The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Sony is looking to acquire Ericsson's shares in the Sony Ericsson mobile joint venture. Such a deal would help Sony compete in the home electronics market against the likes of Apple, analysts pointed out.

"If Sony does become sole owner we should expect to see it transform itself," said telecom analyst Jeff Kagan in email.

Ericsson's stake is likely to be valued at more than €1 billion (US$1.3 billion), according to analysts. Meanwhile, deals that were confirmed this week were not on that scale, but indicate that market gyrations are not slowing down tech trends toward consolidation.

Some of this weeks deals included:

-- BMC Software's acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, of StreamStep, which focuses on technology designed to accelerate enterprise application delivery and improve release quality. The integration of StreamStep's process management capabilities into BMC's Application Release Automation (ARA) platform will support BMC's effort to provide application management from development to production, the company said.