Daily Tech Briefing: July 18, 2014

Over the next year, Microsoft plans to eliminate 18,000 jobs, or roughly 14 percent of the estimated 127,000 workers it employs worldwide. Many of these positions are from the company’s recently acquired Nokia handset business.

This will be done in an effort to consolidate the Smart Devices and Mobile Phones business units into a single phone business unit. Stephen Elop, former Nokia CEO and current executive vice president of Microsoft’s Devices Group added “there will be limited change for the Surface, Xbox hardware, Perceptive Pixel/meetings or next-generation teams.”

If Apple’s appeal of a New York federal judge’s ruling from last year is unsuccessful, the company will have to pay consumers $400 million in damages as part of a government lawsuit that claimed Apple conspired with the nation’s largest book publishers to fix the prices of ebooks.

This sum is on top of the $166 million already paid by publishers in earlier settlements and the $50 million in attorneys’ fees and payments to the states involved in this case.

IBM’s mobility deal with Apple is expected to take its MobileFirst strategy to a much higher level. MobileFirst extends IBM’s strengths of providing services and middleware together with backend support while standing aloof of the consumer-side handset battles.

This strategy dovetails well with Apple’s successful device business. Also, this deal will bring IBM’s big data and analytics capabilities to iPhone and iPad and allows Apple to make use of IBM’s Bluemix Platform as a Service offering.

Oracle has released Oracle Big Data SQL, a tool that can run a single SQL query on Oracle’s own 12C database at the same time as in Hadoop and NoSQL data stores.

While SQL is a long-established relational database query language that has been in use since 1981, enterprises continue to rely on it because it works. Oracle says the 12C database must run on an Exadata server in order to get the full benefit of Big Data SQL.