Industry news

International service company Serco have emerged as the favourites for winning the National Citizen Service (NCS) contract.

The multimillion pound contract would see the company run the service which exists as a key part of the Governments ‘big society’, a non-militarised styling of national service.

Serco has partnered with four charities to run the NCS in north England, Yorkshire, West and east Midlands.

Sir Stephen Bubbs, chief executive of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, said: “-involving a partnership can be good. What I think wouldn't work was if they did it on the model of the work programme, with Serco as a prime contractor. But if it's a partnership, then it probably can."

SAP has settled with Oracle for £197 million over a corporate-theft case that was made by Oracle in 2007, against SAP and former SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow.

The case centred on the illegal downloading of Oracle software by TomorrowNow, who offered support for Oracle software at a lower cost than the software giant.

SAP commented on the resolution: “Although we believe that $306 million is more than the appropriate damages amount, we agreed to this in an effort to bring this case to a reasonable resolution."

Analyst firm IDC have reported an expected 5.2 percent annual growth rate in global IT bank spending.

IDC also commented that different regions were seeing "very different conditions”, with areas such as Latin America and the Middle East enjoying rapid growth with IT spending increases of 10 percent. Western Europe on the other hand saw a decline in forecasts from economic pressures.

Jeanne Capachin, vice-president, IDC Financial Insights, said: “There are bright spots as the Middle East remains a strong growth market for financial services technology and the adoption of public cloud services among US banks has surfaced as a way to innovate despite tight IT spending controls".

Boston based private equity company Bain Capital has invested 1 billion dollars in a 30 percent stake of BPO and technology services firm Genpact.

The transaction is expected to be finalised at the end of this year and includes a lock-in period, preventing the selling of shares for two and a half years.

Genpact president 'Tiger' Tyagarajan, said: “We look forward to working with Bain Capital as we continue to make enterprises around the world run better by continuously improving their business processes

Oracle is set to release a toolkit that will allow for the migration of customer applications from SAP Sybase servers to the Oracle database, according to scheduling for a Oracle session at the OpenWorld conference.

The release of new migration tools comes after Oracle announced the release of a toolkit, for moving applications from Microsoft servers during last month.

The schedule description described how, “new exciting technology from Oracle will enable you to simply point your Sybase application to your migrated Oracle Database instance and run without rewriting your application source."

Groupe Steria who specialises in IT services have renewed and extended its licence with HP for cloud focused software.

The extension of the service provided through the HP IT Performance Suite, will allow for transitional cloud hosting.

Sean Beesting, Steria Group testing service line director, said of the new agreement: “Combined with the extended access rights, the new features enable us to supply even more effective solutions and services to our clients.”

Groupe Steria who specialises in IT services have renewed and extended its licence with HP for cloud focused software.

The extension of the service provided through the HP IT Performance Suite, will allow for transitional cloud hosting.

Sean Beesting, Steria Group testing service line director, said of the new agreement: “Combined with the extended access rights, the new features enable us to supply even more effective solutions and services to our clients.”

Three has reported an increase of nearly one million over the last 12 months in its latest earnings report.

Three’s parent company, Hutchison Whampoa, detailed earnings of £26 million in the first half of 2012 before tax, an increase of almost double from the same period in last year.

Dave Dyson, CEO of Three UK, said: “A million growth in the customer base in the last 12 months is really supported by strong growth in the smartphone side of the market, and the majority of that growth is in contract handset smartphones”.

RBS has ring-fenced £125 million to correct the IT outage that affected customers for two week.

The failure was traced to a failed software upgrade which affected millions of RBS users.

A statement released by RBS , said: "A charge of £125 million has been accrued in Q2 2012 in relation to the costs of this incident, principally covering redress to the Group's customers. Additional costs may arise once all redress and business disruption items are clear”.

A new datacentre worth £35 million is to be constructed in Central London by data centre company Volta.

The datacentre building currently enjoys access to multiple telecoms providers. Matthew Dent, chief executive of Volta, said: ““The project is progressing according to plan and after a long period of design we’re delighted to now be at the construction stage”.

The construction of the new centre is aimed at attracting new users from within the financial services industry.