Microsoft beats Wall Street expectations in fiscal Q2 2018 (ending 31 December 2017), with profits worth $8.7 billion-- a 10% Y-o-Y increase-- from revenues growing by 12% Y-o-Y to $28.9 billion.

The company attributes good part to such results to the Productivity and Business Processes segment covering Office, Office 365 and the LinkedIn social network. The segment shows revenue growth of 25% Y-o-Y, while Office 365 subscribers total 29.2m. Also driving Microsoft growth are Azure cloud and Windows server server, since Intelligent Cloud revenues are up by 15% Y-o-Y, with Azure revenue growth reaching 98% Y-o-Y.

In a bid to sidestep some legal woes Qualcomm refreshes its cross-licensing agreement with Samsung-- leading to Samsung "withdrawing" interventions in a Qualcomm appeal of a Korean Fair Trade decision in the Seoul High Court.

Two years ago the Korean Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) fined Qualcomm to the tune of $845 million for forcing phone makers to pay royalties "for an unnecessarily broad set of patents." It also limited access to patents to rival chipmakers, hindering fair competition.

“We believe this amended agreement provides the foundation for a long-term, stable relationship with Samsung following the KFTC investigation,” Qualcomm says. “With our portfolio of leading technology inventions, we are committed to driving growth for the global ecosystem and we look forward to an expanded business relationship with Samsung.”

Qualcomm is the latest company to face the ire of the European Union-- following the €2.42 billion fine slapped at Google, the European Commission orders the chipmaker to pay €997 million for "abusing its market dominance."

"Qualcomm illegally shut out rivals from the market for LTE baseband chipsets for over five years, thereby cementing its market dominance." European commissioner in charge of competition policy Margrethe Vestager says. "Qualcomm paid billions of US Dollars to a key customer, Apple, so that it would not buy from rivals. These payments were not just reductions in price-- they were made on the condition that Apple would exclusively use Qualcomm's baseband chipsets in all its iPhones and iPads."

Technically monopolies are not against EU policy, but according to the EC Qualcomm got to dominate the market through means deemed abusive. How so? In 2011 Qualcomm started making "significant payments" to ensure the exclusive use of its LTE baseband chips in iPhones and iPads. If Apple started using chipsets supplied by a rival (such as Intel) the payments would not only stop, but the agreement dictated the iPhone maker would have to return "a large part" of payments received.

According to TechCrunch Apple is maintaining its long-term enterprise strategy with the hiring of 18 employees from Silicon Valley Data Science (SVDS), a startup providing data science-powered consultations.

The story says Apple did not acquire the startup itself, but a tech team including "at least" two co-founders, one of whom is the CEO. A comment from an anonymous person connected with SVDS says the purchase will "support product dev ambitions," and at least some people who have recently updated their LinkedIn profiles to show they work at Apple used to work at SVDS.

One such person is SVDS co-founder and CEO Sanjay Mathur, whose LinkedIn profile now tells he is a strategy and analytics leader at Apple. Another is another SVDS co-founder, CTO John Akred, whose LinkedIn job description reads "algorithms at Apple."

IBM breaks a 22-month decline in Q4 2017, as total revenues total $22.54 billion-- a 3.6% Y-o-Y increase, bringing about profits of $4.5bn (an improvement from the -$1.05bn loss of Q4 2016).

Full-year 2017 Big Blue revenues total $79bn.

"Our strategic imperatives revenue again grew at a double-digit rate and now represents 46 percent of our total revenue, and we are pleased with our overall revenue growth in the quarter," CEO Ginni Rometty says.  "During 2017, we strengthened our position as the leading enterprise cloud provider and established IBM as the blockchain leader for business.  Looking ahead, we are uniquely positioned to help clients use data and AI to build smarter businesses."

Control4 announces the acquisition of a remote management services provider-- Ihiji, providing Control4 with a one-stop shop for remote IP network and IoT ecosystem management when paired with the Pakedge BakBak portfolio.

The deal covers certain Ihiji IP, development and support teams, and inventory. Financial details are not available.

“Connected home opportunities are emerging globally, and their individual performance, reliability, and resilience are foundational to all successful installations," Control4 says. "By combining Control4’s BakPak, with its strong network management capabilities, and Ihiji’s Invision, with its industry-leading device monitoring and management capabilities, Control4 can provide a set of unified cloud-based services to our dealers to securely and efficiently monitor end-customer systems."