The European Commission on Monday issued its formal "statement of objections" over Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, saying the deal would harm competition in the database market.

Microsoft has purchased assets in a company that specializes in parallel computing, a function used mainly in supercomputing that Microsoft aims to develop for a broader audience, the company said Tuesday.

EMC on Monday moved to head off NetApp's proposed acquisition of data de-duplication vendor Data Domain, offering about US$1.8 billion compared with NetApp's May 20 bid of $1.5 billion.

Oracle plans to stay in the hardware business following its planned US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, CEO Larry Ellison has said, adding more detail to earlier statements made by the company.

Microsoft has confirmed it is testing a new search engine called Kumo, based on technology from its Powerset acquisition, that is likely to be an early version of a soon-to-be-rebranded Live Search product.

Microsoft has dropped its three-month-long pursuit of Yahoo, ending a historic acquisition attempt whose failure takes Microsoft back to square one in its quest to boost its online business to better compete against Google.

Yahoo failed to agree to an acquisition deal with Microsoft by Saturday, the deadline Microsoft had set for wrapping up negotiations.

Microsoft confirmed a number of high-level executive changes, moves that could be designed to better position the company to digest an acquisition of Yahoo, an analyst said.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang cited the growing online advertising market and his company's position to take advantage of that growth as reasons for shareholders to reject Microsoft's acquisition bid, he said in a letter to shareholders Wednesday.

Yahoo has not reached a decision about Microsoft's acquisition offer and is considering "a wide range of potential strategic alternatives," Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said in an e-mail to employees on Wednesday.

Business Objects SA founder Bernard Liautaud resigned as chairman and chief strategy officer at the company following the closing of its acquisition by SAP AG earlier this month.

A new report from Forrester Research declares that the wave of mega-acquisitions in the software industry is over for now, though big vendors will continue to snap up smaller firms as they round out their portfolios.

U.S. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras won't recuse herself from considering the antitrust implications of Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick, despite a request from two privacy groups that she do so.

Amid further delays of AMD's quad-core server chip and plans to write off goodwill from the acquisition of ATI, AMD executives are going to face tough questions when they meet financial analysts in New York Thursday.

Dell Inc. CEO Michael Dell hinted Monday that his company could be shopping for more acquisition targets, and that they could be larger than the companies it has acquired to date.

BEA Systems Inc.'s board of directors has named an acquisition price to competitor and suitor Oracle Corp.: US$21 a share, $4 more than Oracle's initial offer.

Acer Inc. on Wednesday announced the completion of its acquisition of Gateway Inc., making it officially the third largest PC vendor in the world.

Cisco Systems Inc. on Tuesday reported strong growth in revenue and profit for a fiscal third quarter in which it made several acquisitions that it expects to help power Web 2.0.

After watching its market share for the North American desktop PC market slip in a soft third quarter, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) will seek greater profits in 2007 through a new family of quad-core server chips and its acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI.

ATI Technologies Inc. lost ground in every major graphics product category during the third quarter, and its acquisition by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is likely to blame, according to Jon Peddie Research.