Industry news

Ofcom announced today that the auction for 4G services, which are designed to provide the next generation of high-speed mobile services, will be under way by the end of 2012 but bidding will not start until early 2013.

The revised schedule for the auction from the regulator comes as Ofcom tries to promote competition while ensuring widespread coverage.The minimum reserve sum for the 4G is £1.4 billion but the expected price is much higher.

Ofcom has stated: "In the interests of competition, Ofcom has decided to reserve a minimum amount of spectrum in the auction for a fourth operator. This could be either Hutchinson 3G or a new entrant altogether".

Legal opinion from the EU’s leading data protection watchdog criticise US Safe Harbour cloud safety principles for lack of coverage.

The opinion from the watchdog viewed Safe Harbour guidelines as being ineffective in comparison to guarantees and necessary contractual agreements established by a range of regulators.

The opinion from Article 29 by the Working Party watchdog concluded that: “sole self-certification with Safe Harbor may not be deemed sufficient in the absence of robust enforcement of data protection principles in the Cloud environment”.

Software are giant SAP saw revenue increase of 18 percent from this time last year, with increases totalling £3.2 billion.

The company pointed the success to increased cloud demand with the acquisition of cloud software company SuccessFactors fuelling profits and accounting for a 112 percent increase year-on-year.

SAP have said that they expect to reach targets of 20 billion Euros by 2015 due to increase demand for cloud software along with mobile and finance software.

A survey of 400 European data centre managers has revealed that 70 percent felt that data traffic increases and increasingly challenging infrastructure was hampering performance levels.

Decreased IT budgets were also cited as being key in causing data centres to miss performance targets.

Semiconductor firm LSI, which carried out the survey, identified increasing workloads combined with falling IT budgets as being responsible for poor performance.

LSI commented “data growth is outstripping the infrastructure build-out required to support it, and data centre managers are acutely feeling this challenge".

Outsourcing contracts have fallen in Europe as uncertainty surrounding the economic stability of the Eurozone.

Outsourcing contracts worth more than £15.5 million have fallen by 29 percent in the second quarter from the same time last year.

Research from the Information Services Group’s (ISG) detailed that the total value of contracts had fallen 11 percent from the start of the year and 21 percent from the second quarter of 2011.

Duncan Aitchison partner EMEA at ISG, said: “Looking forward, we anticipate a soft third quarter, which faces an especially tough comparison with 2011.” And "The fourth quarter will likely pick up, with some help from larger deals in the pipeline ready to go to award.”

Google has posted the net income from the second quarter of 2012 detailing a rise of 10 percent to $2.79 billion from $2.51 billion from the same time last year.

Details of spending were also released, including $774 million of IT infrastructure, including servers and datacentres.

New products and services include the Nexus 7 tablet, increased voice search capability, Google Drive and Google Maps Coordinate.

Google CEO, Larry Page, said “Google standalone had a strong quarter with 21% year-on-year revenue growth”

Virgin media has combined three management training systems into one service via a cloud platform.

The past system employed Microsoft Excel spread sheets and was updated on a day-by-day basis.

The new management system was employed in order to allow central management as well as being accessible to all employees. The new cloud learning service has reduced training times by more than 35 percent.

Head of employee learning at Virgin Media, James Iles, said: “One centrally managed system for all content would also help us track the career paths of the workforce, which was something we couldn’t do with the previous systems.”

John Connolly, the chairman of G4S, has acknowledged that there involvement in the Olympic security crisis has damaged future public sector contract biddings.

Connolly, in an interview to the Sunday Times, said "If a contract was being given out by a government department or other large business at the moment, you can understand they would find it difficult to hand that contract to us."

G4S is currently bidding for multiple contracts in the UK public sector including prison and police services. The company has already withdrawn from bidding for security contracts for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Fife Council has moved to a self-service based system with increased use of online logging of calls.

The new system operates with increased accuracy and provides greater detail of performance and demand. The data allows for the Council to accurately employ resources in demand areas and has saved £100,000 through efficiency.

Charlie Anderson, Fife Council CIO, pointed to the need for cost-savings, saying “We were suffering from diminished resources, by 40 percent, so it was key to move to more self service.

In this series of blogs, Paul Hart, IBM, shares his observations and thoughts on outsourcing governance to consider during your next governance meeting

When did you last assess your governance performance? It’s all too easy to think a brilliant job is being done with governance and that there’s no room for improvement. I strongly believe in the need to monitor governance regularly for the same reasons we measure any key activity. The effectiveness and performance of decision makers must be tested because ultimately they carry the responsibility for good governance. A short but well structured survey amongst those individuals involved in or around governance is a healthy learning process.

The results can often be surprising. It becomes really interesting if you survey both client and the solution or service provider: I guarantee there will be different perspectives of the same governance functions. Slight variations are natural enough but significantly differing results should be jointly investigated to determine if there are underlying causal trends or any significant adverse impact on either party.

During one project, I recall a major difference of opinion concerning the effectiveness of decision making. The client rated decision making as “very good” based on the effectiveness of the process, the presentation of salient facts, their empowered management and the speed at which decisions were made. The service provider on the other hand, rated decision making as “increasingly poor” on the basis of consistent misinterpretation, little consultation and above all no communication of what decisions had actually been made. Both sides were visibly shocked at this introspection. They eventually settled on a jointly agreed and equitable process that led to significantly better informed decision making and targeted communication.

Governance can only work effectively when the management cycles and flow of management information are clearly understood and the decision making meetings structured and sequenced accordingly. Factoring in mutual assessment along the way is a key enabler for effective decision making.

Good governance depends on a willing commitment to each other. If I may leave you with one personal message on governance it has to be ‘keep it empowered, keep it alive, keep it relevant’. Or put more simply, ‘keep it real’.