Siemens AG

Nokia Siemens Networks said Tuesday it will lay off up to 5,700 workers globally as part of a move to cut annual costs by euro500 million ($740 million).

The mobile network equipment maker -- a joint venture between Finland's Nokia Corp. and Siemens AG of Germany -- said it will reduce its five business units to three by January, and strengthen its business through partnerships and acquisitions.

The savings program could include cutting 7 to 9 percent of its current global work force of some 64,000 employees, the mobile network equipment maker said.

Industrial conglomerate Siemens AG is poised to sell its 50-percent stake in the joint venture Fujitsu Siemens Computers to Japan's Fujitsu Group, two people familiar with the deal told The Associated Press on Monday.

Siemens has been contemplating a sale of its half in the joint venture at least since August. Chief Executive Peter Loescher said then that the company was in talks with Fujitsu about the fate of the unit, which makes personal computers and laptops and posted sales of 6.6 billion euros but a pretax profit of just 105 million euros last year.

Microsoft announced Wednesday that the 2008 version of SQL Server, its data-management and business-intelligence platform, has been released to manufacturing.

The company said new capabilities have been added, such as support for policy-based management, auditing, large-scale data warehousing, geospatial data, and advanced reporting and analysis. Microsoft is also touting its support for aggregation, summarization, search engines, dashboards, transactions across distributed data sources, and long-running transactions.

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