Industry news

Apple stock prices exceeded the $600 billion mark on Wednesday, only a month after reaching $500 billion. The only other company to reach the $600 billion mark was Microsoft in 1999, which is now valued at $260 billion.

The rise in value is particularly significant as stocks continued to fall on the main exchanges due to high US unemployment and the European debt crisis. The stock price peaked at $644 in the morning and stabilised at $629 by midday.

It has been speculated that the surge in value is down to Apple’s recent announcement that it will be using $200 billion pay a dividend and buy back some shares. Apple’s stock price has climbed 59 percent this year and a range of analysts have even said the stock has been under-valued by the market.

Tower Hamlets Council has awarded a seven-year contract to IT firm Agilisys. The move comes as Tower Hamlets aims to achieve savings of £100 million over four years following government budget cuts.

The contract, worth £70 million, hopes to save the council £29 million in ICT cost savings. Agilisys also implement the council’s new finance and HR systems. The IT firm will be based in Tower Hamlets and none of the council’s current IT staff will lose their jobs as they will be transferred to Agilisys for the duration of the contract.

Georgina O'Toole, TechMarketView analyst said: "Previously Agilisys has worked with Unit4 for its Agresso software, for example, at North Somerset. And word on the street is that it's the same situation at Tower Hamlets. Agilisys is quickly becoming one of the most successful players in the sector with revenues from UK local government set to top £100 million in this financial year to 31 March 2012."

Agilisys will start work at the council from May 2012. It beat Capita, HCL, Logica and Northgate in the race for the contract.

London's Tower Hamlets Council has signed a £70 million deal with services firm Agilsys in an effort to enable ICT to deliver its share of the savings - and create new local jobs.

The seven-year strategic partnership deal with Agilisys is expected to generate more than £29 million in ICT cost savings. Agilsys will implement the council's new finance and HR systems, as well as support its transformation programme.

The deal comes as part of efforts to combat the need to make £100 million of cuts over four years.

The council insisted that the IT team's employment terms and conditions will be fully protected, and that they will also have a no compulsory redundancy guarantee.

BT Global Services has won a $220m outsourcing deal with mining giant Anglo American.

The IT services contract covers all of the company's networking requirements in numerous locations 9many of them remote), across 15 countries, for the next five years.

The entirety of Anglo American's voice services will be moved to BT's One Voice converged communications platform, which will enable collaborative services such as IP telephony and videoconferencing to be deployed. BT will also become Anglo American's "global supplier of choice" for networking hardware equipment.

The deal follows on from a 2007 outsourcing contract with BT in alliance with HP, which also covered IT hardware supplied by HP.

Hacktivist group Anonymous has targeted the home Office, Number 10 and Ministry of Justice websites in protest of the extradition of alleged UK hackers to the US.

Anonymous claimed responsibility for the Denial-of-Service attacks this weekend, rendering the sites useless for over an hour. Twitter accounts affiliated with Anonymous hinted that the attacks came as a protest against the extradition Gary MacKinnon, who stands accused of hacking into the Pentagon's IT systems, and Richard O'Dwyer, who allegedly operated an illegal download link directory site, to the US.

The success of the attacks raises questions as to why the sites were so susceptible to hacking.

The largest maker of business-management software, SAP AG, plans to spend approximately $500 million to encourage customers to its Hana data-processing product, and ramp up the competition against Oracle Corp.

$337 million has been budgeted by SAP to provide new clients of its Hana database platform with consulting services and an 18-month refund policy. The Walldorf, Germany-based company is also starting a $155 million venture fund to spur development of applications compatible with Hana.

Vishal Sikka, an SAP board member in charge of technology and innovation, said yesterday “with Hana, we have an opportunity to really transform the database and rethink applications.”

Sophos has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Dialogs Software, a mobile device management vendor based in Germany.

This is not the first partnership between the companies; Dortmund-based Dialogs' smartMan mobile device management technology is already powering Sophos' Mobile Control product.

The management of mobile devices, particularly those owned by employees and used in corporate environments, was a key topic for discussion at this year's RSA security conference in San Francisco.

Sophos plans to merge Dialogs' smartMan technology, which supports all types of mobile devices and operating systems including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian, into a Unified Threat Management suite which will also include its own mobile security and encryption products.

In a bid to slash on-going costs of £30 million London's councils are considering pooling their administration for pensions.

Some 32 boroughs, alongside the City of London Corporation and the London Pensions Fund Authority, could see their processing costs fall "sharply", it has been proposed.

London Councils, an umbrella group pushing for the changes, said “there was a commitment to explore further the proposals for the creation of a London Pensions Mutual, as a pan-London investment fund."

The councils have also estimated that by combining the funds invested, they will be able to better co-ordinate and direct up to £2.25 billion funds into local infrastructure projects.

"Each scheme has separate advisers, administrators, fund managers with their performance fees – if councils work together that cost can be steeply cut," said Sir Merrick Cockell, chair of the Local Government Association.

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. has annouced the evacuation of staff from two of its software development centers around Chennai in southern India, after authorities issued a tsunami warning following a massive earthquake off the coast of Sumatra.

"As a measure of extreme caution, we have evacuated all our employees from two of our large facilities around Chennai," India's largest software exporter by sales said in a statement.

It wasn't immediately known how many employees it has in the two facilities.

Hewlett Packard is set to move in to the cloud computing market. The new tool will put HP in competition with Amazon as well as other businesses.

HP planned to launch the public cloud service May 10th and will incorporate a variety of computing tasks. The service will also include software tools that businesses and other companies can use to build and run programs, and even transfer programs from to HP's data centres.

The move is part of CEO Meg Whitman’s strategy to take advantage of the cloud computing trend, as businesses and consumers are increasingly storing and accessing data and services over the Internet.

“The market for public cloud is large and will continue to grow,” Hewlett-Packard Chief Strategy Officer Bill Veghte said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg.