Industry news

The Cabinet Office has unveiled a second consultation into the use of open standards in government.

The consultation, entitled Open standards: open opportunities flexibility and efficiency in government IT, will run for 12 weeks and is hosted on the Cabinet Office's website.

The consultation, announced by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, is aimed at informing the definition of open standards in the context of government IT. It will also focus on the meaning of mandation and the effects compulsory standards may have on government departments, delivery partners and supply chains, as well as international alignment and cross-border interoperability.

Cognizant, a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, has announced that it has entered into a five-year, multimillion dollar engagement with Future Group, India's largest multi-format retail group, to provide end-to-end IT infrastructure services for all Future Group companies.

Besides providing service desk support, data center management, and network services support, Cognizant will also deliver the IT infrastructure services support to Future Group's ever growing network of stores, warehouses, offices, and data centers.

To help Future Group proactively monitor, manage, and report business service performance, Cognizant will implement an Enterprise Management Platform to improve operational agility and drive business transformation. Along with Future Group, Cognizant will set up a Point-of-Sale lab to develop and deploy next-generation IT solutions to provide best-in-class consumer experience in stores, and also to co-innovate around the future of the store, leveraging mobile and kiosk technologies.

"We chose Cognizant as our strategic partner after a comprehensive selection process," said Rakesh Biyani, Chief Executive Officer of Retail Business and an Executive Board Member at Future Group. "We were impressed with Cognizant's strong consulting-led approach, process and technology maturity, innovation focus, and most importantly, a sound understanding of our business vision. Our relationship with Cognizant will allow Future Group to harness Cognizant's broad range of business transformation capabilities in our mission to become a premier catalyst in India's consumption-led growth story."

River Island has said that rising labour costs in China were making production in Britain more viable. It has increased the number of items produced at home by 50 per cent in the past 12 months and says that the changes have paid off.

Ben Lewis, the chief executive, said: “It has allowed us to get new fashion to our customers much quicker than we were able to, and as a result some of those products have become absolute bestsellers. We can get more of them and work closely with the factories.” Mr Lewis, a member of the Lewis family which controls a fortune estimated at £1.15 billion, added: “With clever design you can hold the price to something affordable.”

The Rural Payments Agency has said that cleansing its data is the most important part of its new five-year strategy and will help to improve the performance of its troubled IT systems.

In its plan for 2012-2017, the executive agency of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says that the poor quality of data it holds has been one of the main causes of errors and backlogs in its much criticised £350m single payments scheme, which pays subsidies to landowners.

The FundsNetwork Navigator service uses internally developed risk profiling techniques to gauge clients’ tolerance for risk. The system then recommends one of the three Multi Asset Allocator funds of funds that Fidelity launched in October 2011 for Trevor Greetham, which are called Defensive, Balanced and Growth.

This is the first time the FundsNetwork platform has offered advisers a proprietary ‘end-to-end’ way for them to outsource investment management.

The launch puts the group up against similar offerings from Skandia, which offers the Spectrum fund suite and risk-profiling tools, and Standard Life, which offers MyFolio.

Striking public sector staff picketed council offices in protest against plans to outsource services to the private sector.

Public sector union, Unison, say Barnet Council's One Barnet project could see 70 per cent of council workers become private sector employees in under a year, with many being forced to work outside of the borough.

But staff from various council departments, including trading standards, planning, highways, and parking services, say they want to remain council employees. They claim that services and therefore taxpayers will suffer under the new plans.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) has announced three new police hubs to tackle web crime are set to launch.

The hubs in Yorkshire and the Humber, the north-west and east Midlands, will go live "imminently", with some officers undergoing training immeadiately.

The hubs, announced in November, will focus on online crime, with the exception of online child abuse which is already covered by units that specialise in the area. The units will be funded from a budget of £30m over four years, granted by the government to improve national capability to investigate and combat web crime.

Oracle Corp. made its second acquisition in three months, agreeing to buy human-resources software company Taleo Corp. (TLEO) for about $1.9 billion to expand in cloud computing and respond to a December deal by SAP AG. (SAP)

Holders of Taleo will get $46 a share, Redwood City, California-based Oracle, the second-largest software company, said today in a statement. That’s 18 percent higher than Taleo’s closing share price yesterday. Taleo gives Oracle tools that help companies manage human resources, recruit employees and set compensation

Barclays has reported a 3% fall in profits to £5.9bn for last year, hit by a slowdown at its investment bank arm.

The bank also said the bonus pool at the investment banking division was down 32% to £1.5bn in 2011.

There was no immediate news on the bonus for its chief executive Bob Diamond, reportedly in line for a payout worth several million pounds.

MSPexcellence, the business-building consultancy for Managed Services Providers (MSPs) and Cloud Solutions Providers (CSPs) has been selected by two leading providers of hosted cloud services to expand their market coverage with a channel of indirect sales partners to resell their hosted cloud services.

External IT, a leading provider of comprehensive cloud-based IT solutions and Global Micro, the first and the largest provider of hosted services in South Africa, are both working with MSPexcellence to roll out a structured channel program to enable VARs, interconnects and MSPs to become certified channel partners and successful Cloud Solutions Providers.