Industry news

The updated TrainTracker NRE service is expected to use industry leading voice recognition technology capable of accurately and consistently recognising natural language and multiple item requests in a single utterance. The service will interact with TISL provided APIs for the provision of train running information and is expected to include self service elements to enable control and manipulation of reference data and call flow by TISL.

National Rail Enquiries, as part of their call handling strategy, provide a interactive voice response service to enable customers to request and receive real time train running information, including full journey planning up to 3 months in advance and information about the cheapest available fares for their journey.

The service handles 6 000 calls each day with peaks in excess of 14x this volume during disruption. The current contract for the provision of this service expires in september 2012 and TISL will use this opportunity to update and refresh this service to ensure it continues to meet customer expectations.

The launch follows the June 15th agreement of a global distribution partnership under which Siemens Enterprise Communications will exclusively resell the inContact cloud contact centre portfolio under the OpenScape Cloud Contact Center brand in the UK.

OpenScape Cloud Contact Center is based on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) contact centre platform from inContact (NASDAQ: SAAS), the leading provider of on-demand contact centre software and agent optimisation tools. OpenScape Cloud Contact Center is designed to simplify the agent interface, streamline contact centre management and improve the customer experience, all at a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than premise-based solutions. It allows companies to easily add part-time, temporary or seasonal agents to their existing contact centre, giving them ultimate flexibility in day-to-day operations. Hosted in inContact’s best-in-class data centres, OpenScape Cloud Contact Center offers the reliability and security of a private cloud but with more flexible, yet affordable deployment options.

OpenScape Cloud Contact Center complements the existing premise-based OpenScape Contact Center solution to deliver choice and investment protection. Customers will be able to choose a cloud-based, premise-based or hybrid contact centre solution based upon the best-fit for their business needs. In addition, OpenScape Cloud Contact Center enables customers to easily and affordably add on to an existing premise-based contact centre to provide new functionality, expand to new sites, support increased capacity needs, and to easily add remote or seasonal workers.

Scott McDonald, Global Vice President of Contact Centres at Siemens Enterprise Communications, commented that: “We are excited to announce the availability of OpenScape Cloud Contact Center into the UK. The proposition of increased flexibility and scalability, higher productivity levels and also the lowered cost of delivering service is resonating strongly with organisations, especially within the current economic conditions. With the availability of our OpenScape Cloud Contact Center proposition, we have the most comprehensive contact centre portfolio in the market today.”

Unison is conducting a ballot that could see 1.1 million workers strike on 30 November – and possibly beyond. The strike is over the Government’s public sector pension reforms. It affects works in local government and health service retirement schemes.

Other large public sector and civil service unions are already in the process of balloting, which could see over two million workers out, making it the biggest strike in UK history.

Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison said the strike “could take the form of targeted action against certain local authorities, health trusts or privatised service employers or the form of rolling action in certain regions.”

Deutsche Telekom and Capgemini have signed a five year business intelligence (BI) sourcing framework agreement.

The contract is between Deutsche Telekom AG – a new company merging two business units, T-Home and T-Mobile - and Capgemini Deutschland GmbH. It aims to consolidate the business processes and IT systems of both.

Capgemini global head of Business Information Management Paul Nannetti said: "Our investments and focus on developing a differentiated approach to the delivery of BI programs, combining consulting, technology and a scalable India centric delivery platform, have positioned Capgemini as a global leader in the provision of BI transformation services.”

Nearly in 3 SMEs plan to use cloud computing in the next year, according to a survey by IT industry non-profit trade association CompTIA.

400 IT and business professionals in UK were surveyed. 18% of companies were currently using cloud, 93% are satisfied with the result. Other technologies with the highest planned adoption rates were mobile solutions (27 per cent) and social media (26 per cent).

Swiss software solutions company Avaloq is to recruit at least 75 Scottish graduates among the 500 new jobs to be created when it opens its new Edinburgh base.

The announcement was welcomed today by Alex Salmond, who met with senior representatives of the company as plans were officially unveiled for their new Scottish software development centre. The First Minister described the graduate jobs boost as good news for new graduates in Edinburgh and across Scotland.

The development centre – to be sited in Edinburgh city centre – is expected to employ 500 people in its first five years, with 20 staff to start before the end of this year alone.

First Minister Alex Salmond said: “I welcome Avaloq’s commitment to recruit 75 new graduates from Scottish universities which is terrific news for new graduates in Edinburgh and across Scotland. This is a substantial number of training positions being created by a well-respected international software company, whose solutions are used by dozens of banks in more than 20 countries worldwide.

“The plans they are announcing this morning for their Edinburgh software development centre will mean a total of 500 high-quality, highly-skilled new jobs. Private sector job creation is pivotal to Scotland’s economic growth and the most recent figures show employment increased in Scotland by 23,000 over the three months to July 2011, at a time when it fell by 69,000 across the UK as a whole."

British firms risk losing out on significant employee productivity gains due to old-fashioned attitudes towards embracing new technologies, from iPhones and iPads to Android smart phones and tablets, in the workplace. This is the conclusion of a survey commissioned by Six Degrees Group, a UK managed data service provider serving Britain’s mid-sized businesses.

The survey, conducted by research firm Vanson Bourne, found widely differing attitudes between businesses and their employees towards the growing ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) to work phenomenon. 200 businesses and 200 employees across the UK were surveyed.

The vast majority (78%) of employees believe that their own personal devices are superior to those provided by their employer. If they were able to use their own devices for work, employees estimate they would be at least seven percent more productive, and in many cases far higher.

The survey also found that most (84 percent) employees believe using their own device at work would place no extra burden on IT support, with almost a third more likely to troubleshoot problems themselves. Together, these findings suggest a compelling case for BYOD in the workplace.

Alastair Mills, CEO of Six Degrees Group, believes that the latest BYOD findings should have been great news for UK business. He said: “We’ve clearly reached a tipping point in technology: for the first time ever, our personal tech is better than our work tech. The trend towards BYOD reflects the fact that the UK has become one of the most connected, always on, societies and we now have technology at our fingertips that can make us even more successful.”

The Open Group recently published a new book, Cloud Computing for Business: The Open Group Guide to address cloud issues through specific guidance on business drivers for Cloud; defining the Cloud vision and buying requirements criteria; assessing risk; and building the return on investment metrics and case for Cloud Computing. The book gives managers reliable and independent guidance that will help to support decisions and actions in this key operational area.

Cloud Computing is more than just a utility cost reduction exercise of your IT storage and computing assets through subscribing or purchasing to an on-demand, pay-as-you-go model. Cloud Computing is evolving into an ecosystem of services from storage, computing and network infrastructure to impacting the integration and application software to transform the business processes and market service models.

Verne Global, an innovative, UK-based developer of power conscious data centre campuses, today announced the availability of its colocation service from its 18-hectacre campus in Keflavik, Iceland. Verne Global's data centre campus is 100% carbon neutral, drawing commercial power from Iceland's dual-sourced renewable energy power grid and utilising Iceland's ambient temperatures to provide free cooling.

Datapipe, a leading provider of managed services and infrastructure for mission critical IT and cloud computing, will be one of the first customers to have a presence in the new data centre.

"The demand for high capacity, flexible and scalable data centre campuses has increased in parallel with the growing concern of rising cost and environmental impact of traditional data centres," said Jeff Monroe, CEO of Verne Global. "We have designed a flexible, dynamic solution that answers the need for both high capacity computing and cost management."

Guernsey States could outsource more says expert

More services provided by the States of Guernsey could be run by the private sector, a specialist in infrastructure investment has said.

Giles Frost was invited from the UK by Guernsey Institute of Directors to be a guest speaker.

He told 500 island business leaders more could be done to reduce the pressure on public finances.

"I'm talking about social services, health services, leisure services." Mr Frost said.