Industry news

Steve Wozniak was reported in the Australian Daily Telegraph, as saying that the Cloud is “going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years."

Wozniak said how he viewed the service as problematic as users of the cloud are handing control of their data to a third party, with basic contracts removing legal rights to information uploaded.

Wozniak said, “the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it".

Energy giant GSH has received an extension of its energy and technical services contract with the National Australia Group (NAG). The contract is worth over £100 million and will see contract services provided until 2020.

GSH will continue to provide services to such GSH brand as Yorkshire Bank and Clydesdale Bank, including 450 High Street branches.

Dan Moore, head of property at NAG, commented: “Over the past five years we have worked closely with GSH and they have played a vital role in helping us to achieve our targets. This, and their excellent service delivery record on M&E, are the main reasons that we are happy to commit for the long term to 2020.”

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has migrated trading away from Knight Capital to rival company GETCO, after an IT failure affected trading software.

Knight Capital revealed that I had experienced a glitch on the 1st of August that had resulted in multiple orders within the markets.

The transfer of trading has been assigned temporarily, according to the exchange, with Larry Liebowitz, chief operation officer at NYSE Euronext, saying: “Our first priority is to ensure market integrity and an orderly trading environment in which investors and all market participants have confidence.”

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.”