Industry news

Atos, an international IT services company, has announced that it has been awarded a five year contract worth £74 million by the Department of Health. Under the contract, Atos will deliver an integrated IT desktop service plus a range of supporting services within the Department of Health (DH) and for some of its Arms Length Bodies.

A spokesperson for the DH said: “The procurement was conducted against the ASCC framework using an in-house team and has delivered a flexible contract that will result in savings of around 40% on the current cost of service across the life of the contract.”

The contract draws together the desktop solution for the Department and some of its Arms Length Bodies, such as, the Care Quality Commission, into a common, high-quality, integrated, shared service. It supports the aims of the Government Strategy for ICT, both in reducing costs and ensuring the necessary ICT is in place to deliver DH reforms and modernisation in 2012 and beyond.

MTN, a leading telecommunications company with a presence in 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East, has announced the extension of its managed services agreement with Ericsson.

This announcement marks the extension of the first managed services contract between Ericsson and MTN, originally signed in 2009 in connection to the rollout of MTN's 3G network in Ghana. Under the extension, Ericsson is responsible for network operations, field maintenance and optimization.

Jon Hoffmann, Chief Technical officer, MTN Ghana said, "Our first two years together achieved the results we were hoping for: we could focus on subscriber growth, and Ericsson delivered network reliability and efficiencies."

HCL Technologies Ltd., a leading global IT services provider, has underlined its position as a socially responsible business by announcing a series of initiatives around building Glocal Centres of Excellence (GCoE) with the aim of creating 10,000 jobs in US and Europe in the next five years.

"As our unique Employees First culture has continued to grow and evolve, we've seen more and more HCL employees expressing the desire to see a truly socially responsible business model," said Vineet Nayar, Vice Chairman & CEO, HCL Technologies. "Clearly, the need of the hour is growth and employment and we believe that this initiative will create unique business value for HCL while generating sustainable employment in local economies for years to come. It will need significant collaboration of all stakeholders; however, we do believe that it can be done and we are committed to backing this program with all our resources and best intent," he added.

The public administration select committee has commended the government on making progress to tackle the well known problems associated with public sector IT, but warns it has not done enough to address concerns around skills, legacy equipment and allegations of "cartel-like" behaviour among suppliers.

The committee published a report in July 2011 entitled, A recipe for rip-offs: time for a new approach, that listed its concerns about the public sector's overdependance on the same large IT providers, lack of ability to make any large-scale change to how it uses IT, and issues around skills and legacy equipment.

The committee has now published a progress report examining how far the issues raised by the original report have been addressed.

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, has unveiled Desk.com, revolutionizing customer service for a social and mobile world.

Desk.com enables businesses to deliver personal customer service by offering a help desk that is social, mobile and simple to use and deploy. Desk.com allows any business to instantly work with customers over any major social network. Desk.com Mobile allows companies to carry a help desk in their pocket and answer customers on the go.

"We built Desk.com so that every company can deliver personal customer service in a social and mobile world. Desk.com is social at its core; its mobile app instantly lets any employee, anywhere, deliver awesome customer service; and it can be deployed quickly and easily," said Alex Bard, vice president and general manager, Desk.com.

The European Commission is to establish the European Cloud Partnership, which aims to bring together public sector organisations and the IT industry to work on commons requirements for cloud procurement, said Neelie Kroes, the vice-president of the EC with responsibility for Europe's digital agenda.

Speaking at the European Cloud Partnership World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Kroes promised that the commission would invest an initial €10m in the partnership. It will be set up in 2012 and its first results are expected the following year.

buyingTeam, Europe’s leading provider of end-to-end procurement services, announces that it is to transition to a new brand and, from 20 February 2012, will be known as Proxima.

The move reflects the scope and range of services that the company now offers its portfolio of blue-chip, multi-national clients, driven by the growing importance that businesses place on procurement as a strategic corporate function in today’s challenging economic environment.

2012 also sees Proxima expanding its offering into the North American market. With some large outsourcing assignments already underway in the United States, Proxima has a platform from which to grow its presence in the market and translate its track record of delivery for clients on both sides of the Atlantic.

Matthew Eatough, CEO, Proxima, said: “Over the years we have evolved along with our clients to reach this market leading position and gain their trust as an advisor. Changing our name to Proxima reflects that progress and our ambitions for the future. Our growing portfolio of highly-respected clients is testament to the skills and experience of our people."

Worried over the adverse fallout of protectionism, Indian finance minister Pranab Mukherjee on Monday said if the US stops outsourcing jobs to India, profitability of both the economies will be hurt.

Mukherjee said: "If the US stops outsourcing jobs from India to some extent profitability of the economies will be affected."

The FTSE 100 security group G4S is set to replace its roster of corporate advisers and brokers this week as punishment for not buying the Danish cleaner ISS.

The chairman, Alf Duch-Pederson,has announced that he is to quit after the £5.2bn proposal, which would have made G4S the world's biggest cleaning and security group with 1.2 million employees, failed to get shareholder support in November. However, the G4S board believes that it can only regain credibility by also axing some of the advisers on that deal.

The Technology Strategy Board has announced that it will establish a Catapult centre for the connected UK digital economy.

The new Catapult is a technology and innovation centre which will accelerate innovation and stimulate growth in this important area of the economy. It will bring together technological expertise to help the UK’s world-leading digital businesses to develop, test and apply new technologies, reducing the risk associated with creating hugely profitable products and services in the future. The centre may focus on areas such as:

- How digital media and content are traded and used - in order to find sustainable ways to help businesses co-operate to create profitable services;

- The pervasiveness of digital services - addressing the impact of new technologies and systems such as cloud computing and identity management, as businesses and industries become more digital;

- The blending of digital and physical worlds - looking at how our devices, clothes, cars and other consumer goods become better connected to enhance our physical lives.