Last June Toshiba Memory Corporation (TMC) was acquired by a consortium lead by Bain Capital. Now the Wall Street Journal reports Toshiba sets to buy back the storage unit from the companies making said consortium.

The consortium includes Apple and Dell, as well as storage rivals Kingston and Seagate. According to the unnamed WSJ sources, the companies plan to sell their shares back to Toshiba for around 500 billion yen (or $4.5bn) in a deal set to be completed by end May 2019. Funding the buyback are Japanese banks with a loan worth around $11.8bn. Bain Capital is not selling its shares, and as such remains a majority owner of TMC.

The 2019 Intel Open Source Technology Summit (OSTS) brings leaders from across the industry to discuss the open source software driving the next generation of data-centric technology in areas such as containers, AI, machine learning and other cloud to edge to device workloads.

The OSTS started in 2004 as an internal conference hosting a few dozen engineers, but since then it has grown into a major event. The 2019 edition has 500 participants from major names, including Alibaba, Amazon, AT&T, Google, Huawei, JD.com, Microsoft, MontaVista, Red Hat, SUSE and Wind River.

Of course, the conference has Chipzilla show off the latest in open source advances, especially those optimised for Intel architecture. One example is ModernFW, an initiative with the aim to remove legacy code and modernise design for scalability and security. The approach delivers "just enough" code to boot the kernel, thus reducing security risks while allowing for easier management.

SnapAV and Control4 announce a "definitive merger agreement"-- one seeing SnapAV buying all Control4 shares in an all-cash agreement worth $680 million. In other words, it is less a merger and more, well, an outright acquisition.

According to the two companies, the deal makes a "highly complementary combination," bringing a one-stop shop with a complete portfolio of custom smart home, control and automation solutions. It also creates a single company with over 1200 employees, market-leading solutions, "exceptional" interoperability and channel platform, dealer-first programs, global distribution and financial resources to deliver value.

Dell vice chairman Jeff Clarke uses his Dell Technologies World 2019 day 2 keynote to point out the 5 "key imperatives" the industry needs to consider and invest in if it is to handle the "tsunami of data" headed its way.

According to IDC, the global data sphere is to reach 163 zetabytes (or "163 with 21 zeroes," as Clarke puts it) by 2025, thanks to the introduction of usage models brought about by 5G, such as autonomous cars. And a Dell survey cements how this growing surge of data is a priority for customers, since 68% of respondents plan to use emerging technology to drive and improve supply chain efficiency and transparency, while 77% want to use emerging technologies to anticipate and predict customer demand and manage resources. As such, IT needs to be able to scale to meet the data needs of today, never mind tomorrow.