Industry news

The pharmaceuticals giant selects the Indian outsourcer's platform for marketing content, developed in partnership with a division of marketing giant WPP.

The ‘Digital Marketing Platform’ developed by Infosys in partnership with Fabric Worldwide (a division of advertising and marketing services group WPP) is designed to enable users to manage their online marketing process from beginning to end and monitor and analyse their success.

Phil Benton, GSK' vice president for the new division says “we recognise that our customers, consumers and other external stakeholders increasingly want to engage with us on-line […] Global Digital Services will enable us to provide globally standard processes, scalable assets and advanced analytics to support better and more efficient engagement with these external audiences."

London’s second largest airport plans a £73m IT operations overhaul which will include hosting, telephony and management of end-user computing.

There will be 11 lots available for suppliers to bid on which are outlined on an online tender, with each lasting for a period of 4 years. The most expensive of these being valued at £12m covers hosting, management, support and maintenance. This section of the airport’s current framework has more than 900 servers, based on a virtualised Unix and Wintel estate, as well as over 200 storage devices.

Gatwick is also considering cloud-based services to handle its web services, including their website, intranet and extranet.

The £20 billion guarantee scheme to increase the flow of credit to SMEs is to be approved this week by EU regulators.

The proposal for the National Loan Guarantee Scheme unveiled by Chancellor George Osborne in November aims to provide government guarantees for bank’s funding in an effort to cut the cost of borrowing for companies.

The European Commission has been assessing the plan to ensure that in falls in line with EU state aid rules. According to a source approval from the European Commission is imminent and will come in the next few days.

Capita has unveiled details of their £440m deal with the armed forces under which it will work with the Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force on its Recruiting Partnering Project (RPP).

The forces stand to save and estimated £300m with the 10 year deal, and hope to release 1,000 military recruiters back to the front line. Ownership of the recruitment policy, entry criteria and assessment standards will remain with the Forces, but the RPP will handle the process of attracting and recruitment of new soldiers and officers.

As part of this plan an ICT platform will be provided by Capita, although they will continue to work in an assisting role with the existing model until March 2013 when the new delivery model will be executed.

SAP, the market leader in creating business management applications, has confirmed that over the next 4 years it will invest an additional $450 million to increase its leading position in the Middle East and North Africa.

SAP intends to increase its workforce in the region from 300 employees to 800 as well as setting up a training institute to certify 2,000 software consultants. SAP said that these measures are designed to lead to a significant increase in sales in the region.

Werner Brandt, Chief Financial Officer, said the region is: “is remarkable in its growth potential, scope and readiness to innovate - additional investment will enable us to deliver leading-edge innovation, better localization and more talent.”

Thameslink has awarded a £120 million contract to upgrade infrastructure to Carillion. Carillion will service lines and deports as part of the Thameslink Programme in preparation for the delivery of new 12 car trains.

The longer trains are set to serve increased demand and improve the timetable of the service to the north and south of the capital.

Richard Hoswon, Chief executive of Carillion, said: "We will continue to work closely with Network Rail and the train operators to maximise value for money in delivering this important new phase of the Thameslink project."

BT has been chosen by Australia's Financial and Energy Exchange Group (FEX) to provide its Radianz Cloud software for financial services, giving global market participants greater flexibility in accessing the FEX exchange.

The BT Radianz cloud services have been created to suit the global financial community in providing stability and speed of service.

Thomas Price, FEX CEO, said: "BT leads the way in providing financial services cloud connectivity. They help us extend our global reach and gain greater access to the community that we need to attract new clients and grow our business."

O2 is set to deliver Wifi hotspots to 1,600 pubs and restaurants around the UK in a 3 year contract to provide free wireless to 13 brands belonging to Mitchells & Butlers.

The O2 Wifi will be accessible and free regardless of the guests’ mobile and broadband providers. The hotspots will be rolled out initially to 199 Harvester restaurants, with complete coverage of all Mitchells & Butlers brands by October.

Robin Young, Operations Director at Mitchells & Butlers, said: "Our three-year technology journey is reaching that exciting stage where, following the deployment of a new flexible cloud-based infrastructure with our partner Fujitsu, we can start to deploy some really guest-focused services.”

Youku and Tudou are merging together in a deal worth over £1 billion in order to cut costs and increase profitability in a struggling industry caused by rising costs.

The joining of the two video streaming companies, imaginatively named Youku Tudou, will create an industry leader with more than one thirds of the online video market. Pre-market trading this Monday saw Tudou stocks rise by more than double.

The once bitter rivals had both reported net losses last year in an overly competitive marketplace hit by both rising bandwidth and content costs. Independent analyst, Bill Bishop, said: “This creates China's biggest video site, but it doesn't create a YouTube – they still have less than 50% market share."

Formalise communications, roles, service definitions and processes

The saying “Good fences make good neighbours” is very applicable to relationships with Cloud service providers.

Clear demarcation of services, roles and responsibilities is vital to these relationships. The more that’s left to subjective opinion, conjecture and guesswork, the more likely it is that misunderstandings, mistakes and missed opportunities will result.

Good “fences” for the Cloud are built by asking the right questions: Which services are ‘core’ and which are ‘chore’? Which will be off-loaded to a Cloud partner and which will remain in-house? What has front-line responsibility in the event of a problem? Who is the next contact in line if that person isn’t available?

Detailed process documentation, well-defined roles and clear accountability are all essential for managing an increasingly disparate IT infrastructure; one that includes partnerships with Cloud services providers.

This, by the way, is one factor that differentiates today’s high-value Cloud engagements from the less successful outsourcing engagement of the past. With the Cloud, IT can tightly focus what it off-loads and what its service-levels expectations are. So it can actually gain control, rather than losing it.

Start with concrete IT service requirements and definitions

Service level agreements cannot be standardised. Performance that is acceptable for one service will not be for another. And there cannot be grey areas. Everyone must understand the performance target.

This is why it is so important to have watertight service contracts in place―ones that detail deliverables and potential penalties―thus ensuring there can be no questions or misunderstandings in the event of service disruption. It is essential to detail what constitutes acceptable up-time. And if an outage is reported, it must be clear how quickly it is to be addressed.

One good way to set thresholds for Cloud service providers is to use benchmarks based on service levels historically achieved by the internal IT organisation.

Other considerations when creating SLAs include:

1. Penalties - What service credits or compensation will be honoured if SLAs are missed?

2. Realism - Can 99.999% reliability actually be guaranteed by the service provider? Does the business really need to bear the cost of premium reliability for every service?

3. Accountability – Service Providers’ claims about service levels should be validated against reports of problems from end-users.

4. Alignment with business requirements - Different departments, for example may require different service levels.

Stipulate on-demand service status updates

Irrespective of the SLAs, or any other service agreements that are in place, it is vital that the business has 24 by 7 visibility into the performance status of its Cloud services. The sooner the business is aware of an issue, the better it will be able to mitigate its impact on end-users and customers.

Many established Cloud service providers offer their clients online portals that provide access to real-time data on the performance and status of their managed infrastructure and services. Some also provide automated reporting and alerts. This transparency gives customers a higher level of confidence that business needs and SLAs are being met.

How should an organisation manage its Cloud services?

The use of Cloud service providers does not eliminate the need for businesses to monitor the performance and availability of critical services. On the contrary, it is still important to identify problems and hold service providers accountable.

So rather than relying exclusively on the monitoring and reporting offered by each Cloud service provider, it is advisable to implement a comprehensive solution for monitoring any and all externally provided services. Such a solution will help ensure the success of Cloud computing initiatives by measuring all key services and applications in real-time.

Ideally, this monitoring solution should unify the entire operational IT infrastructure, bringing both internally and externally provisioned services under the umbrella of a single IT monitoring and management process. This unified approach is the most cost-effective way to ensure that all IT services are meeting the needs of the business in terms of performance and availability.