Industry news

Gloucestershire and Herefordshire councils have signed a shared rural superfast broadband deal worth £56.5 million.

The contract is the largest to be announced under the BDUK program, with investment of £18.17 million being provided by the delivery project.

The superfast broadband contract with BT is designed to increase private and business broadband speeds across the two council districts.

The contract will cover a four year period up until 2016 with speeds greater than 24 Mbps being widely available by 2018.

Manufactures have called on the government to support SMEs and recommended tax relief and bank investment to stimulate the UK’s SMEs involved in manufacturing and engineering in a new report.

Within the report SMEs raised the issue of poor communication between the government and industry with Chris Coopey, head of manufacturing at MHA, saying: “Even where there are supportive initiatives, information about them is scattered and often not well communicated.”

The MHA Manufacturing Group which represents SMEs from the industry provided recommendations in a report to be presented to business secretary Vince Cable.

Research has identified an increasing trend of high level IT professionals being poorly placed on low level IT projects.

A study commissioned by IPsoft found that IT professionals were spending nearly a third of their time on low level IT tasks, these included tasks such as error reporting and checking.

IPsoft’s UK MD Terry Walby commenting on the research, saying:”the biggest impact of this is that IT staff are not being used effectively and are missing the opportunity to drive technology innovation, which is vital in the development of most businesses.”

The Ministry of Defence is planning to sell off radio spectrum which had been employed for military services as the government seeks to expand 4G opportunities.

The sale will represent the first of its kind by the government with the MoD offering radio spectrum of 200 MHz in order to satisfy 4G demand, with the department currently holding three quarters of public spectrum.

Philip Dunne, Minister for Defence Equipment, Support and Technology, said: ““We welcome this opportunity to free up much-needed spectrum. We hope that the sale will help drive the roll-out of new generation networks and universal access to broadband, both of which are vital to the UK’s prosperity.”

West Somerset council is looking to promote cost savings and has begun to look at an expansive shared services operation to reduce expenses.

The move follows a report by the Local Government Association which reported that West Somerset council, as the smallest district council in England, could not continue as a viable authority.

The council will investigate the benefits of reducing the size of workforce and employ shared services from local authorities or neighbouring councils while maintaining the existing core staff.

“There now exists an opportunity for the council to create a new model of operation by becoming a commissioning authority”, detailed a report on the options for change available.

A report has predicted the standardisation of technology to monitor patients’ health remotley within the NHS as technological developments and the promotion of cost-savings drive uptake.

A report from TechMarketView has predicted the slow adoption of technology which is being backed with government policy support in a bid to reduce overall costs.

The report predicted that health monitoring services could be outsourced to external private companies including independent sector healthcare providers.

The release of KPMG’s Outsourcing 2012 study which looked at service provider performance across Europe saw ITO and consulting giant Cognizant topping the rankings.

The rankings covered 22 European IT service providers and assessed over 2,900 relationships based on areas including innovation, knowledge transition and governance.

Rajeev Mehta, Group Chief Executive, Industries and Markets, Cognizant said: “We remain committed to delivering a distinctly superior experience to our clients in Europe by nurturing strong client relationships, continuing investments to bring our industry-leading processes to Europe, and building strong local teams and capabilities.”

The Department of Health Informatics Directorate will provide funding of £2.2 million to over 40 IT projects.

The funding will be used to develop new digital services including patient care and information sharing within the NHS.

The funding is also designed to promote innovation with Bill McAvoy, interim director of the intelligence, patients and information directorate, of the NHS Commissioning Board Authority, saying: "This makes for an exciting opportunity to pave the way for more collaborative patient-centred working across the NHS."

Global accountancy firm Mazars which employs Oracle and Sharepoint applications within its 6000 workforce has outsourced management access to Salford Software.

Salford Software was awarded the contract after costs increased for previous management access capabilities. The new contract is expected to save hundreds of thousands of pounds for the accountant.

Group infrastructure manager at Mazars, Jayson Dudley, detailed the increasing expenses associates with changes: “Whenever we wanted to do something there was a charge associated with it.”

Failings in expecting economic recovery in global markets and high levels of investment have seen global accounting company KPMG report reduced annual profits.

Falling profits has seen the accountant firm make 250 redundancies over the summer months.

The company blamed the fall in profits on maintain a large workforce for too long, with "KPMG's senior UK partner Simon Collins said: "Our profitability fell because of investment and because we maintained high staff levels in some areas of our business in anticipation of a wider economic recovery”.