Industry news

The UK government is expecting savings of tens-of-millions of pounds from G-Cloud procurement, with, deputy director of IT reform at the Cabinet Office, Alex Holmes, saying that procurement rates will rapidly increase over the year.

Mr Holmes described that SMEs will be a key focus of the new G-Cloud framework, saying: “Medium-sized departments will be putting tens-of-millions of pounds through the G-Cloud”.

As departments move to become more centralised, the government is now looking to secure the largest deal so far through the G-Cloud, with a new multimillion pound tender for a secure email provider.

Attacks against privatisation and plans to outsource services by trade union Napo have been criticised by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ).

Napo used the example of G4S’ failure to deliver on its security contract to the 2012 Olympics, with Harry Fletcher, the assistant general secretary of Napo, saying that at risk individuals "need to be supervised by experienced staff who can motivate them and properly assess risk."

MoJ minister, Jeremy Wright, said in defence of outsourced services: "Reoffending rates have barely changed in a decade, and almost half of all prisoners are reconvicted within a year of their release. We cannot go on just doing more of the same."

The administration of 2e2 placed its datacentre customers in a predicament, with the potential for complete loss of service and data control. However a new agreement between 2e2 and telecommunications service provider Daisy Group will secure the datacentres services for customers including the NHS.

Upon entering into administration under FTI Consulting, customers had been asked to provide nearly £1m in funding from customers, to gain access to services including their data.

Daisy chief executive Matthew Riley, said: “Through the additional datacentre facilities Daisy is in a position to expand its data and hosting footprint, provide stability to existing 2e2 customers and offer additional resources to its own customers”.

Film studios are looking to the benefits of cloud hosting and services with VFX (visual effects) studios moving to render images through the cloud.

Studios have now started to use variable cloud services such as Amazon’s EC2 cloud to render images while retaining a high level of artistic quality.

Traditionally VFX studios would render digital images through an on-site data centre, but advances in cloud hosting technology have now allowed artists to move away from a reliance on traditional methods.

The outsourcing venture Southwest One, between IBM and Somerset council, has achieved savings of £16.2million. However the target savings of £192 million are far off, despite the venture now being halfway through the 10 year project, which ends in 2017.

Recommendations from accountants saw Somerset council place the venture under review, which resulted in legal writs being issued by the two parties against one another, hindering the review and shifting the ventures focus.

Having only achieved 10 percent of planned savings halfway through the venture, Southwest One has been quite in releasing information on how it would achieve the gap in savings targets.

Heinz is set to be bought up by a consortium of Mr Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway company and private equity firm 3G, in a deal worth $28 billion.

The planned takeover saw a New York share rise increase of 20 percent, while Berkshire Hathaway closed at a new record record high.

Having been approved by both boards, the approval of shareholders will be the next step in securing one of the world biggest deals in the food industry.

Heinz chairman, president and chief executive William Johnson, said: “We look forward to partnering with Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital, both greatly respected investors, in what will be an exciting new chapter in the history of Heinz."

Research of global data breach detection rates in 2012 have revealed that serious breaches are going unnoticed for months and in some cases years.

The research carried out by security firm Trustwave found that six in ten organisations in 2012 took longer than three months to detect a data breach.

Of the data breaches analysed by the company in 2012, the average time for discovery was 210 days, an increase in delay from 175 in 2011. 14 percent of the breaches took over two years to be discovered.

The research suggests that organisations are continuing to employ ineffective security measures that are failing to keep up to date with new threats.

Despite increasing uptake and reliance on supply chains, businesses are failing to effectively develop risk management to tackle increasing threats.

A survey by Deloitte of global manufacturing and retail organisations found that 53 percent of all respondents had found that supply chain disruption had become increasingly costly over the past three years. Despite this only just 55 percent believed that their risk management programmes were effective.

Increasing complexity and its impact on cross-collaboration on risk management were cited as reasons for the increasing ineffectiveness of risk management. This reduction comes at a time of increasing disruption from geopolitical movements and rapid economic developments.

After a pilot in large stores, Boots are planning to move forward with a program with Visa Europe and Streamline to roll out contactless payments throughout the UK.

Customers will be able to make payments under £20 through the reader. The contactless payment technology is expected to see significant uptake in 2013, with Visa expecting terminal numbers in the UK to rise to 175,000 as customer demand gradually develops.

Jonathan Vardon, IT director at Boots, said: “Our aim is to offer customers a great shopping experience with quick, easy ways to pay and we believe that contactless payment is one way to deliver this as the technology has helped to reduce transaction and queuing times.”

The Whitbread organisation, which owns Premier Inn, Brewers Fayre and Beefeater, has signed an extended five-year contract with Steria, to provide BPO services.

Steria will continue to deliver accounting and finance service for another five years, having provided services for the past 20 years.

The new contract will reduce annual service costs by 14 percent, which had been a conditional arrangement of the contract extension.

Andrew Pellington, finance director at Whitbread, said: “In the current economic climate, we need to ensure efficiencies are made across the business, and with Steria we know that this is the case".