Industry news

JANET, the organisation that operates shared network services for the UK's higher education sector, has announced its suppliers.

Suppliers including Dell, HP, Fujitsu, Capita and more will provide cloud infrastructure services to its customers over the next four years.

IBM has unveiled three packages of services and software to help organizations analyze their data for profit and improved efficiency.

The signature solutions, as IBM calls these offerings, go beyond generic analysis software to address three different specific tasks: detecting financial fraud, predicting consumer behavior and estimating financial risk.

"Having software is important but having industry expertise and domain knowledge is also pretty essential," said Deepak Advani, IBM vice president of predictive analytics. IBM's intent behind these packages is to combine its analytic software with the lessons it has learned installing such software for clients, Advani said.

City & Guilds, the UK’s leading awarding body, has chosen Azzurri Communications as their strategic telecoms partner.

The first engagement in this relationship is for a £900,000, three year contract. Azzurri will consolidate four existing telecoms suppliers (covering mobility, IP telephony, audio/video conferencing, calls and lines and support) into one managed service to deliver cost savings and reduce complexity. Azzurri will then assist City & Guilds in their quest to use ICT in a radical and strategic way to drive real business change, through a planned and phased unified communications strategy.

Ian Turfrey, Head of Architecture and Strategic Development, City & Guilds, said: “Our first priority was to procure a cost effective service and get more from our existing infrastructure, through an operational costing model rather than capital expenditure. We also wanted a long term strategic telecoms partner that could help take us on ‘the journey’ to a fully integrated unified communications environment. We believe this is the best way for us to support our business objectives of enhancing staff collaboration and productivity.

Amazon has bought the warehouse-robotics company Kiva for $775m in cash. The deal is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2012, with Kiva continuing to run operations from their headquarters in North Reading, Massachusetts.

Dave Clark, the global customer fulfillment vice president of Amazon.com said "Kiva shares our passion for invention, and we look forward to supporting their continued growth". Amazon has used automation as a method of increasing productivity by bringing the products directly to employees to pick, pack and stow.

Quidsi and Zappos the online retailers that have been acquired by Amazon are also reported to be using Kiva’s robotic services.

The move comes as Amazon reports recent high costs of fulfilment services, and the online retailer hopes to reduce its operational costs.

Oracle Corp. has observed a boost in German trading following reports of a quarterly profit, indicative of a growing demand for programs that help companies organize data and run operations.

This comes following an overhaul of Oracle Corp after poor results during the previous quarter. Since the changes the company has reported increase in shares of 2.3 percent.

Oracle has also been making acquisitions to broaden its offerings in cloud computing software delivered over the Web. It agreed last month to buy Taleo Corp. (TLEO), a maker of online human resources software, for $1.9 billion, its second Web software acquisition in less than four months.

Tech Miranda and Mahindra Satyam today announced a merger which will result in the creation of a new offshore services leader with revenues estimated at US$2.4bn, a 75,000+ strong work force and 350+ active clients across 54 countries.

The strategy of the combined companies will consist of a balanced mix of revenues from Telecom, Manufacturing, Technology, Media & Entertainment, Banking Financial Services and Insurance, Retail and Healthcare.

Commenting on the merger Mr. Anand G Mahindra, Chairman, Tech Mahindra said “This merger will help propel the combined entity into the top tier of Indian software and services companies, achieving the Group’s key objective of being in a leadership role in each of our focus business areas”.

Mr. Vineet Nayyar, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Tech Mahindra and Chairman of Mahindra Satyam said “This merger is a key part of our strategy to deliver industry leading performance”.

Atos announced today that it has signed a 10 year contract worth in excess of £100 million with EDF Energy, after a 12 month procurement process, to provide data centre services for its UK business in a bid to consolidate EDF Energy’s data centre infrastructure to cut costs by 20% over the life of the contract.

Ursula Morgenstern, CEO for UK and Ireland at Atos, said: “This contract extends our relationship with EDF Group and represents the start of a long term partnership between Atos and EDF Energy in the UK […] and demonstrates our strength in the UK market in infrastructure outsourcing.”

Under the new contract, Atos will provide EDF Energy with significant additional data centre capacity to meet increased demand, whilst also enabling its services to be flexed up or down according to requirements.

Atos is ranked number one in managed services in Europe and one of the leaders in cloud computing with 30 major data centres, 900,000 SAP users and management of more than 90,000 servers globally.

In the G-20 nations, the Internet economy will grow more than 10 percent a year through 2016, according to a new report published by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) as part of its Connected World series.

The report states that in the developed markets of the G-20, the Internet economy will grow approximately 8 percent annually; in the developing markets, it will grow more than twice as fast—at an average annual rate of 18 percent. Argentina and India will grow the fastest, at 24 percent and 23 percent a year, respectively. The leading developed markets—Italy and the U.K.—will grow about 12 percent and 11 percent a year, respectively.

BCG projects that the Internet economy will contribute a total of $4.2 trillion to the G-20’s total GDP in 2016. “If it were a national economy, it would rank in the world’s top five, behind only the U.S., China, India, and Japan, and ahead of Germany,” said David Dean, BCG senior partner and a coauthor of the report.

United Parcel Service Inc. has agreed to buy TNT Express with a bid of 5.16 billion euros ($6.8 billion), the biggest purchase in the U.S. company’s 105- year history, to challenge Deutsche Post AG (DPW) in Europe.

TNT accepted an offer of 9.5 euros a share in cash, the companies said in a joint statement today. That’s 5.6 percent more than the 9-euro bid turned down last month by Hoofddorp, Netherlands-based TNT and 54 percent more than the closing price on Feb. 16, the day before the talks were made public.

Rolls Royce has awarded a three-year outsourcing contract to Capgemini. Capgemini will work with Rolls Royce to overlook the IT outsourcing provided by a number of vendors, ensuring that they deliver the best possible services in over 50 countries.

The contract, which has the option to be extended for a further two years, is part of a new multi-vendor IT strategy.

Simon Ricketts, CIO at Rolls-Royce, said: "It is vital that our products, services and people are supported by world-class IT and that is what our new strategy is designed to achieve."

The strategy is tasked with allowing 40,000 Rolls Royce IT users in 50 countries use the system seamlessly. The contract will begin by the end of this year.