Nokia has the chance to become the second biggest telecom equipment maker in the industry since it plans to acquire Alcatel-Lucent in an all-share deal making the French company worth €15.6 billion.

The result will bring about a single company with sales reaching around €26bn, 114000 employees and global mobile equipment market share of 35%, following Ericsson (40%) and ahead of Huawei (20%), at least according to Bernstein Research. It also unites Alcatel-Lucent's famous Bell Labs with Nokia's FutureWorks, even if the Nokia Technologies research division will remain a separate entity.

"[T]he combined company will be in a position to accelerate development of future technologies including 5G, IP and software-defined networking, cloud, analytics as well as sensors and imaging," Nokia says.

Bigger-than-expected losses and falling Q1 2015 sales lead to AMD dropping  the SeaMicro dense server business in order to "simplify and sharpen the company's investment focus."

AMD acquired microserver specialist SeaMicro a little more than 3 years ago. It builds space- and energy-saving server with hundreds of ultra-low-power processors dubbed "wimpy cores," which are tied together using "supercompute" fabric technology.

One SeaMicro product sold by AMD is the SM15000, a 10RU server pushing compute, networking and storage through 64 "compute card" slots carrying either AMD Octal-core Opteron or Intel quad-core Xeon processors.

Lenovo announces a leadership shuffle as it moves EMEA president Aymar de Lencquesaing to N. America. Replacing him from the end of the month is ex-HP Personal Systems Group Senior VP Eric Cador.

Cador has a 30-year history of leadership positions in the IT industry, and was part of the team behind the integration of Compaq with the HP PC business.

"In Eric, we have attracted a unique talent to our company," the company says. "An industry veteran with an incredible track record for delivering growth, deep insights into our industry, and a strong competitive spirit.”

IBM announces a $3 billion investment in the creation of an Internet of Things (IoT) unit, whose task is the building of a cloud-based open platform for enterprises with plans for IoT solutions.

According to the company, the platform offers industry-specific cloud data services and developer tools for the integration of data from an "unprecedented" amount of sources, both IoT and traditional, all in the name of designing IoT-optimised connected devices.

“Our knowledge of the world grows with every connected sensor and device, but too often we are not acting on it, even when we know we can ensure a better result,” Big Blue adds. “IBM will enable clients and industry partners apply IoT data to build solutions based on an open platform. This is a major focus of investment for IBM because it’s a rich and broad-based opportunity where innovation matters.”

TechCrunch is reporting that Apple has acquired FoundationDB, a company that specialises in speedy, multi-model databases - ones that can store and interrogate many types data. The acquisition has not yet been confirmed by either company, but there seems no reason to doubt that it is true.

Apple already owns a database company in FileMaker, but it is clear that these are two very different beasts. While FileMaker, with its long history as an independent unit within its parent company, focuses on traditional database development, particularly for SMEs and individual users, FoundationDB addresses much larger and more diverse datasets. Its core strength appears to be speed, and its ability to handle multiple and ill-defined data.

Printing supply maker Lexmark pours investment in its software business as it acquires enterprise software seller Kofax in a deal worth $1 billion in cash.

The Kofax portfolio consists of intelligent information capture, BPO and analytics software. It reports fiscal 2014 sales of $289 million (up from $266m) if with a -59% operating profit decline of $10.2m due to rising overheads and one-off costs.

"The acquisition of Kofax enhances our best-in-class offerings so our customers can capture, manage, access, and act upon their information more efficiently, and extends Lexmark into the high-growth smart process applications market," Lexmark says. "Our customers will have a breadth of hardware and software solutions that connect their information silos and automate their business processes-- enabling them to access the most relevant information at the moment they need it to drive business forward."