Industry news

The beginning of next month will see bids placed by firms for the decommissioning of 12 British nuclear facilities which is expected to be worth £6.1 billion.

Likely bidding firms include US based engineers and consultants along with British based businesses including Serco and Amec.

The procurement process is expected to be concluded in 2014 with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority selecting an overall supplier.

IBM has been hit with a multimillion dollar lawsuit from chemical manufacturer client Avantor over the implementation of a SLA project.

The lawsuit alleges that the SLA project was mismanaged, with IBM consultants making "numerous design, configuration and programming errors".

The suit also alleges that IBM workers had told Avantor employees that SAP "best practices" had not been employed.

IBM has refuted the claims and stated that the company had met its contractual obligations and that Avantor was continuing to use its services.

HTC and Apple announced last Saturday that they had settled all remaining patent disputes with the creation of a 10-year licensing agreement.

The terms of the settlement where kept undisclosed however the licensing agreement will cover current and future patents.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said: "We are glad to have reached a settlement with HTC. We will continue to stay laser focused on product innovation."

A report released by the Bank of Scotland has revealed that the private sector economy is facing near no growth as jobs and services are cut.

The report revealed that from July to October the Scottish manufacturing production has been in continual decline.

Reduced European demand for Scottish products also had an impact upon the growth of the economy, which has been compounded by increasing fuel and energy costs for businesses.

Royal Mail is expected to post strong half-year profits tomorrow in the run up to the privatisation of the company in next year’s third quarter.

The delivery of increased profits by the Royal Mail is a key condition of the go-ahead of the company’s floatation next year. The expectation of strong profits is expected to further boost the investor interest surrounding the Royal Mail.

While the Royal Mail has been boosted in recent years, the road towards profitability has seen job cuts and opposition towards the move towards privatisation from postal unions.

The Business Innovation and Skills Committee have called for the creation of an apprenticeship for every £1 billion spend through public procurement projects.

The call came in the publication of a report this week by the committee, which also revealed that the government had said that it would ““push this as far as possible”.

Skills minister Matthew Hancock, said in response to the report: ““I welcome this timely and thorough investigation into apprenticeships, and will consider carefully its suggestions to help make the programme even more successful.”

Outsourcing services firms including Serco, Sodexo and MTC/Amey have been approved by the Ministry of Justice as four prisons enter the final procurement phase for private sector management.

Wolds prison was confirmed to have changed management from G4S back to the public sector, following a poor inspectorate report which detailed weaknesses.

The Ministry of Justice said: “This competition process produced a compelling package of reforms for delivering cost reduction, improvements to regimes and a working prisons model in these prisons”.

The move towards private sector management is expected to save £450 million in the next six years.

Telefónica Digital has launched a global Iaas service delivering configurable cloud services, aimed at enterprise and mobile applications.

The cloud service will be offered as a customer managed platform allowing for the control, monitoring and customisation of virtual servers.

Carlos Morales, director at Telefónica Digital, said: “Telefónica Digital seeks to meet the needs of thousands of businesses that require a cloud services platform that is easily scalable, with low latency and totally trustworthy, enabling them not only to rapidly respond to their own needs, but also to the expectations of their customers”.

International Airlines Group (IAG), owners of British Airways are to cut 4,500 jobs in attempt to cut losses from airline Iberia after a loss of over £210 million.

The cuts will include a 15 percent reduction in Iberia’s capacity and the removal of 25 aircraft from the fleet.

The impact of hurricane Sandy has also damaged the company’s profits with flights grounded in and out of the east coast of North America.

Despite poor results and the impact of hurricane Sandy and the difficulties stemming from Iberia, IAG posted profits of £216 million in a busy third quarter.

The global services market saw transaction volumes decline in the third quarter of this year, extending a declining trend to six consecutive quarters, according toMarket Vista: Q3 2012, a quarterly market report by Everest Group, an advisory and research firm on global services.

Market Vista: Q3 2012, which analyzes global outsourcing and offshoring activity contracts irrespective of contract value, found third quarter transactions and annual contract volumes fell 8 and 35 percent compared to the second quarter, respectively. The market saw 380 outsourcing deals signed in the third quarter, compared to 472 and 441 during the first and second quarters, respectively. In the third quarter, reported annual contract value (ACV) reached about US$1.4 billion. Both transaction volume and ACV dropped for IT Outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).

“In years past, the market saw pent up demand accumulate then propel positive third-quarter activity, but that didn’t happen this year,” said Eric Simonson, managing partner of Research.