Industry news

Immix Cloud, the latest generation of Cloud-based IP monitoring solutions, is being announced to UK and European users at IFSEC 2011. Immix Cloud is an innovative new IP-based solution that allows security events to be remotely monitored from any location and makes user services available through mobile devices including iPhone, Android-based mobile phones and the latest tablet computers such as the Apple iPad.

Developed by SureView Systems, the leading provider of video-based automation platforms for the security alarm industry, Immix Cloud can be seen on a number of different stands throughout the show. It will be featured by Honeywell on stand E80 in Hall 4. According to Daniel Wan, UK Channel Marketing Leader for Honeywell Systems Group: “Immix Cloud provides our customers with a cost-effective way to monitor alarm events from diverse sources including video, audio, access control and building management systems. It reduces the cost of monitoring in a wide range of environments.”

Videcon PLC, a leading UK based distributor of CCTV products and services, will also be featuring Immix Cloud in Hall 5 on stand C50. The company will be demonstrating how SureView’s new Cloud-based remote monitoring solution provides the flexibility to monitor security events anywhere, customise service offerings and simplify IT deployments.

“We are pleased to have the Concept Pro VXH264 integrated with Immix Cloud from SureView Systems,” commented Andy Croston, Sales Director of Videcon. “Immix Cloud delivers the next generation of monitoring services for Commercial stations and Private Command Centres. It significantly reduces operational costs and enables an even wider range of organisations to benefit from remote monitoring.”

Amazon has released new details on the extent of the outage which knocked out, or slowed, its cloud computing platforms in recent days.

The company said on its Amazon Web Services Health Dashboard that services are now returned to normal, and that most user systems and data should be fully restored.

While the issue has been resolved, Amazon said that a small fraction its systems, some 0.07 per cent of its volumes stored in its Eastern US region "would not be fully recoverable."

"The vast majority of affected volumes have now been recovered," the company said.

"We're in the process of contacting a limited number of customers who have EBS volumes that have not yet recovered and will continue to work hard on restoring these remaining volumes."

The announcement comes as the company looks to move past a system outage, which had left many of its client web services slowed or inaccessible for a period of several days. Amazon said that the outage of its EC2 and EBS services in northern Virginia was now over.

The company also promised that it would be investigating the issue and releasing a detailed report on the cause of the outage.

Over the course of the outage, the company has taken criticism over its inability to connect with users and warn of possible repercussions from an outage.

Source: http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2046380/amazon-sheds-light-cloud-outage#ixzz1Kny4MbEv

Clothing retailer Arcadia Group has signed a deal with CA for an on-demand software service to support its IT and e-commerce projects.

The group, which owns the Topshop, Miss Selfridge, Burton, Topman, Wallis, Evans, Dorothy Perkins and Outfit brands, is using the CA Clarity Project & Portfolio Manager On-Demand service.

The service provides users with access to project and portfolio management systems, with the aim of delivering projects faster and in a consistent and predictable way.

The technology, said Arcadia, will act as a single platform for managing all IT and ecommerce projects across the firm's brands.

“We chose the on-demand version of CA Clarity PPM to achieve a quick return-on-investment," said Andrew Clarke, group IT director. "The cloud-based solution shortened the deployment time for us, whilst lowering outgoing costs. This is helping us to realise the benefits of the new solution, across the entire group’s IT and eCommerce projects."

Before implementing CA Clarity PPM, the IT department had to manage up to 50 IT and eCommerce projects, such as supply chain projects and new product developments, through a collection of legacy systems and spreadsheets.

This included a Notes-based timesheet system and various in-house built applications to control costs and resources.

This made it difficult and time-consuming for the IT team to control the cost and governance of each project. There was also a lack of real-time visibility into IT projects across the Arcadia Group, and an over-reliance on paper based reporting.

Clarke said the system will provide the firm with a centralised project management tool with increased visibility of projects across 2,000-plus stores, improve resource planning and head office reporting.

Two years ago, Debenhams deployed a similar CA project management platform in a bid to slash costs and reduce wasted resources on "unprofitable or ineffective projects".

Source: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/cloud-computing/3276382/topshop-owner-arcadia-adopts-cloud-based-project-management/

The government has appointed John Collington as chief procurement officer, handing him the task of promoting collaborative procurement across central government.

Collington will be responsible for centralising procurement in a bid to ensure that taxpayers receive the best value for money.

Collington previously worked as the head of procurement in the Cabinet Office's Efficiency and Reform Group.

The need for efficient procurement was highlighted in Sir Philip Green's Efficiency Review, released in October 2010, which found that the government had failed to make the most of its buying power and credit rating.

David Smith, commercial director at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), will act as Collington's deputy on top of his current duties.

Collington's elevation follows the appointment of nine Crown Representatives who will each oversee a specific area of procurement.

The Crown Representatives will seek to achieve the cost savings agreed through the renegotiation of contracts with key suppliers.

The government claims that the renegotiation of key contracts has saved it £800m since May 2010.

Source: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2045971/government-appoints-chief-procurement-officer#ixzz1KiD0pQna

The global market for cloud computing will grow from $40.7bn (£24.7bn) in 2011 to more than $241bn (£146bn) in 2020, according to a report from analyst firm Forrester called Sizing the Cloud.

These figures represent both public and private sectors of the cloud-computing market.

Interestingly, the report argues that the public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service model, pioneered by the likes of Amazon with its EC2 offering, will reach a peak of $5.9bn (£3.5bn) in global revenues by 2014, then enter a period of significant commoditisation, price deterioration, and margin pressure.

As a result, between 2014 and 2020, this market will decline, and revenues will stand at an estimated

Source: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2045974/cloud-market-total-gbp146bn-2020-forrester#ixzz1KiDMjSZI

The NHS has spent £9.7 million on IT contract legal advice, during a two year period when it attempted to renegotiate deals on its highly-troubled national IT programme.

The figures were revealed in a written submission from the Department of Health to the Public Accounts Committee. The PAC today published a report on reforms in the NHS.

In the financial year from 2009, the NHS spent £6.3 million on “legal consultancy advice”. During the first nine months of the following year, it spent a further £3.4 million. During those periods, the Department of Health was striving to renegotiate contracts with IT suppliers.

It was previously revealed that in the seven years to March 2009, the NHS spent a further £39 million on lawyers for the programme.

One of two lead suppliers on the programme, BT, delivers IT systems to NHS trusts in London and other parts of southern England. It saw its contract value cut marginally from £1.1 billion to £1 billion last year, in exchange for delivering systems to around half as many London trusts and cutting deployments elsewhere.

Meanwhile, complex discussions are ongoing with CSC, which has a £3.2 billion contract to deliver IT systems to northern and central England. Last week, CSC was dropped by a key NHS trust which said it did not have confidence in the supplier. This followed the Department of Health issuing it with a breach of contract notice in February, following repeatedly missed deadlines.

The NHS is also reportedly in protracted legal discussions with Fujitsu, which quit the programme in 2008 after it and the NHS failed to agree on the cost of localising systems. Fujitsu had had a £709 million contract for NHS systems in southern England. Work in those areas is now carried out by BT.

The Department of Health had not commented on the details of the legal expenditure at the time of writing.

Source: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/public-sector/3276377/nhs-spends-10m-on-it-contract-legal-advice/

Several days after Amazon.com's cloud outage knocked some high-profile Web sites offline, the company said its cloud service was largely back up and running. Now Amazon is trying to track down the root of the problem.

The outage partially disabled or knocked out popular websites including Quora, Foursquare and Reddit.

On Saturday, two days after Amazon suffered a failure in its Web hosting services , the company announced that it had fixed most of the problem. However, the latest update on Amazon's Service Health Dashboard noted that engineers are still working on some remaining issues with its EBS, or Elastic Block Storage .

At 10:35 p.m. ET on Sunday, Amazon reported, "We're in the process of contacting a limited number of customers who have EBS volumes that have not yet recovered and will continue to work hard on restoring these remaining volumes.

Users still having problems with their hosted Web sites should contact Amazon on their Web Services site. Users should select Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud in the "Services" field. And in the description field, they should list the instance and volume IDs and describe the issue they're experiencing.

Source: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/cloud-computing/3276189/amazon-investigates-after-cloud-nightmare/

Utility giant Centrica is taking advantage of onshore and offshore software testing skills through an £8m deal with Software Quality Systems (SQS).

The 12-month managed software testing contract will test business critical systems such as those being used in Centrica's smart metering programme.

The deal is a signal of the increasing importance of software testing to Centrica, the parent company of British Gas. Previously the firm contracted SQS on a project-by-project basis.

Centrica will gain access to testing resources locally and offshore. SQS has software testing resources in India and South Africa.

The need to get smart metering applications right has increased Centrica's software testing requirement. The billing systems related to smart metering will be complicated because of the requirement to allow consumers to manage when they use energy and bill them accurately.

Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2011/04/21/246511/Centrica-outsources-software-testing.htm

Greenpeace is lashing out at some of the world's largest technology firms over their datacentre practices.

The environmental watchdog group said in its 'Dirty Data Report' [PDF] that companies running large-scale cloud services are neglecting to adopt green energy practices and policies at the datacentre facilities.

The company pointed to vendors such as Facebook, Apple and Google as making poor choices in selecting green energy sources for their datacentre.

"Across the board, IT companies have thus far failed to commit to clean energy in the same way they are embracing energy efficiency, which is holding the sector back from being truly green," Greenpeace said in the report.

By failing to consider alternative energy sources when building facilities, the group argues that many vendors are driving up their carbon footprints and further damaging the environment.

Among Greenpeace's biggest complaints was the locations in which many firms are building their datacentre facilities. In particular, the group singled out Apple, Google and Facebook for their choices of venue.

All three firms have established datacentres in North Carolina, a region that Greenpeace has labelled as the 'Dirty Data Triangle.' The group said that the area in which the datacentres are located is particularly reliant on coal for generating electricity.

Source: http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2045667/greenpeace-criticise-cloud-providers-dirty-energy-practices#ixzz1KcPRXxNj

The global cloud computing market will grow from a $40.7 billion in 2011 to $241 billion in 2020, according to Forrester Research.

On the way to all of this growth are a few notable nuggets from the report.

* For starters, the infrastructure as a service market will peak at $5.9 billion in global revenue in 2014 and then commoditization, price pressure and falling margins kick in. In other words, early wins by Amazon Web Services and Rackspace won’t add up in the long run.

* Software as a service will be adopted by companies of all sizes. In 2011, SaaS will be a $21.2 billion market and grow to $92.8 billion in 2016. AT that point SaaS comes closer to saturation.

* BusinessProcess as a service will be notable, but face modest revenue.

* Virtualization will recede to the background as new technologies take over.

Source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/cloud-computing-market-241-billion-in-2020/47702