Industry news

Singapore-based NewsPage, which specialises in developing and building mobility and management software, is to be bought by consulting firm Accenture.

The move comes as Accenture seeks to develop and improve platform mobility and management capabilities.

Fabio Vacirca, senior managing director of Accenture's consumer goods and services practice, said: "This acquisition is important as it will enhance Accenture's ability to help global consumer goods companies by supporting all route-to-market sales and delivery models across mature and emerging markets."

The Glencore Xstrata deal has been brought to a halt after major shareholder Qatar says it will vote against the £30 billion move.

The Qatar sovereign wealth fund owns 12 percent of Xstrata’s shares, and had indicated back in June that is was unsatisfied, saying that it was “seeking improved merger terms".

Qatar has now stated that: “will vote vote its entire shareholding in Xstrata against the proposed scheme".

Free-Wi-Fi will be provided at Lord’s Cricket Ground, after the owners signed a deal with BSkyB owned The Cloud, to provide the service.

The contracts will last five years, and is already active in the grounds, media centre and refreshment areas.

The Wi-Fi would provide free internet access to 28,500 people when the stands were at full capacity.

Airbus is to deliver 50 planes to China in a deal expected to be worth £2.2 billion.

The deal comes after the EU and china had come into dispute regarding the carbon Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which had affected Airbus as a European company in China.

The news comes as German Chancellor Angela Merkel visits China on a trade-visit, and improve Chinese investment in Europe.

Dutch based chip manufacturer ASML have sold three percent of equity to Samsung as the technology giant seeks to create next-generation chip technology.

AMSL, as one of the world largest chip tool manufactures, has been invested in by other computer giants including Intel and TSMC.

The deal will see Samsung invest £617 million into the chip manufacturer, in order to develop new lithographic based chip technology, which would allow for more power-efficient and faster versions.

4G services may be delayed, after Telefónica threatens legal action, against the decision by Ofcom to allow Everything Everywhere to launch the service early this autumn.

Telefónica have contacted Ofcom, threating legal action according to the Guardian, if rival brands Orange and T-Mobile, owned by Everything Everywhere, are allowed to go ahead with 4G services.

The move would see Telefónica appeal against the ruling to the Competition Appeals Tribunal (CAT). This would include a temporary block to the decision by Ofcom, delaying 4G service delivery by Everything Everywhere.

Fujitsu have won a five-year contract, worth $68 million, to provide IT services to trustee group Perpetual.

The deal comes as Perpetual looks to overhaul its IT infrastructure and create efficiency and cost-savings.

The implementation of IT services will begin in the second half of 2013. A statement released by Perpetual detailed that: "The new structure will create more variable cost base and deliver cost savings included in the Transformation 2015 strategy".

Cisco has provided £300,000 in funding to Sunderland City Council in order to increase the delivery of Cisco’s National Virtual Incubator, a public technology network designed to provide businesses with one connecting infrastructure.

The Virtual Incubator would link the council with the cities tech centre and other research centres throughout the UK.

Tom Baker, head of ICT at Sunderland City Counci, said: “This investment really will ensure that our businesses are more plugged into the technology network than ever before. It's a great boost for the city and its growing technology community".

David Gibson, VP of strategy, Varonis continues to describe how 10 simple steps can be employed to prevent data from being misused or stolen in part 2 on security guidance.

5. Identify Data Owners

Once you’ve done these general ‘housekeeping’ tasks it is time to look at individual datasets to figure out who is qualified to make access decisions, and designate a data owner. The appropriate owner (or custodian) will often be one of the active users of that data, or their immediate supervisor. Automation can significantly reduce the time it takes to identify data owners, by analyzing access activity over time and indicate who the likely owners are. Ideally only the data owner should decide who should be allowed to access their data, and IT should only act as a facilitator. As an added bonus, the data owners are often well qualified to review stale data that can be archived to free up storage space (and by auditing access activity stale data is much easier to identify).

6. Perform Entitlement Reviews

Regular entitlement reviews, or attestations, provide an effective way to make sure that data access permissions are always buttoned up. As the organization changes and new data sets are created, it is imperative to review who has access to ensure that permissions are always aligned to business needs. Data owners should be a part of this process as they are the best qualified to determine which users no longer need (or should) have access to their data. Again, with the right technologies, time-consuming manual parts of the entitlement review process can be automated and data owners can be automatically prompted to conduct reviews at pre-defined intervals, and provided with recommendations about which users look like they no longer require access to their data.

7. Align Security Groups with Data

In organizations where access to data is controlled by security groups, it’s critical that the groups themselves are properly aligned with the data sets they’re meant to protect. Often this is easier said than done – roles change, groups are created for special circumstances but not reviewed, and pretty soon the whole system is a mess. Cleaning this up requires complete visibility into which data sets can be accessed by which groups. Automation is best suited to provide this visibility, and to programmatically create new groups and re-permission the data sets if necessary.

The recent court rulings in both South Korea and the USA regarding the legal battle between Samsung and Apple, over the infringement of patents, shows the current court based battlefields of technology companies.

The balance between the promotion of innovation and the safeguarding of patent infringement is being tested in the fallout of recent events.

The court decision in South Korea ruled that both sides had infringed on each other patent designs, with both Samsung and Apple, banned from selling some of their products, with both sides receiving relatively small fines. Last Friday a Californian court ruled in favour of Apple, judging that Samsung had infringed on all but one of Apple’s patents with an imposition of a $1 billion fine.

The amount of patents and the scale of breadth of which they are able to cover is a genuine risk to promoting innovation. While Samsung’s rebuttal to the US patent decision, as giving, “one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners”, doesn’t justify the similarities in both design and code of Apple and Samsung products, it does highlight the point, that patent laws in countries including the US are becoming overly restrictive.

Arguments against heavy patent laws can focus on restrictions to innovations which build on a template design, licenced to another holder, or that patents are able to be enforced on a blanket technology or design.

Supporters of a powerful patent system say that such a system ensures innovation, preventing slight modification of patented designs rather than forward thinking improvement. Horace Dediu, mobile analyst at Asymco, said “Samsung is already more consciously avoiding copying”.

The impact of the court ruling will be seen over the following months, as other Apple rivals such as HTC, Sony and Lenovo, wait to see if further legal action will follow.

The hidden winner of the patent rulings may emerge as Microsoft, with the original design of the Windows Phone secure in the background of patent disputes and in position to innovate with the release of its new operating system.