Industry news

Dorset County Council has successfully delivered the first version of its Public Services Network (PSN).

The PSN was procured in July 2011, and represented the first council to use the service for tendering for communication services across the county.

The PSN has been designed for employing shared services, including implementing a public sector framework across school sites, council departments and libraries.

Elaine Taylor, Director for Corporate Resources, Dorset County Council, said: “The completion is a tremendous step in creating easier pathways for shared public services for Dorset residents by enabling more coordinated working between government departments and agencies in the county.”

Leicestershire, Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire’s Fire and Rescue services are preparing to enter into a shared services agreement, after the success of a similar shared services project between Devon and Somerset fire services.

The contract which will see the sharing of ICT services, mobile data services and training and management, is expected to cost between £4 million and £7 million.

The shared services project, named ‘Tri-Service Control’ is expected to deliver large cost savings, with the shared Devon and Somerset Fire services agreement saving £4.2 million from its 2007 implementation.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been criticised by the National Audit Office (NAO), for its failure to address weaknesses regarding its medical assessments outsourcing contract with Atos.

The NAO attacked the DWP for failing to penalise Atos for its “under-performance” in assessing the eligibility of patents for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).

Labour frontbencher Mr Greatrex, MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, said: “My underlying concern was the fact that the contract is worth £112 million a year to Atos, at the same time, through the Tribunals Service, the appeals are costing about £60 million a year so effectively we are paying twice to try to correct the mistakes in the initial assessments or the process that leads to the assessments and decisions. That isn't good value for money and this is a contract that really needs a lot more scrutiny to understand how effective it's been."

KPMG have reported that SMEs have driven cloud services during the recession, with the cloud-services industry now reportedly worth $2.2billion.

KPMG have detailed that cloud-services now has come to represent the most popular form of SaaS service model.

Gartner have identified cloud as the fastest rising service in global IT outsourcing market, identifying the service as worth $250 billion

Steve Watmough, partner at KPMG’s CIO Advisory team, said in regard to cloud: ““The attraction, especially for smaller business, lies in organisations no longer needing to find funds for infrastructure, deployment or training”.

Juniper Research has reported that mobile banking will be worth $730 billion by 2017.

The driving force of the growth is expected to come from high street purchasing, with tablet devices transferring payments away from desktops and laptops.

Juniper detailed that retailers are rapidly increasing their service offering to meet the increasing demand, with companies such as Argos seeing a 7 percent rise from mobile services.

Recruitment agency RecruitmentGenius.com has reduced hosting costs by 90 percent through cloud hosting.

The company will see yearly savings of £112,000 by transitioning services to a cloud based platform provided by ElasticHosts.

Geoff Newman, CEO at RecruitmentGenius.com, said: “The business has grown a lot and a big reason is the scalability cloud has offered us".

The Indian government has announced plans to transfer data centers onto private cloud based platforms.

The plan comes after the National e-Governance Plan saw the creation of multiple data centers to provide services to citizens.

The new proposal would see private cloud services developed by private companies. The Economic Times in India reported that “IT companies like HP, IBM, Cisco and Dell", have been approached for the new cloud project.

Intelligence firm IDC reports IT spending within the mining sector will outpace all other markets.

IDC have predicted that annual growth will increase by 3.8 percent by 2015, compared to an average increase of 2.7 percent in other sectors.

IDC research manager Emilie Ditton said in a statement: "IDC expects to see opportunities in technologies that deliver productivity improvements- such as mobile applications, remote application delivery, business intelligence (BI), predictive analytics and cloud computing".

Ceredigion County Council based in mid-west Wales, have outsourced payroll services to Logica.

The new service will replace the outdated legacy payroll system used by the council which failed to comply with the HMRC Real Time Information (RTI) system for reporting pay, tax and National Insurance, which will be mandatory and come into place in 2013.

Ceredigion County Council are considering the expansion of outsourcing services with Logica to include HR.

Calum Macleod, Director of Local Public Services at Logica, said: “We are delighted with the Council’s decision as it demonstrates the value, strength and viability of our involvement in the framework, as well as Logica's heritage and expertise in delivering payroll services.”

Logica has announced today the signing of a two-year extension with ELEXON to provide business process outsourcing.

ELEXON is at the heart of the UK’s electricity supply and distribution industry, administering the Balancing and Settlement Code, which governs the wholesale electricity balancing and settlement arrangements for the UK.

Tara McGeehan, UK Utilities Director, Logica, said: “We are delighted to have extended our agreement with ELEXON. Over the last four years our two companies have established a fantastic working relationship. This contract extension not only rewards that, but means we can continue to work collaboratively to enable ELEXON to provide the best level of service through a significant period of change for the electricity industry.”