Industry news

In a move to a predominantly online based service Argos is set to close or relocate 75 stores over the next five years.

The move comes as like-for-like sales growth increased by 0.6 percent over April to September.

Parent company the Home Retail Group said: “Stores and catalogues will remain important, but their roles will be adapted in order to support a digital offer."

Chief executive of Home Retail Terry Duddy, said: "Market conditions remain fragile and hence we will continue to plan cautiously, however we are in good operational shape as we approach our peak trading period".

Chinese based Huawei has offered to provide unrestricted access and software source code details to Australia in a bid to avoid being labelled as a security risk.

John Lord, chairman of Huawei's Australian arm, in a speech to Australia's National Press Club, said: “Huawei has done a very poor job of communicating about ourselves and we must take full responsibility for that".

The announcement comes after concerns were voiced over the employment of Huawei within the USA, including a House intelligence Committee report recommending that Huawei should be barred from any US mergers and acquisitions.

Birmingham City Council has revealed that the council needs to save £600 million by 2017 rather than the originally held figure of £400 million.

The proposed cuts will job losses and a reduction in services, with further reductions based upon the provision of government grants.

Council leader Sir Albert Bore said: “"I am not looking forward to this but it has to be done" and” "This is as serious as I've known it in local government."

Rolls-Royce has been chosen to provide engines for the development of a new generation of landing craft.

The multi-million dollar contract for the new craft will see Rolls partner will Textron to provide prototype craft, with the US navy looking to buy 72 units with the potential for further orders from the navy and other departments.

The success of the contract is expected to see the creation of further business from other nations as well as future contracts from the US as the company further establishes itself within the US defence market.

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), which ranks as India’s largest software services exporter specialising in providing BPO and ITO services, have reported profit growth of 44 percent.

The announcement comes as customers increase their uptake of outsourcing, with the global economic downfall forcing businesses to cut costs.

Despite rising costs within India and reduced margins for similar Indian companies such as Infosys, TCS have said that they expect to see increased profits throughout the next year.

Websites including Reddit and Imgur experienced disrupted service including downtime from Amazons’s Web Services Elastic Block Storage (EBS).

Services dropped within the US, focused particularly within Northern Virginia, in which Amazon stated that its service saw, "degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes."

The service is designed for large data loads and is frequently coupled with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Past disruptions to AWS have also included downtime from powerful storms and a poorly implemented upgrades which resulted in four days of downtime.

Plans to outsource back office and management services by the London Metropolitan University (LMU) have been abandoned, following the withdrawal of the universities Highly Trusted Sponsor status by the UK Border Agency relating to illegal students.

Instead of carrying out BPO and carrying forward with a major shared services procurement process, LMU will instead look at increasing support-services within the institution.

BT, Wipro, Capita and Global Services had all submitted proposals for the delivery of the contract.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has announced a £80 million programme to upgrade the banks IT systems.

The upgrade comes after RBS experienced service outages in July following a failed IT upgrade.

The upgrade will include the streamlining of processes and a consolidation of mainframes from a sprawling system which had compounded the effects of the service disruption in July and had resulted in losses of over £125 million.

The deal would see Rosneft acquire half of TNK-BP from BP, in turn BP would receive up to $14 billion in cash and a 15 to 20 percent stake of the Russian oil group. The deal is also expected to see a cross exchange of board seats between the two energy giants.

The move would allow BP to gain access to large oil fields in the Russian Artic, providing reserves for many years to come and creating strong investor return for the company.

In return Rosneft will expand into a position of dominance within the Russian oil industry as the state moves to reacquire privatised industries.

A systems failure that resulted in the creation of inaccurate mortgage records at the Bank of Scotland has resulted in a £4.2 million fine from the FSA.

Inaccurate records had been relied upon from 2004 to 2011 and had resulted from two unaligned systems and a failure to implement manual updates.

FSA director of enforcement and financial crime, Tracey McDermott, said: "These mistakes stemmed from the fact that Bank of Scotland had an inadequate mortgage records system” adding “This breach is particularly serious because the inaccuracies built up over a period of seven years. There was no structure in place to identify errors as they occurred and no checking procedures thereafter.”