Industry news

Dell has announced it has finalised the acquisition of Make Technologies, a leading application modernisation software and services company.

This acquisition, combined with the recent acquisition of Clerity Solutions, enables Dell to empower customers to reduce the cost, risk and time required to transition business-critical applications from legacy systems to cloud infrastructure and open, standards-based platforms.

Through this technology, Dell is positioned to help organisations leverage more flexible platforms, allowing them to better leverage social and mobile technologies, enhancing workforce productivity and helping to deliver better business results.

Steve Schuckenbrock, president, Dell Services said: “The addition of Make Technologies to our Dell Services portfolio allows us to offer customers a complete suite of application modernisation services to help them move their legacy IT environments to more modern architectures. At Dell, we are focused on solving some of our customers’ most complex problems with powerful IT solutions. With Make and Clerity we believe we have the industry’s most robust offering to help customers meet their modernisation goals in an efficient, reliable and cost-effective way.”

“If Dell embraces the MAKE process as well as the tooling, it will gain a formidable weapon for its services arm. The sky truly is the limit for Dell - if it plays its cards right¹,” wrote Forrester Research, Inc. principal analyst, Phil Murphy.

“The combination of Make Technologies and Dell provides the market with a single vendor solution for any modernisation activity and is an exciting step in expanding growth opportunities for our core application modernisation software and services,” said Bill Bergen, president and CEO of Make Technologies, Inc. “Together, with Dell’s global reach, scale and reputation for customer support, Make’s methodology and tools will become even more accessible to more customers struggling with the dilemma that surrounds legacy environments.”

Oracle has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Vitrue, a leading cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform that enables marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns.

The transaction is expected to close in the summer of 2012 and until the transaction closes, Oracle and Vitrue will continue to operate independently, and it is business as usual.

“The proliferation of social media and an increased demand by consumers to engage with brands across multiple social channels is driving chief marketing officers to look for an integrated social marketing platform,” said Thomas Kurian, executive vice president, Oracle Development. “Vitrue’s leading social marketing and engagement platform coupled with Oracle’s leading sales, service, and commerce products offers a complete social experience solution to our customers.”

Dell has reported a 33 percent drop in profits in a disappointing quarterly report for former market leader.

The company, which has slipped to third place in the global PC market, said its profit in the first fiscal quarter fell to $635 million. Revenue in the quarter was $14.4 billion, a four percent decrease from the same period the previous year.

Dell said however the firm was moving away from its traditional PC base to services. "We continued to shift the mix of our business during a challenging environment," said Brian Gladden, Dell's chief financial officer.

HP has confirmed plans to reduce its workforce by 27,000 which would amount to eight percent of the companies staff by 2014 in order to make savings of £1.9 billion.

The move will come as part of long term restructuring and cost cutting by the company, which began at the end of October. The cuts will come in the form of both retirement offers and redundancies.

The move comes as HP announce a reduction of the company’s net income by 31 percent in the third quarter from the same time last year.

De Vere had the challenge of trying to join two separate Wide Area Network (WAN) services using an interconnect which was proving costly and inefficient. They chose Claranet to design a WAN that would connect 60 locations to a single platform.

The aquisition and merge of Initial Style Conferences Ltd and De Vere Group plc, meant that both companies had seperate WAN providers, which was not practical or cost effective. With the two separate WAN contracts coming to an end almost simultaneously, De Vere began planning for a new networking solution that would unify the Group and provide a higher performing and more reliable platform.

Jo Stanford, De Vere Group IT Director, said: "We invited Claranet to pitch, but were unsure how they would compare to some of the larger players. Yet, without a doubt, they gave us the most confidence, and proved that they had the right team in place to deliver a better performing WAN that would unify our business. Thanks to the strength of their relations, expertise and experience, Claranet pulled the rabbit out of the hat – more than once – to make sure our WAN was delivered smoothly and on time."

BAE Systems has secured a contract worth £1.6 billion to provide Hawk and Pilatus aircraft to Saudi Arabia.

The move will secure 200 jobs and will see the defence giant supply 55 Pilatus turboprop and 22 Hawk jet trainer aircraft as well as technical support to the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF).

BAE's group managing director, Guy Griffiths, said: "We have a long history in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and, working with Pilatus, we will provide the RSAF with the best training platforms to meet their requirements.”

Analytics is being viewed as an increasingly vital tool in business. Social media has been seen as a new way in which businesses can employ analytics technology. Analytics is being seen as a hugely important tool with many CIOs, rating the employment of analytic technology as one of their new top priorities for 2012.

The use of high quality data to inform high value decision making has become increasingly valued. The employment of analytics can provide cost-savings, efficiency as well as generate insights that can allow for market breakthroughs. The acquisition of social media companies or their employment externally from businesses in order to increase analytics within business has become increasingly prevalent.

This week multinational computer technology company Oracle entered into negotiations to buy social media marketing company Virtue. The acquisition of Virtue would provide the technology giant with the ability to combine Virtue’s services in providing social media campaigns and direct interaction with consumers with Oracle’s own data analytics and management capabilities.

The coupling of social media with advanced analytics will allow customers to accurately gauge how effective their social media campaigns are performing. Companies are increasingly releasing technology designed to incorporate analytics with social media for both internal use as well as selling the technology within a wider market.

Companies spend multi millions on social media campaigns however the implementation of analytics can allow the user to assess the success or failure of the campaign. Social media sites such as Facebook are widely recognised by businesses as being key in engaging and advertising to consumers, without analytics the impact of such services cannot be measured. General Motors pulled a multi-million dollar advertising campaign from Facebook after determining that the success of the campaign did not warrant the revenue expenditure.

The importance of social media in attracting consumers is being increasingly recognised and social media is being increasingly focused on within business strategies. The use of business and consumer analytics with social media provides insights and analysis revenant to business strategies and allows for a flexible approach which adapts to the evidence that analytics gathers. Analytics allows users to identify new areas open to innervation. When the technology is used in conjunction with a social media strategy then innovation can occur on-demand and be adapted to fit the evidence.

Marketing wisdom dictates that to make headway with the consumer, marketers need to be creative. Too often businesses believe that the secret to a successful marketing campaign is witty and hard hitting messaging. But that’s not always the case. It’s fair to say that until recently creative ruled the roost. However, with the birth of big data, marketers now have a new tool at their disposal.

The expanding data footprint left by consumers means that businesses are increasingly aware of individual preferences and reactions – gone are the days of mass market messages which rely solely on creative. By cleverly using customer data to their advantage, marketers are able to target consumers in a way never before possible.

Here are some top tips for making data and creative work for you:

• Use data to drive creative decisions

Marketers should view data as a new tool that can supplement the marketing process of old. The insight gained from data can be used to identify target audiences with a new-found degree of sophistication. In turn this influences the imagery and messaging used in advertising campaigns for competitive advantage and ROI.

• Combine your teams

For many businesses, the structure of the marketing team now includes marketers, creative and data experts. Data is increasingly an important part of the team. From an in-house and agency perspective, the ability to use data in campaigns is fast becoming an area of differentiation which sets them apart from the competition.

• Refine and optimise

Businesses need to recognise how data and creative can work alongside one another to drive ever-smarter and ever-more effective targeted campaigns. A prime example is email and web banners – with the use of data, knowing who to target and where to display or send them not only makes the process more effective, but a whole lot more efficient.

• Target more precisely

Businesses should appreciate that ‘the public’ rarely have homogeneous tastes. Instead they should look to target specific consumers based on their attributes and behaviours – not only is this more effective, but by removing irrelevant marketing it enhances the customer’s experience too.

Last week saw the 2012 Loebner prize take place, the competition in which computers attempt to convince judges that they are human. A few years ago, the results of a competition to demonstrate a machine mimicking a human may have seemed inconsequential to our everyday lives, but today the story is becoming more and more relevant. Increasingly machines use chatbots to interact with users online, or push out discussions on twitter, and the introduction of Apple’s Siri to the consumer market last year made all of this technology much more visible.

For all the marketing fluff, a system that proves it can have a conversation like a human is not really the point. For example, what Siri attempts to do is not to interact, it is to respond and react to simple questions and commands, but as with the “voice recognition” which has been available in high end cars for several years, these are simple tasks which provide little real-world gains in efficiency. But if the principles of natural language interpretation and interactive dialogue could be combined with the ability to trigger the automated execution of tasks, then we would be closer to seeing tangible efficiencies through Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Efficiency is a word that all businesses are drawn to, and if businesses are to use technology to drive such efficiency, what better place to start than the IT department, where use of technology is second nature? If an expert system could be “taught” to act as a virtual service desk, surely that would release the potential of AI to add tangible business value? Imagine if you could deploy virtual service desk staff which are able to think, act and interact independently without human intervention. Contactable 24/7 by a phone, email, Instant Messenger or SMS, they would not only listen and understand what is required, but would have the ability to trigger automated actions, run tests and execute fixes. They would remember everything, creating a vast database of every action undertaken or issue ever resolved, which could be recalled instantly.

The systems behind this principle would not just be having a conversation, but be mimicking the behaviour of a team of service desk engineers. They would continue to learn from every problem they encountered, every request they received and every action they took, and share that knowledge between them. Also, an AI system can handle many tasks at once, can instantly correlate complex information, and can make decisions at lightning speed. But unlike the human engineers they mimic, our virtual service desk staff don’t go sick, don’t forget anything and never come in to work with a hangover. And they never ask for a pay rise!

If this all sounds too far removed from a piece of software pretending it’s a person, it’s not! The principle of a virtual service desk engineer may sound like science fiction, but in reality, the technology isn’t as far away as you might think. Innovative companies have been working on creating this for over a decade. Done right, technology such as this will shake the IT outsourcing industry to its core.

As we read about the strain between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in the UK coalition Government, it is worth remembering that clients and suppliers in an outsourcing arrangement often feel a similar level of stress.

While both parties obviously have different objectives, it could be argued that the basic rationale behind outsourcing should constitute a win-win situation. However, although most arrangements work sufficiently well to keep a business working, it often does not feel like a win-win in reality – particularly from the client’s perspective. High on the worry list is both obtaining and sustaining value for money. Many clients also wrestle with the alignment of their business objectives with that of the suppliers. Given the maturity of the outsourcing market and despite the majority of clients already experiencing their second, third or even fourth generation of contracts, surely it is time for this situation to be improved. But how can clients achieve this in practice?

For a start, from a client’s point-of-view, the word ‘relationship’ itself may not be appropriate in the context of outsourcing. ‘Relationship’ may suggest that this arrangement is a kind of friendship, a potential marriage or a platonic arrangement with dealings on a personal level. Nothing is further from the truth. While I am not advocating an adversarial or disrespectful stance in any way, the key aspect for clients to remember is that outsourcing should be considered strictly a business arrangement.

After all, this is the stance already taken by suppliers. At present, in most outsourcing relationships, the supplier’s skills and capability profile is far more developed in terms of managing its customer and stakeholders, as well as deploying and operating business disciplines and controls, to protect its business interests. Despite consistent advice and plenty of evidence to suggest that they would benefit from adopting a comparable approach to managing their own side of the arrangement, many clients have failed to invest in the appropriate skills to manage their supplier on an equal footing.

There are four key dimensions that need to be considered when building and maintaining an outsourcing business relationship. These dimensions include the:

1. performance metrics that inform the parties

2. business environment that the relationship operates within

3. people who engage to operate the relationship

4. characteristics of the relationship sought.

Everyone involved with outsourcing will recognise the first dimension, performance. The problem is that virtually everyone just concentrates on this aspect alone. Defining and discharging the obligations of the other three dimensions is more challenging. The usual response is, why bother? Analysis has shown that poor or inadequate relationship management can account for as much as 29% of the contract value not being realised.

No matter how it is wrapped up, outsourcing arrangements will always remain an extension of the client’s organisation. The only main difference is that outsourcing is defined by its own commercial arrangements which need to be managed and considered a fundamental part of the relationship. Too often clients treat an outsourcing arrangement as purely a transaction, comparable to buying paper-clips, with nothing further to do having signed a contract. However, they need to consider how outsourcing relationships develop and need careful management over time. Survey data again supports the case for investment in supplier relationship management: 50% of customer/supplier relationships fail. This is surpassed by those clients who take an ad-hoc approach to relationships, who can expect a failure rate of 80%

In today’s economic climate, can any business really afford not to make these achievable improvements?

Data source: United Nations survey 2010