Industry news

The Post Office has offered two contracts up for tender, totalling £360 million, to provide IT services throughout the organisation.

The news comes after the postal service experienced difficulties with IT services provided by Horizon.

The new contracts are designed to deliver new services, transition services and prepare for future innovations.

The world’s largest distiller, Diageo, have report increased annual revenue.The company sells such brands as Guinness, Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker.

The London based distiller reported that increased sales within the U.S. have helped to drive profits despite uncertain economic conditions in Europe.

The company revealed £3.2 billion in earnings prior to tax and interest, a 9 percent increase on last year.

SCC, who provide IT infrastructure services, have become the first supplier to the G-Cloud, to become fully accredited for secure government data.

While the company has yet to acquire customers through the public sector cloud service, the accreditation will allow SCC to sell to a wider range of public sector departments, including those involved in delivering security centric services.

Rhys Sharp, SCC's chief technology officer, commented: “As you would expect it is has been a long and challenging process, but we have to put it in context of the whole journey that we have already been undertaking.”

Computing giant Dell has warned of low revenue expectations for the third-quarter, due to economic uncertainty and a highly competitive marketplace.

The company warned during the release of second quarter financial results, of an expected drop of revenue of between 2 and 5 percent.

Brian Gladden, Dell chief financial officer, said: “Growth in our PC business was challenging, as we saw a tough macro-economic and competitive environment, and continued to focus on higher-value solutions in this business”.

After concern surrounding the low number of sales carried out through the G-Cloud during July, the government have released a revised figure of £ £353,000, £254,000 higher than previously reported.

Denise McDonagh, director of the G-Cloud programme, revealed the new figures via Twitter.

McDonagh criticised reporting surrounding the original figures, saying, “what they don’t understand is the relationship between £1 spent with a G-Cloud supplier, and £1 spent with one of the 20 corporations responsible for delivering 90 percent of government IT at present.”

ZIM Integrated Shipping Services, which operates in over 120 countries, have employed a new IT service management platform, aimed at increasing efficiency.

The service, delivered by BMC software, will see the consolidation of existing IT services and offer automated functionality.

David Avni, CIO of ZIM, said: “We selected this platform as part of our strategy to ensure business continuity and consolidate our IT centres globally”.

The rise of telecoms

As the continued gloom of uncertainty stultifies some industries and their plans for growth, the telcoms industry – for both suppliers and end users - is currently thriving.

According to Robert Morgan of outsourcing advisory firm Burnt Oak Partners, the number of new deals in telecommunications are increasing as clients find they cannot put decisions off any longer. This will extend to renewing existing contracts too: “Outsourcing is changing and not without consequence. Large deals have all but disappeared and deals now being signed are smaller, shorter and less complex than three years ago.” Suppliers usually feel recompleting is mostly done for benchmarking purposes and take it for granted the account will not change from the incumbent.”

Paul Leybourne, Head of Sales, Vodat International, believes that over the past few years, particularly in the retail sector, telecoms budgets have been stripped back and organisations have been concentrating on business as usual and not development.

“This year we have seen a number of retailers investing in telecoms solutions. The main focus has been to implement solutions to assist customers to business with them across all of the channels easier with the aim of increasing sales, customer experience and loyalty. Plus giving the retail store staff the technology which operationally they can provide a higher level of service.”

The desire of ultraportable computing (e.g. Ipad) with “always on” data connectivity, as well as the market growth of the smartphone, has certainly helped the industry.

Indeed community applications in the cloud – Facebook, Twitter – are now used as effective customer service strategies and the rise of web based software has seen a race for the market share of cloud technology. At the forefront sits Amazon, who have capitalised on their early lead in creating a set of easy to use online programs, however the market place is fiercely competitive and Google moving to end Amazon’s lead.

The cloud market has rapidly grown, with value expectations of $10.5 billion by 2014 from $3.7 billion in 2011, according to Gartner. Research commissioned by VMware indicates the European enterprises intend to spend nearly one-third of their IT budgets on web-based computing over the next 18 months. Microsoft, IBM and HP have all entered into the Cloud market beside Google, while Amazon have continued to maintain a strong lead with the biggest share of the cloud market.

Following cloud, Tim Cox, Chief Technology Officer, ControlCircle, believes the rise of the telecoms industry is also due to the demand for mobile and BYOD in general.

“Consumers of these telecom products are constantly on the go and with technological advancements on the rise and the demand for content soaring; the use of handheld devices continues to grow. This is evident with the many applications that have emerged as a result of this growing industry, such as Cloud/SaaS, video conferencing (Skype), Dropbox.”

Tim continues: “Furthermore as the use of these devices increase, contingency plans to overcome and avoid security breaches should be considered, in other words bring your own device (BYOD) regulations.”

• People are now carrying more devices then before, the concept of the converged devices has yet to materialise as organizations struggle to come to terms with BYOD.

• Uses for mobile devices have shifted from being purely used for personal reasons (eg. employees using their corporate devices for non-work related activities and vice-versa).

• The upswing in the use of the BYOD will inherently cause a rise in traffic volumes which in turn will eventually cause network bottle necks, both at the carrier and the corporate level.

• As the devices become converged, organisations are searching for ways to regulate employees who bring their own devices to work. This in turn will come in the form of devices running corporate and personal identities resulting in the increase of device purchases.

• The BYOD when combined with worker mobility will create a need for corporate to present their legacy applications through their perimeter to the BOD, again driving traffic volume as users use virtual desktop technology to access these corporate applications.

Data centres have continued to expand with Google, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft aiming to build a variety of data centres in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Eire and China. The rapid expansion seems to be attributed to a major growth in internet services and cloud computing, as well as private equity firms and telecom company investments acquiring established providers.

So as the adoption of smartphones and social media becomes the norm, cloud computing takes its expected grip and new technological innovations on the handset and in the network continue to improve important services like caching, compression and signalling to enhance mobile user experience, battery life and network access, the telecoms market will continue to battle against the odds.

In your experience how can businesses build a better outsourcing relationship?

Everything we do as a business is about making sure that we hold a strong relationship with the clients we’re servicing including regular conversions and direct visits.

What are you finding to be your clients main interests and requirements?

They are three main services that our clients are interested in at the moment. Firstly it’s supporting their businesses in an out of frame capacity and support companies during peak business time. Some companies have decided to outsource of their communications and switchboard services to use, particularly with city based companies and the expense of maintaining communication services. The third is business continuity and disaster recovery. Most people have covered procedures, if IT systems go down but the biggest requirement when you lose systems is how customers can contact you and the perception they have. If you lose your telephone system all the calls come to Moneypenny and essentially the service can carry on.

One of Moneypenny’s on-going projects is 24 hour telephone service. Does that reflect more of an emphasis on global connectivity and are businesses trying to reach a wider audience?

I think we are finding now that big businesses want to provide a 24 hour service. We are looking to provide a slightly different service than the norm. By manning a switchboard with Moneypenny staff from the UK in New Zealand, so that when UK switchboards close the New Zealand staff carry on. The quality of staff remains the same with the same cultural background and accents remain consistent. Its offshoring, but offshoring with a difference as it is UK staff.

In future developments - what other areas are you looking to develop, what areas will become more in vogue?

I think we have to recognise that the internet, smart phones and mobile technology are becoming more relevant. We currently have apps that allow clients to communicate with us, we want to align our service with this new technology.

Do you think public perception of outsourcing is important? If it is - how do you think that the image can be improved?

I think the public perception is important, but it does depend on the sector. We can see that in the furore of the banking sector, some banks have chosen to bring services back on shore because of public pressure. From our perspective we are working from more on a business to business level rather than consumer, and it is all about the service. If people like us and we can deliver better quality service than can be done in house, at more cost competitive price, then I don’t believe that any customers would be able to tell the difference and in that respect it shouldn’t matter.

There has been a lot of hype surrounding Big Data and how the information explosion, and resulting complexity, is now a top priority for businesses – some vendors have even suggested that organisations face yet another a ‘rip and replace’ watershed. However, analysts have commented that any new technology should be complementary to existing tools, not an alternative. While there has been much discussion about what companies can hope to achieve with Big Data once they’ve overhauled their entire existing infrastructure, businesses should instead be focusing on how they can use this information today.

According to IDC, Big Data is ramping up to be a big business opportunity, with companies on average doubling the amount of data they create every two years. The firm also estimates that companies will spend $120bn globally on data analytics software between now and 2015. Due to this exponential growth in information, managing and organising data is becoming increasingly complex for businesses. Traditional relational databases are becoming less useful and relevant as more ad hoc information is being created outside of those systems. But, while Business Intelligence (BI) tools have been around for a while to extract value from relational databases, few companies currently have the technology in place to apply the same degree of sophistication to unstructured data, such as call transcripts, documents, emails, instant messages and social media. What is different about Big Data is that it includes sources that were previously ignored; unstructured data being the main one, which itself contains a myriad of untapped and valuable information. Data left unmanaged and un-analysed is worthless. In fact, it can be problematic as it represents a cost to the business in terms of storage and may leave a company vulnerable to compliance concerns. The ability to extract meaning from data is where its true value lies.

Informed business decisions must be based on the totality of information and not merely a subset of transactional data from a relational database. Unstructured data by its very nature is uncategorised and lacks the metadata that allows for easy identification and organisation. This can potentially leave data in a state of chaos, exposing the business to legal and compliance risks – especially those in regulated industries. This can end up costing businesses vast sums of money to analyse information on a purely reactive basis. As such, organising, managing, and analysing this chaotic data proactively is a more cost effective approach, and can provide businesses with valuable insight through the evaluation of unstructured data. If businesses rely on structured information alone, they are potentially missing out on key information spread across its disparate systems within the organisation as well as conversations taking place between its customers, and the business beyond its four walls.

The real ‘big’ in Big Data is the amount of unstructured data that businesses now have to manage and track. Businesses should be able to build up a customer profile to analyse and calculate risk through the collection of data from various mediums. They need solutions - whether they are internal or outsourced - that can help employees effectively access key information through predictive information management and analysis. The only way to do that at the scale of big data is to use machine learning to automatically categorise and analyse that information. . Without these solutions, businesses may be exposed to legal and compliance issues run the risk of not being able to respond to their customers, respond to their regulators or react quickly to threats of litigation.. This again highlights the importance of getting to grips with unstructured data as well as structured data, but how can businesses organise this chaotic landscape?

Integral to this is the ability to identify, understand and categorise the key information amongst the vast amounts of unorganised and unstructured data. Traditionally, it is held on file servers, in document management systems, archives records management systems. But extracting value from the information held there is usually very hard because it wasn’t stored in any uniform way and wasn’t categorized accurately.

But now software exists that can accurately index and categorise such data that resides in these repositories and can extract intelligence that aligns with business goals, this providing a competitive edge and reducing legal and compliance risks. Businesses must know what information resides within their systems; be it structured, semi-structured or unstructured data. By using software to identify words, phrases and concepts in context businesses can embrace and take advantage of the data explosion, rather than living in fear of it overwhelming them.

Everything Everywhere, owners of Orange and T-mobile, have completed a deal which will see mobile operator 3 acquire part of its 1800MHz spectrum.

The acquisition will allow 3 to launch its own 4G services, alongside Everything Everywhere. The move comes as part of the European Commission’s stipulations for ensuring effective market competition.

Dave Dyson, CEO of 3 UK, said: ““Acquiring this spectrum will more than double the capacity available to customers on our network”.