Industry news

  • 1 Aug 2008 12:00 AM | Anonymous
    Technology, outsourcing and services giant IBM is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create two delivery centres to power the much touted cloud-computing model it believes will be a driving force of future business.

    Good news is that the two new datacentres – one in Carolina, and the other in Tokyo – are being designed to be ultra efficient and will recycle or reuse parts of existing facilities. They will join existing cloud centres in Dublin, Beijing and Johannesburg.

    "Cloud computing is fundamentally about re-engineering the world's computing infrastructure, to enable game-changing – even life-changing – applications," said Willy Chiu, VP IBM High Performance On Demand Solutions. "To IBM, cloud computing is much more than the normal evolution of a datacentre."

    The news comes at the same time as Yahoo, together with chip maker Intel and hardware and services giant Hewlett Packard have announced a collaboration with three universities to develop a cloud computing testbed to help colleges and and vendors design, build and test cloud applications.

    The three companies plus the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany plan to build six datacentres to promote arrays of open-source collaborations on a global scale.

    This latter project is all very well – if a little late to the party – and it certainly reinforces cloud computing's traditional association with academia.

    But that is the point: more and companies now seem determined to adopt the term 'cloud computing' as a synonym for 'internet-based applications and on-demand services', to the general bafflement of the wider public (otherwise known as customers).

    As regular readers will know from this blog, software as a service (SaaS) vendors such as NetSuite, Salesforce.com and RightNow are serial offenders in this misappropriation of the term, and have been joined by Google and IBM.

    Meanwhile, the three-legged dog of Yahoo, plus traditional industry stalwarts HP and Intel clearly view 'cloud computing' as still being about the academic open source, peer-to-peer sharing of computing resources and processing power, which is the origin of the term.

    So the question remains as to why the industry has elected to use a vague, amorphous, enigmatic phrase to describe SaaS and on-demand applications – an area that is surely better described as 'Internet-based computing' or 'on-demand computing'. Since when have clouds been sexy?

    No amount of rewriting Wikipedia entries to claim that cloud computing and SaaS have always been synonymous will alter the fact that, for most of the general services-buying public, 'cloud computing' is a baffling and offputting term. Why obfuscate and mystify when the subject ought to be so easy for people to understand?

  • 31 Jul 2008 12:00 AM | Anonymous
    As the economy weakens, news reaches sourcingfocus.com of two very different approaches to the challenges. First, Transport for London (TfL) is reportedly embarking on a massive shake-up of its outsourcing deals, bringing some work back in house.

    The move may be yet another blow to embattled Fujitsu, which is currently dealing with the fallout of its severed relationship with the NHS National Programme for IT. Fujitsu, along with BT, CSC and others is one of TfL's main IT outsourcing partners.

    TfL intends to complete the review by the end of next month, and currently has 17 prime outsourcing suppliers – a number it intends to slash and replace with “a blend of in and out”.

    The organisation feels that it will have greater control over its intelligence assets by bringing them back in house.

    Meanwhile, insurance giant Norwich Union has announced that up to 500 back-office IT and financial admin jobs are to be culled as it outsources two operations, which are currently based in York, to partner firms in Essex and Scotland.

    Norwich Union Life CEO Mark Hodges said: "It is too early to give an indication of the likely number of redundancies for both of these partnerships and we understand that this causes uncertainty for staff.

    "Our priority will be to keep employees fully informed throughout this process and we will do everything we can to minimise the impact of this decision.” Wise words, as all too often enterprises demotivate staff by keeping the truth from them until the last minute, creating a culture of rumour, gossip and mistrust.

    Rather than being a short-term cost-cutting decision, in Hodge's estimation, Norwich Union says it is investing in future growth opportunities, including a greater focus on the Internet.

    One thing any seasoned observer of enterprise IT will tell you is that the larger and more bureaucratic the organisation, the more cyclical and seasonal their outsourcing strategies will be.

    Many such organisations go through cycles of farming work out, becoming a hostage to third-party terms, conditions, and prices, and then setting up in-house units to do the work at apparently lower cost while regaining control over quality. In the medium term those attractions wane, the unit is deemed not to be core to strategic objectives, and then the cycle begins again.

    The economic downturn will doubtless bring many such stories to light before the year is out.

  • 31 Jul 2008 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    Anglian Water has signed a two-year, multimillion-pound contract with Solution 1 for the management of its communications infrastructure.

    Solution 1 will work to develop a converged hosted IP platform including voice over IP and the infrastructure to support the two million calls that Anglian takes each year. The company hopes to improve service levels while increasing the efficiency of its customer management processes.

    Chris Boucher, IS director at Anglian Water, commented: “The challenges we face range from the supply of connectivity services to a large number of field based staff, to ensuring we have reliable telephony connections to over 1000 treatment installations".

  • 31 Jul 2008 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    Capgemini has confirmed that it will acquire Getronics PinkRoccade Business Application Services BV (BAS NV), a unit of Getronics, for €255 million.

    Getronics' owner, Royal KPN, said in February it plans to divest, in full or part, several of Getronics' businesses with combined annual sales of 800 million euros.

  • 31 Jul 2008 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    IBM has announced that it will acquire ILOG, the Paris-based software company, in a deal valued at $340 million.

    The company has announced plans to combine ILOG’s software with its business process management software and service oriented architecture technology. The deal is reported to be worth approximately €215 million, a 37 percent premium on ILOG’s Friday share price.

    Tom Rosamilia, General Manager at IBM WebSphere, commented: "Companies across all industries are looking for technologies to help them manage their processes with more flexibility so they can keep up with changing business conditions. ILOG's software allows businesses to more effectively manage and automate the decision making process, giving companies an opportunity to react with incredible speed and accuracy. IBM has partnered with ILOG for over a decade, and by adding ILOG's capabilities to IBM's software portfolio, this is a great combination to provide value to our clients".

  • 30 Jul 2008 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    Siemens has extended an existing agreement with T-Systems to operate its high-performance network in Germany and 22 countries in Northern and Eastern Europe for a further three years. The contract will be extended until September 2011 and is expected to be worth around two million Euros.

  • 30 Jul 2008 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    CAT Group, the worldwide provider of transport and logistics services, has awarded EDS a seven-year ITO contract to develop, integrate, deploy and support all of the company’s software applications.

    This contract builds upon an existing IT infrastructure agreement CAT Group awarded to EDS in 2005. Under that agreement, which includes network management and governance and continues through 2015, EDS continues to manage CAT Group’s entire IT infrastructure, which includes 2,000 work stations at 131 sites in 19 countries.

    Alejandro Forbes, CEO of the CAT Group, said: “With this new agreement, we are expecting a high level of IT cost optimization, valued at about $44 million over the next five years”.

  • 29 Jul 2008 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    Sparkassen Informatik’s subsidiary IZB and FinanzIT, both IT service providers for the German group of savings banks, have expanded their contract with T-Systems for telecommunications IT services until 2013. The deal is reported to be worth around three million euros.

    As part of the agreement, Sparkassen Informatik and FinanzIT are entering into a technology partnership with T-Systems, the aim of which is to develop a new IP network for voice and data. It is designed to replace the previous data network provided by T-Systems.

    The network will link together Sparkassen Informatik, FinanzIT and approximately 480 institutes of the Sparkassen organization in Germany. A total of 16,000 branches will access all the data and applications made available by the two IT service providers via the network for the Sparkassen organization.

  • 29 Jul 2008 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    The National Centre for Antarctic & Ocean Research (NCAOR), a research body dedicated to the survey and exploration of the seas, has enlisted TCS to undertake a comprehensive marine geophysical data acquisition program for the Antarctic region. The deal forms part of a national project to help understand the marine ecosystem and provide data to scientific communities to help them better understand global changes in weather and the environment.

    The contract, awarded on the behalf of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, will see TCS work to make the outputs of scientific models available through web interfaces. These interfaces will then be used by scientific organisations who can retrieve data for interpretation and develop appropriate modules for their own their fields of expertise.

    Rasik Ravindra, Director of NCAOR, commented: “This data is acquired through strenuous efforts by various scientific communities all over India. It is crucial to treasure this and to create an interface for researchers. I am sure TCS with its huge expertise and specially coming back from an experience of Tsunami Early Warning System for Ministry of Earth Sciences is the right partner for doing this work”.

  • 29 Jul 2008 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    New York City's Human Resources Administration (HRA), the US body charged with encouraging the social welfare of New Yorkers, has renewed a three-year document management contract with Affiliated Computer Services, the largest provider of BPO services in the US government sector.

    Under the agreement, valued at USD $17 million, ACS will collect HRA case documents from multiple points in New York City that are taken to a central location to be inventoried, scanned and indexed. After a rigorous quality control process, the documents are added to HRA's internal imaging system for use by its staff.

    "Since 2003, ACS has provided the HRA with outstanding service," said Michael Lavin, HRA's director of imaging systems and support services. "We value the commitment to quality that ACS has brought to the partnership in providing accurate and timely imaging work."

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