Industry news

A Forrester survey has revealed that BYOD is being increasingly supported, with 64 percent of firms in the study expanding their mobility support in response to employee requests.

The survey also revealed that 66 percent of employees use more than two or more devices for work in a day.

60 percent of surveyed firms in the UK were focusing on developing a corporate BYOD policy, with 55 percent of firms providing funding for increased mobility support and applications.

Chinese technology giant Lenovo has announced plans to enter into global mobile markets.

Lenovo announced: “We won't stop at laptops and tablets - for the first time, Lenovo is making plans to sell smartphones outside China."

The company "will continue to drive growth and innovation in PCs while expanding across four screens (PC, tablet, smartphone, smartTV) of devices and into the eco system of cloud, services and other applications that make up the PC+ market.”

While both London and New York are major economic and tourist hubs, tests have revealed that broadband speeds are significantly faster in the Big Apple.

RootMetrics which specialises in testing has revealed that mobile broadband is significantly faster in regards to both upload and download speeds. Average New York download speeds were 8.5mbps compared to 2.2mbps in London.

CEO Bill Moore of RootMetrics, said: “It’s quite amazing to find such a vast disparity in services between two cities that are rival destinations for global business and tourism.”

South West Fire & Rescue Services (FRS), consisting of Dorset, Wiltshire, Devon and Somerset services, are to roll-out a Public Services Network (PSN) in order to reduce response times and costs.

The network will provide communications services and data transfer to 4,860 staff and 188 fire stations. Wiltshire FRS ICT Director Les Louth said: “We’re supporting PSN services in areas such as common systems and applications, common standards operating procedures and data management."

The South West PSN will lay the path for a linked control system between the four regional services, designed to improve rapid response times and provide increased coverage for major disasters.

The chief executive of BAE Systems publicised a renewed focus by the defence contractor to establish strong links to EADS after the collapse of merger talks between the two groups.

Ian King, the chief executive of BAE, commented: “We have a great working relationship with EADS and we will work together stronger than ever on our joint projects which include the Eurofighter project and MBDA, the joint missile programme."

Currently EADS and BAE are both jointly invested as a consortium in the development of the Eurofighter. The two are also working together in a £8.5 billion joint venture programme to develop missiles as shareholders of European defence company MBDA

AstraZeneca has entered into a partnership with Chinese based Pharnarcon, which will see the pharmaceutical giant increase its team in China through additional employees from Pharmaron.

Pharmaron will add scientists to AstraZeneca’s research and development team in order to increase development and drug discovery speeds.

Despite poor stock performance in comparison to its European rivals AstraZeneca’s sales increased by 20 percent in China during last year, in an expanding market that is expected to be worth $165 billion by 2016.

After the failure of the West Coast Mainline procurement process due to ‘technical flaws’, ministers are to enter into talks with the Virgin which would see the company enter into a temporary contract to run the service while another procurement process is developed.

The Department for Transport revealed to the London Stock Exchange, that it hoped that Virgin would continue to run the rail line for 9 to 13 months.

Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin said: "I believe Virgin remaining as operator for a short period of time is the best way to do this and my officials and I will be working flat out to make this happen."

Jim Currie, deputy leader of Cornish council, has resigned over plans to increase public sector privatisation.

The privatisation of council services is expected to go to preferred bidders CSC or BT, in a deal that could be worth as much as £300 million per year.

While council members had resisted the creation of a privatisation contract, pressure from cabinet members had driven the procurement tender through revealed Currie.

In a resignation email, Currie pointed to the increasing lack of Council control over joint ventures coupled with the rush to enable private contracts.

Council leader Alec Robertson said: “I am hopeful that members will support the strategic partnership once they have access to all the facts. However, if I a majority of the council decide to vote against the proposal, then it will not go ahead.”

The relationship between Chinese networking giant Huawei and UK based telecommunications giant BT is to be investigated by a UK parliamentary committee.

The investigation comes after a US report which concluded that the Chinese company posed a threat to national security.

BT receives much of its networking equipment from Huawei including material involved in the rollout of superfast broadband within the UK.

The chairman of the investigation, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, said in a interview with the Guardian: “We wanted to look at the historical background to that contract, to what extent there were security concerns at the time, whether and to what extent the British government were involved in these decisions, and whether there have been any causes for concern that have arisen since Huawei became involved in our telecoms infrastructure.”

Asus is to construct three new data centres in order to meet increased usage of cloud services from users.

The new data centres will be potentially located in China, the USA and Europe, with 10 million users already being served by three data centres located in the Taiwan, China and the States.

The news comes as Asus’ cloud business prepares to break even at the end of 2012 with strong revenue growth predicted for the following two years.