Daily Tech Briefing: August 1, 2014

French telecom Iliad reportedly bid to buy T-Mobile, in an effort to counter a potential Sprint-T-Mobile merger that neither U.S. carrier will admit is being negotiated.

The Wall Street Journal stated that people familiar with the matter said that Iliad views the deal as a “one-time opportunity” to enter the U.S. wireless market. While it’s unknown how much Iliad’s bid was for, it’s rumored that Sprint majority shareholder Softbank could pay $39 billion for T-Mobile.

The Wall Street Journal described Iliad as a feisty, young carrier that has “sparked a fierce price war” in the French telecom market.

Advanced Micro Devices will introduce new chips aimed at gamers and PC enthusiasts who want to build desktops that are powerful, small and inexpensive.

The vendor’s A10-7800 is a fourth-generation A-Series “Kaveri” processor that includes 12 cores – four CPUs and eight GPUs – and Heterogeneous System Architecture features that improve performance by enabling workloads to easily move between the CPUs and GPUs as needed and for the CPU and GPU to share access to memory.

Salesforce.com has added new features to its Journey Builder cloud marketing product such as improved customer personalization tools, easier customer activity mapping capabilities and new Journey Metrics data measurement tools.

These features are aimed at helping companies gain more insights about customer interactions. The additions were unveiled July 30 at a Global Media Day event sponsored by the company.

Microsoft has released new monitoring and alerting options for cloud application administrators that improve visibility into Office 365 environments.

Lawrence Chiu, senior product marketing manager for the Office 365 administrator experience, announced the roll out of the Office 365 Management Pack for Microsoft System Center and explained that the new Office 365 Service Communications API extends the platform’s service communications to IT monitoring systems. The Office 365 Management Pack for Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 is available for download now.