Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: more French M&A talk; Telekom Austria dissolves its CFO; big data pioneer lands Finnish tech prize.
BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA) has done a deal with Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) to provide its enterprise customers with access to Microsoft's Azure public cloud platform. The so-called Azure ExpressRoute will allow BT customers to bypass the public Internet and connect to Azure through BT's IP Connect VPN service. The service is due to go live in the summer, and will be supported by Microsoft data centers in Dublin and Amsterdam.
No sooner is one big French M&A deal tied up than another one pops back into the frame: Reuters reports that Iliad (Euronext: ILD), owner of the cut-price Free Mobile brand, is in talks about the possible acquisition of larger rival Bouygues Telecom , which failed in its attempt to buy Vivendi 's SFR . Citing Le Parisien newspaper, Reuters says that Bouygues is looking to sell for €8 billion (US$11 billion), but Iliad is only offering €5 billion ($6.9 billion). Regarder cet espace! (See Eurobites: Numericable Wins SFR M&A Tussle.)
Uh-oh -- it's another conscious uncoupling! Telekom Austria Group is to part company with CFO Hans Tschuden, who had been in that role since 2007. His contract will be prematurely "dissolved" on May 31. No successor has been announced.
A key enabler of the "big data" phenomenon has been awarded Finland's Millennium Technology Prize, reports YLE. Stuart Parkin, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) stalwart and visiting professor to Stanford University, invented the GMR read head, a vital component of the hard disk drive. This, according to the judges, helped pave the way for big data.
Who's the big data daddy? Stuart Parkin, that's who. (Source: TAF)
Vodafone Group plc (NYSE: VOD) has landed an M2M contract with Kone, the manufacturer of elevators and more. Under the terms of the deal, a Vodafone M2M SIM card will be embedded into each elevator, enabling operational data to be sent and received wirelessly over the Vodafone network, with the aim of streamlining maintenance processes.
— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading
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