Industry news

Oracle has announced the acquisition of social intelligent vendor Collective Intellect. Collective provides services in monitoring, analysing and tracking social media conversations.

Full details of the deal have yet to be announced, but the deal comes at a time when Oracle’s rival companies are expanding rapidly to increase social marketing capability.

The acquisition comes on the heels of the purchase of marketing campaign software company Viture by Oracle. Oracle commented that the purchase would create the "most advanced and comprehensive social relationship platform."

Welsh parts firm Trax JH Ltd have won a bid to provide a contract for Renault valued at £4 million. The contract will see the Powys based company provide wheel balance weights to be fitted to Renault and Dacia cars.

The company has suffered from the European economic downturn with 70 percent of Trax JH sales coming from exports, most of which are to companies within Europe. The company commented that the new contract is the first of many and that the deal has safeguarded 50 jobs within the business.

Managing director John Halle commented on BBC Radio Wales, that "It took us seven years to get the business, which obviously was a long time.”

Suffolk County Council have purchased a cloud based mobile app platform, designed to increase efficiency via the G-Cloud.

The service called Weejot from management provider Jadu has been acquired in order to allow Suffolk County Council to develop and use mobile apps rapidly in real-time, by users who have little technical proficiency . The employment of the G-Cloud significantly reduced procurement costs.

The CIO of Suffolk County Council, Mark Adams-Wright, commented: “We’re looking to make a step change in how we service our customers and mobile is fast becoming the de facto standard for accessing services.”

Google has acquired Meebo a company that specialises in creating a toolbars aimed at integrating social media and displaying advertising.

The company, founded in 2005, also provides instant messaging services which allow users to access third-party services such as IM services from AOL, Yahoo and Google while browsing.

While the terms of the deal have not been disclosed, Meebo would increase Google’s social media market presence in displaying and transferring social media content throughout the web.

Wipro Technologies, the Global Information Technology, Consulting and Outsourcing business of Wipro Limited has announced the launch of ‘Wipro m-eXecute’. Wipro m-eXecute is the first ever mobility app for the manufacturing sector, developed in collaboration with SAP and caters to the niche space of manufacturing operations.

It enables the functionalities of SAP’s proprietary ‘Manufacturing Execution 6.0’ solution for iPhone and iPad users and other platforms will be added in the later releases. The solution is built on a Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP).

“Wipro m-eXecute is based on two principles - faster decision making and timely execution of transactions, and we have found that these are the two most important objectives for any manufacturer. We are happy to launch the app in partnership with SAP and have designed it to enable collaborative decision making across the manufacturing value chain”, said N.S. Bala, Senior Vice President and Global Head -Manufacturing & Hi-Tech, Wipro Technologies.

Insurance giant Prudential is set to expand with the acquisition of the US arm of insurance firm Swiss Re for £400 million.

The deal will see the UK’s biggest insurance company acquire £6.7 billion of asserts in a £400 million acquisition deal.The move is expected to add £100 million to The Prudential within the first year of ownership. Swiss Re is expected to use the profits from the sale to invest in more profitable areas.

Jackson National Life chief executive Mike Wells said, “This bolt-on acquisition is in line with our strategy and is a great opportunity to increase the scale of our life business,”

The UK government New Enterprise Allowance has provided held in launching 4,500 new businesses. New businesses helped by the scheme including a tattoo parlour, tapas restaurant and a dog grooming service.

The scheme has been running since late 2010 and was created in an effort to reduce unemployment numbers while stimulating economic growth. The scheme offers allowance of £65 a week with access to loans worth as much as £1,000, to help with start-up costs.

Employment Minister Chris Grayling said, “With 4,560 businesses up and running, we're already helping to unleash a new wave of entrepreneurs. I want to make the support available sooner so we can help even more people realise their dreams and become their own boss”.

Capita have bought Clinical Solutions, specialists in patient management software, in a deal valued at £20 million.

The acquisition would provide Capita with a high quality data centre which already provides a large quality of services to the NHS. The buyout comes on the back of a series of acquisitions by Capita over the last month.

Chief executive of Capita, Paul Pindar, commented: "This acquisition strengthens our ability to assist health services in driving down costs while providing quality patient care”.

Technology research leader Gartner has placed Arvato in Magic Quadrant for Finance and Accounting BPO.

The report focused on evaluating vendor capabilities in the comprehensive F&A business process outsourcing market among 18 different providers.

Rolf Buch, CEO of Arvato commented: “We believe such a strong placement in the Challenger Quadrant demonstrates that Arvato has the expertise and experience to both transition and deliver F&A BPO programmes of significant scale.”

A successful bid from CGI for Logica is far from certain due to the potential for failure because of the difference in size between the two companies along with expected counter offers.

The procurement of companies greater than 50 percent than that of the buyer have a high rate of failure, the size of Logica in relation to CGI make the deal unstable, particularly with CGI reporting failing profits.

Indian based firms have raised a high degree of interest in potential acquisitions in Europe and the Logica offer is unlikely to end without counter bids. Philip Carnelley, research director at Pierre Audoin Consultants, commented on the bid “CGI and Logica have almost no overlap in operations –we can think of several other IT services players who would also be a good, complementary fit.”