Industry news

NHS Wales have awarded a five-year contract to SME Software Europe to provide expenses management across Welsh NHS facilities, which is expected to deliver £750,000 in cost-savings.

The contract will cover the delivery of an online staff expenses system, designed to remove manual processing and paper administration. The new system will provide services for around 194,000 claimants.

Paul Thomas, assistant director of employment services at NHS Wales Shared Services, said: "We expect the system to help us provide a quicker reimbursement of travel expenses incurred by NHS staff.”

Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire councils have launched a shared services program designed to save £675,000 per year from back office expenses.

The partnership between the authorities within the two councils, known as ‘Go Shared Services’, will provide services in finance, procurement, and HR. While the service was expected to bring high-cost savings, the partnership was expected to result in job losses in roles to be shared.

Cotswold DC councillor Barry Dare, who is in charge of GO Shared Services at Cotswold, said: "We can now do more with less and, in many instances, do it better because we are bringing together a pool of expertise and experience."

Statoil, the Norwegian oil giant, plans to invest £18 billion in U.K North Sea oil fields. The move would see the creation of 300 jobs.

The move comes after Statoil previously announced the creation of 700 jobs from a £6 billion investment. The investment would last the lifetime of the North Sea fields with the potential to provide 800 million barrels of oil.

David Cameron commented after meeting with the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, on creating closer energy links between the two countries, that the move represented "a big investment into North Sea production."

Vodafone has taken a controlling stake of Vouchercloud, a mobile based savings firm, with 57 percent ownership.

Vouchercloud who has just entered the Irish market, provide discounts and vouchers to a wide range of UK shops, restaurants and leisure providers. The service is tied to a GPS service which provides the location of the closest offers.

The move comes as Vodafone looks to deliver on mobile commerce. Vodafone commercial development director Tobin Ireland said: “Mobile couponing is set to grow rapidly across Vodafone's businesses as cost-conscious consumers increasingly turn to their smartphones to hunt for bargains and collect loyalty points."

A new £2m supercomputer which will help scientists study the universe has got the go-ahead after funding was awarded to the University of Leicester.

It will be used by academics to help them understand the formation of stars and planets.

The university has been selected as one of four sites to host national high performance computing (HPC) facilities.

Dr Mark Wilkinson from the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the University of Leicester is the principal scientist for the project. He said: “This is incredibly exciting news. We will now be able to carry out the largest and most detailed simulations of planets, stars and galaxies that have ever been performed and answer questions that we could not even have asked just a few years ago.”

Mobile giant operators Vodafone and Telefonica have announced plans to combine network infrastructures in order to deliver 4G services.

The companies expect that the plans to create one shared grid will increase the coverage of the current 4G network while speeding up the deployment of super-fast 4G services. The cooperative sharing of network resources will enable the companies to deliver 4G mobile services by 2015.

Ovum predict that Vodafone and Telefonica cooperation is the future

Vodafone UK chief executive, Guy Laurence, commented: "This partnership will close the digital divide for millions of people across the country and power the next phase of the smartphone revolution."

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle said in a webcast this week, that the company was ready to deliver "the most comprehensive cloud on the planet Earth."

Oracles Public Cloud which will feature per-month and per-user pricing, will allow customers to choose bespoke models that fit personal needs, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach which has been the approach offered by other major cloud suppliers.

Oracle has been in direct competition with Salesforce.com with both companies acquiring social media service capabilities in recent months in order to extend their market dominance. Ellison spoke out against other cloud services lack of security in comparison to Oracles Public Cloud, saying, "It's a big difference between our cloud and others on the market."

Talks between CSC and the NHS have been extended to the 31st of August after the 1st of June deadline was reached without a final agreement.

The 1 June deadline had already been extended from April in the effort to resolve talks surrounding valuation reductions and the scope of the contract.

The new August extension does not necessarily provide closure, with CSC stating in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, that “there can be no assurance that CSC and NHS will enter into the interim agreement or any amendment the existing agreement”.

Nuffield Health, the UK’s largest health charity with over 300 UK facilities, is planning to move all existing IT services onto a cloud-based architecture.

The company has selected HP CloudSystem to support a centralised IT infrastructure, in order to increase flexibility and speed within the IT system, while providing cost-savings.

Claire Myerson, CIO at Nuffield Health, said: “We selected HP to help us on the cloud journey from a largely physical environment to a more virtualised platform with a geographically resilient infrastructure."

Amazon have bought publisher Avalon Books, in a move that will see the internet retailer giant gain publication rights to over 3,000 back-listed titles owned by the publisher.

The purchase will see Amazon increase the already huge range of books on offer, in both print and digital format for e-books. Many of the new titles covered in the deal have never been released in e-book format.

The publisher acquisition comes on the back of other purchases including the rights to 450 tiles from Marshall Cavendish Children's Books and all of the James Bond books.