Industry news

Google has announced they are building a service to that will allow big data analysis in the cloud. BigQuery will allow organisations to analyse their data anywhere, without the need to build infrastructure. The service was launched by Google after developing similar infrastructure for in-house use.

Google product manager Ju-Kay Kwek, speaking at the GigaOm Structure Data conference, said: “The time to insight on Big Query can be as short as a day or less because we take care of the data structuring and making it available so teams can focus on querying the data.”

Users will upload data and stream updates as they become available. Google’s algorithms then allow the user to analyse the data. The service offers a number of benefits, notably it eliminated the need for large data storage facilities.

The service is currently being tested by trial users.

Cumbria Council’s IT outsourcing contract with Computacenter has fallen through less than two weeks before the proposed switch over.

It was announced yesterday that the five-year deal would no longer go ahead after the council announced "following extensive discussions with Computacenter, it has not proved possible for the two parties to conclude the finalisation of the proposed contract".

Cumbria Council announced in January that Computacenter was their preferred bidder, winning the contract that was due to be worth £33 million in total. A Computacenter spokesperson said “We can’t discuss the specifics of contract negotiations, however, we can confirm that we haven’t been able to agree terms agreeable to both parties.”

Agilsys will continue to provide services for the council until a new provider is found.

BT Global services have won an £8.3 million contract with The Northern Grid for Learning. The deal involves BT delivering a regional wide area network (WAN) to schools and local authorities.

Northern Grid is a non-profit, regional broadband consortium that is owned by several local authorities in the North East of England.

The current contract with Northern Grid expires in July 2012, and BT are expected to deliver an improved and more cost effective service. The London Grid signed a similar deal with Virgin which plans to move 2,000 schools in the capital onto to a new, fibre optic network.

John Lewis has announced it will be hiring over 50 new IT specialists in 2012. The UK retailers have made the investment in a move to improve in multi-channel customer service offerings.

Some of the roles created will include project managers, systems analysts and business analysts, and will join John Lewis’ 280-strong IT team.

Owen Roberts, John Lewis’ recruitment manager said: ““Technology has been identified as one of the most important drivers of business growth. We are now looking for talented IT professionals to join our team and help us take multi-channel retail to the next level, cementing our reputation as an industry leader.”

The new recruitments follow the three-fold investment increase in IT John Lewis has experienced in recent years.

T-mobile is to slash 1,900 jobs by closing seven of its 24 call centers in the USA in an effort to reduce costs and remain competitive.

T-mobile plans to consolidate its work force and an extra 1,400 jobs at the remaining call centers. However, around 3,300 employees will be laid off as around 5% of their US work force will be cut.

Philipp Humm, CEO and president of T-Mobile, said: "Concentrating call centers is an important step to achieve competitive cost structures to successfully compete in the wireless market. These are not easy steps to take, but they are necessary to realize efficiency in order to invest for growth."

The government is planning to outsource control of emergency call centres to the private sector. The move is being spearheaded by Capita who are to supply a modernized 999 control system in a 10 year contract. The deal is aimed to save over £5million during the lifetime of the contract.

The emergency call centre is run nationally by BT and Cable and Wireless, the London brigade contact will see around 120 current staff, including office support staff and control officers move to Capita.

Councillor Brian Norman, chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, said: “Outsourcing the Brigade's 999 control centre will mean people in the capital benefit from a new, high-tech system that will mobilise our firefighters to incidents even more quickly and this will be done at less cost."

Atos has signed a £100m deal to provide EDF with datacentre services over 10 years. The deal is set to consolidate EDF datacentres, and reduce costs by over 20 percent over the next decade.

Atos will provide EDF Energy with the ability to meet demand through greater datacentre capacity, while increasing service resilience. The contract will cover the move of more than 100 employees from EDF to Atos.

Nigel Pettifer, datacentre head at EDF, said: "The new solution will enable us to run our business more cost-effectively while improving the resilience and flexibility of our IT infrastructure.”

Glaxo will invest £500m in factories and infrastructure, including the construction of a new factory in Cumbria.

The investments according to Glaxo ,will see the creation of 1,000 new jobs. The move will boost the UK pharmaceutical industry after the loss of US drug giant Pfizer, which closed its research facility in Kent, resulting in the loss of around 1,500 jobs

Glaxo has said that the investment represents “one of the largest commitments to the UK life-sciences sector in recent years".

CSC has launched its new Foundation Service which allows users to transform business applications to a cloud based infrastructure in conjunction with Oracle hardware and services.

CSC Foundation services for Oracle will allow the analysis of business processes, identifying which workloads will generate the greatest ROI from cloud based services, as well as providing development and run time environments for use in private clouds.

Michelle Montalvo, Vice-president of Oracle Global System, said: "Leveraging our engineered systems, CSC Foundation Services for Oracle will help equip customers to transform their Oracle investments into Oracle As a Service environments."

The IT industry was generally positive about the impact of Wednesday’s Budget on their industry sector and the level of support offered to small businesses, video games industries and broadband providers.

Concerns however were levelled at the amounts of funding on offer. Julian David, director of IT industry association Intellect, said: "to turn this vision into a reality we will have to go much further than today's announcements.”

The former BT CTO, Dr Peter Cochrane also criticized the budget, saying that the UK had: “no vision, no mission and no business plan” in regards to delivering a 21st century Broadband infrastructure.