company's revenue decline was attributed to a drop in 'transit revenue',  the money its get from other telecommunications operators that use its infrastructure. Excluding transit revenue, the year-on-year revenue drop was just 3%, the company said.

BT's network infrastructure management division OpenReach was once again the best performer. OpenReach revenues rose 5% to £1.3 billion, and its operating profit shot up 26% to £355 million.

The company's services arm, BT Global Services, saw a 4% revenue decline to £1.9 billion, and the division made an operating loss of £25 million. The division signed deals with retailer Sainsbury's and insurer Standard Life, and two 'major'  contracts with the European Parliament during the quarter, BT revealed.

A report from the the Science and Technology Select Committee warns that UK citizens need to be better informed about the risks posed by online malware and Internet scams, adding that advice is often too technical for most users to understand.

"We believe that the Government has a duty to protect the people of the United Kingdom from crime regardless of whether that crime takes place on the streets or on the Internet," the report says.

The committee made a number of suggestions for improving the current lack of 'Plain English' information, including a public malware detection web service to determine whether a machine was infected. Internet security awareness site, Get Safe Online, is in need of "substantial investment and improvement," the committee said.

"Get Safe Online needs a much higher profile among UK computer users," the committee said. "Government is central in that awareness raising, through integrating the site with relevant official organisations and governmental bodies and providing a one-stop shop for victims of cyber crime to report  that crime and get authoritative information on how to remedy their situation."

Another suggestion was to introduce a kite mark for security software that meets the government's standards. However, the committee said it recognised that such schemes might work against smaller companies, and asked the government to look into other ways that smaller security companies might prove their product's security.

"Despite the increasing use of malware, the internet is still a reasonably safe place to go about one's business, provided users take a few sensible precautions," said committee chair Andrew Miller said. "Government departments need to realise that better public information about computer safety could save huge numbers of people the hassle of having their personal details stolen."

The government cyber security strategy was aimed primarily at protecting business and critical national infrastructure from cyber attacks. It called for greater cross-sector collaboration and information sharing and revealed that intelligence agency GCHQ would recieve 50% of the UK's £650 million cyber security budget.