Industry news

The global healthcare cloud computing market is expected to be worth over $5.4 billion by 2017 according to a report published by MarketsandMarkets.

This report comes as cloud computing and other forms of ICT are adopted at an increasing rate in healthcare.

Cloud software was currently deployed within 4 percent of all healthcare areas in 2011 and this number is expected to rise as more funds are deployed to develop cloud platforms as a means to deliver cost-savings.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) have been hit by a second outage within a month raising concern and the ire of users.

The latest outage came on the 14th June and customers affected by the outage were reportedly unable to get a response from the Amazon support team.

One user of AWS said: "One hundred per cent uptime is a required SLA for anyone providing cloud computing services. Amazon's inability to provide such service levels is the main reason we have decided to quit using Amazon Web Services EC2 altogether."

Vodafone’s purchase of Cable & Wireless Worldwide for £1.04 billion has been approved by the European Commission.

The acquisition did not break competition guidelines despite the move creating the second largest domestic telecoms company in the UK. The purchase of Cable & Wireless will add a company specialised in fixed telecoms to Vodafone’s focus on mobile services.

Cable & Wireless also is the owner of the largest fiber-optic network in the UK for business uses as well as an extensive European network which will provide Vodafone with greater market flexibility.

Yiru Zhong, senior industry analyst for the ICT group at Frost & Sullivan, commented: “we believe Vodafone is signalling its ambitions to capture all related digitalisation services around enterprises”.

Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has the potential to leave taxpayers footing a bill of over £300 billion.

The news comes from the analysis of a series of contracts sanctioned by the Treasury office. PFI contracts currently total 717 and provide funding for hospitals, schools and other forms of public facilities.

PFI provides funding totalling £54.7 billion for public infrastructure, however the expected final repayments are to total near £300 billion. The scheme has come under criticism for failing to be cost effective, with running costs making the scheme inefficient when compared with direct loans.

The losses caused by the purchase of aQuantive by Microsoft and the failure of the advertising specialist to develop may cause Microsoft to publish a loss for the first time in over a decade.

Analysts had previously reported that the failure of the online advertising company to grow would only cost $5.3 billion however the figure has now been revised to nearly $6.3 billion.

AQuantive commented that: “While the Online Services Division business has been improving, the company’s expectations for future growth and profitability are lower than previous estimates."

A warning that the UK faces an increased risk of cyber-attacks during the London 2012 Olympics has been issued by the Home Office.

The warning comes on the back of a series of repeated comments from Whitehall warning of the threat of cyber-attacks.

Richard Clarke, director of Counter-Terrorism, said: "The current threat level is at substantial and we recognise threat levels may change rapidly”.

Ofcom has proposed new caps to the charges that BT can bring for the use of its telecoms infrastructure by other communication providers.

The propose cap would only allow for a reduction of between 0-6.5 percent for traditional interface technology and 8-16 percent for newer telecom lines.

These new caps would see the expected price of customer communication charges fall, with companies including Vodafone, O2 and Plusnet all currently using BT infrastructure.

There has been much gloom in the channel about the cloud. Whether we are talking about IT service providers or value added resellers (VARs), many players in this sector have admitted to feeling under threat as small and medium sized customers begin to adopt cloud services. There is concern that vendors will simply start selling direct to businesses and cut their channel partner out of the loop entirely. Resellers worry about how to keep up to date with all the different cloud offerings and whether it will be possible to make a reasonable margin when billing monthly for a service instead of charging up front?

Yet a great opportunity exists for the channel. Everything hinges on the relationship between a trusted IT provider and its client. Most small businesses will have neither the time nor the resources to deal with more than one IT company, and moving independently to a cloud model can be complex and confusing. Businesses have their own set of questions about making the move. Who will sort out the setup of new users? How do we go about choosing the right set of solutions for our business? What if the business needs more than just Microsoft 365? While the giants of the software world may be targeting their off-the-shelf cloud products at the SME market, they are unable to provide the personal touch that a channel provider can bring.

Small businesses, from accountants and lawyers to recruitment agents or charities, need to focus on the job in hand and want their IT programmes to “just work.” The majority do not even have the luxury of an IT team; if they have an IT manager at all then this person will be spending much of his or her time trying to smooth out the problems of individual staff so that everyone can get on with their jobs with a minimum of fuss. Many find themselves “making-do” with technology that just about works, which is frustrating and can slow down productivity drastically. This is where a good IT services company can step in.

With the right technology, the reseller can offer cloud services to customers smoothly, easily, and with the right margins. New platforms, such as AppLayer’s White Label Box, are forging the final link in the chain that brings cloud services to smaller businesses via the channel. Such platforms allow resellers to bundle together whatever selection of cloud services a customer desires, from hosted desktop and email to specialist accounting software or database applications. In this way it becomes easy for the reseller, or the customer themselves, to simply switch user access on and off as required and to add and remove services on demand.

The benefits to the end user are enormous. Not only can a business dispense with the cost and hassle of maintaining an on-premise service, but it can enjoy far greater control over employee access to both data and applications. When an employee leaves, for example, their ID can be deactivated from a single point, removing the need for lengthy password searches and checking of lists. If the business is using an entirely hosted desktop model, access to data can be removed at the same time.

For the IT partner, the result is an enhanced role as the manager of the system, offering advice on applications and managing or delegating the central dashboard. Rather than being called in only when things go wrong, or as a supplier of new computers, the opportunity now exists for resellers to develop a longer-term relationship in which real value is added for the customer.

Small businesses will inevitably move to cloud solutions. In any company where IT is a tool and not a key part of the business, the more it can be treated as utility like any other, the better. The opportunity for the channel is to offer the services that make this possible, to take the burden from the already over-laden shoulders of small business managers, and to become indispensable.

Strategic decisions, those that change the nature and direction of organisations are usually a response to the “environment” of the Business. As the “environment” changes there is often a need to revisit previous strategic decisions and tweak them or in some cases radically rethink them. This usually results, in a conventional business, in an annual planning cycle in which there are mini projects activated to review the “environment” of the business, revisit business strategy in light of any changes, and then plan the operations of the business in the light of any consequential strategy changes.

The one problem with this approach is that traditionally the strategic decisions of the past have not been documented in most organisations. If they have, only the final outcome is recorded and not the options that may been considered and rejected. Even when the options have been recorded there is often a further problem in that the criteria by which the original options were assessed and their assessment have often been lost, or in many cases never existed in organisational memory because they were held entirely privately in the brains or the computer of the person engaged in the task.

If that person moves on from the organisation the knowledge about the decision will be lost and this is highly likely as anyone with a “strategy” in their title is dispensable in most businesses. At best, as a new strategist, you might find an old presentation containing the decision recommendation and the rationale supporting the decision. But for most companies the result is a restart from scratch to review any previous strategic decision.

There is a better way. If you adopt a systematic formal approach to strategic decision making in which the decision model (criteria) are formally defined, their relative importance to the business clearly assessed and the options fully evaluated against the criteria and this information is maintained in a system as part of the companies formal decision making process, it will be possible for an organisation to return to the decision from time to time and review it in light of environmental changes, without having to reinvent the wheel. You will know exactly why the previous decision is as it is and what has changed.

Changes will inevitably happen overtime as new people join the organisation with new ideas and priorities, the business environment evolves and as the leaders of the company transform their vision. But all will be able to return to the original criteria, add new criteria to accommodate new circumstances and then reassess the decision using the collective new and acquired knowledge of the organisation.

Why is this important in the context of sourcing?

Have you ever outsourced any of your operations? If so where is the documentation supporting that decision? What benefits were predicted in the original decision? Have you achieved them, exactly as planned? How do you know? If you haven't achieved them exactly as planned - is it because your original decision was wrong or is it because the environmental conditions have changed or were there some bad assumptions made or bad data used? How do you know? If you were to return to that decision and consider bringing the operation back in house, how would you make that decision? Could you compare it with your previous decision? If you bring it back in house will you continue to review that strategic decision? Should you replicate this decision in another area of your business? Why?

Benefits of base-lining strategic sourcing decisions

• Reduce decision cycle times from months to days

• Ensure the efficient and optimum use of employee knowledge and time in decision making

• Makes strategies rigorous and defendable, demonstrating decision validity

• Deliver rational and auditable strategic decisions, with defined ownership and accountability

• Provides linkages between the decisions, the criteria and management / mitigation of consequential risks

• Enhances the likelihood that the strategic decision will be implemented correctly, linking strategy with longer term performance

The importance of Business intelligence can be aptly encapsulated by the phrase, ‘Information does not equal knowledge.’ While accurate up-to-date information is undeniably a critical requirement for any business, it is how that information is used, manipulated and acted upon that is fundamental to business success. Business intelligence (BI) is a tool that proactively uses business data to provide actionable information for end users; it helps to join up information from disparate departments’ functions and systems to give businesses a holistic view of their business.

According to a Gartner survey of 2,335 CIOs BI and analytics have now deposed cloud computing as the top enterprise technology priority. During challenging economic conditions, firms have to recognise that they must be in a position to quickly react to new opportunities and threats that arise. Through having the full picture of their business and this has put BI as the heart of many organisations operations. The efficiency of your business’ processes is everything. In these situations simply relying on hunches or inclinations would be illogical if not detrimental.

A tool just for big businesses?

The complex nature of early BI systems meant that Business Intelligence has traditionally been viewed as a service exclusive to large enterprise. Whilst historically BI may have provided information at a management level only, extending the reach of BI is now more important than ever, and is a business critical tool that today underpins the success of organisations of all sizes.

Simple, easy to use BI tools can be used by anyone across the business, helping employees to share information across different departments and therefore save time on reporting and analytics. This is particularly important if you have regular reports you need to run e.g. monthly executive reports where you need the same information each month. Sharing information reduced duplication of data and means not only will all your figures match up but that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.

Making it work for your business

Sage works closely with its ever increasing 830,000 small and medium size UK customer base. Many of whom have realised the important truth that business development can only be based on solid foundations. One key component is trust worthy and accessible data on which to make informed decisions. Provision of business intelligence through business management solutions like the award winning Sage200 allows companies to have greater control and agility through better visibility of data and multidimensional analysis so they can measure key metrics enabling them to spot things like underperformance and take action.

At Sage we worked closely with our thousands of customers and built our solutions to assure that user’s don’t have to work hard to get the data out of the system, that the data is easy to interrogate and provides meaningful and timely insights. We know we’ve succeeded when we see people get genuinely excited about the patterns they can see in their own data!

Kathryn Shankland is Product Manager for Sage 200 in the UK