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Trustmarque in £43 mill management buyout

TrustmarqueYork-based Trustmarque has been bought out by its management to the tune of £43 million.

The deal was underwritten by Dunedin which is a UK mid-market buyout house.

Trustmarque has been in operation for over 25 years and it helps organisations license, deploy and manage Microsoft, VMware, and McAfee software.
It made £130 million for the year ended 31 August 2012 and it is hoped that Dunedin’s investment will enable Trustmarque to expand.

The company hires 180 people at three sites in York, Bracknell and Edinburgh and currently serves over 1,200 clients including RBS, Lloyds Banking Group, Sainsbury’s and Capita. Public sector clients include the NHS, Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Justice, HMRC, local authorities and NHS trusts throughout England, Scotland and Wales.

Trustmarque was the first Microsoft partner to achieve Gold licensing status and remains a top software and consulting services supplier to the UK Government.

The Sunday Times ranked it as number 54 in their 2013 league of the best small companies to work for in the UK and the company has also been shortlisted by the National Business Awards scheme.

Mark Ligertwood, partner at Dunedin said that Trustmarque esd s market-leader with a clearly positioned brand and an exceptional reputation within both the commercial and public sectors.

“The UK market for software and IT services is currently worth an estimated £40bn and is expected to grow at two percent to five percent to 2016,” Ligertwood said.

It appears the company’s management has a cunning plan to expand and it is a business plan that Dunedin thinks has legs.

Scott Haddow, CEO of Trustmarque said that Trustmarque has developed significantly over the last four years. His ambition is to cement our position as an independent end-to-end technology services provider and the trusted adviser of choice for blue chip and large government enterprises.

Trustmarque was previously owned by LDC which grew it from an IT reseller into a value-added provider of IT services, growing services-driven revenues to 33 per cent of turnover.

In 2011, Trustmarque bought Nimbus Technology Systems as part of a move to provide cloud-based services.

FCS Global aims at suicide prevention

Console LogoUS IP phone systems provider ShoreTel signed a deal with Irish independent communications company FCS Global to provide hardware for its suicide prevention and support charity, Console.

Console offers suicide bereavement and prevention services and resources around Ireland and the UK. All of its free services are delivered by fully qualified and accredited counsellors, psychotherapists and psychologists, to those who have been affected by suicide.

Paul Kelly, CEO and founder of Console said the charity relies heavily on the kindness and support of local communities and businesses.

Under the deal, FCS will set up ShoreTel unified communications systems to help Console to streamline operations and aid the further development of its centres and 24 hour helpline service in Ireland and the UK.

Console will be expanded throughout the UK and FCS Global to support its growth with the ShoreTel UC systems.

Using the technology new offices can be easily added by Console to the ShoreTel platform without the need for specialist technical knowledge and will ensure all the centres can continue to collaborate effectively as the charity grows.

UK reports online fraud increase

kcalmOnline fraud is on the increase, providing a windfall for security firms trying to pitch packages to cash strapped businesses.

The latest figures from the National Fraud Authority show that account takeover fraud rose by 53 percent compared with the previous year.

This means that those frauds where the criminal requires identity details accounted for almost two thirds of all frauds recorded by CIFAS in 2012.
More than 8.8 percent of UK adults were a victim of this fraud and those who lost cash tended to lose an average of £1,203 each.

Stephen Harrison, National Fraud Authority Chief Executive estimated that this year’s AFI has put the loss to the UK economy from fraud at £52 billion.

He said that private sector businesses suffer the highest levels of loss and can also suffer other impacts like reputational damage. Loss to smaller businesses can even put their future at risk.

Trusteer, which makes products for cybercrime prevention, said it has seen an increase in the number of Man in The Browser (MiTB) malware activity, and in the sophistication and techniques cybercriminals use to steal credentials and credit card data.

A Trusteer spokesperson said that as infection rates increase, account takeover fraud, and account fraud, is becoming a top threat for organisations.

This is not just a matter of providing companies with software or hardware to fix.

Companies need to come up with a holistic approach which encompasses endpoint security as well as clientless detection and conclusive event correlation is required.

This means that security resellers are having to create layered security covering PC and Macs, desktops and mobile, client and client-less solutions.

PCKeeper lets customers pick their own price

buckguardA software outfit called PCKeeper has come up with a novel way of flogging its product.

It’s not setting a sale price – instead letting the customer decide what they want to pay.

The company said that it is experimenting with the same idea which allows for musicians and artists to allow their fans to pay what they want for music or art.

It is a radical concept for software because companies usually fear not getting their development costs back.

In this case it took a team of nearly 150 people almost two years to create and support the program so they want to make their money back.

The software normally has a retail price of $39.99 but will be available to customers for as low as $1.00. The idea is being tested out between June and July and it is not clear if it is just a marketing gimmick or if the company really is serious about it as a long term option.

PCKeeper’s communications manager, Ilias Melikov, said that letting people choose their own price is an interesting way to open up the product to consumers who price shop and also build trust with those customers once they use the software and see just how useful it is.

Still, even if the idea is canned after a month it could create regular users.

Dell and Oracle cosy up

kissThe partnership between Dell and Oracle appears to be getting closer.

For a while now Dell has been packaging Oracle software and services with hardware, while Oracle optimised services for Dell’s products.

According to Sourcing Focus, the relationship is hotting up.

The two companies are starting to share customer support and engineering support services. Oracle is now listing Dell as a preferred x86 partner for deploying its software. At the same time, Dell highlighted Oracle as a preferred enterprise software provider for its hardware.

Oracle Co-President Mark Hurd described the shared relationship between the two IT giants as: “We test it together, we patch it together, we support it together.”
What is odd about the relationship is that the pair sometimes compete in different markets. Ironically, by working together, they hope to get a general competition advantage.

Dell has to come up with some new ideas as it tries to get back its market share after a downturn in its traditional PC markets.

It is not clear what Oracle’s advantage is, particularly as it has its own hardware business which is also not doing so well.

Hurd admitted that this more of a win for Dell and that this expanded alliance will enable Dell to “gain significant market share by delivering to its customers an integrated, optimized solution designed to deploy business critical applications”.

Ovum eggs on BYOD market

ovumResearch outfit Ovum is telling the world+dog that the bring your own device trend is here to stay.

One of the findings of Ovum’s 2013 multi-market bring-your-own-anything employee study indicates that the trend is not only just “here to stay” it is also going to increase.

Corporate BYOD activity by full-time employees has remained steady at almost 60 percent over the past two years.

Already global industry analysts warn business leaders to respond and adapt now to this change in employee behaviour, rather than being steamrollered by it, the report said.

Ovum said that nearly 70 percent of employees who own a smartphone or tablet choose to use it to access corporate data. The personal tablet market continues to grow, and with personal tablet ownership by FTEs rising from 28.4 per cent to 44.5 per cemt over the last 12 months, more businesses will see these devices on their networks.

The report said that this will happen whether the CIO wants it to or not. More than 67.8 percent of smartphone-owning employees bring their own smartphone to work, and 15.4 percent of these do so without the IT department’s knowledge and 20.9 percent do so in spite of an anti-BYOD policy.

Richard Absalom, consumer impact technology analyst at Ovum said that it was impossible to stand in the path of consumerised mobility.

“We believe businesses are better served by exploiting this behaviour to increase employee engagement and productivity, and promote the benefits of enterprise mobility,” he said.

Ovum’s research also depicts the rise of a “bring-your-own-application” trend.

While email and calendar remains the most commonly used application on both corporately provisioned and personally owned devices, the usage of new-generation cloud productivity applications, such as enterprise social networking, file sync and share and IM/VoIP, is growing fast.

What worries Ovum is that these types of apps are increasingly being sourced by employees themselves and not through managed corporate channels. A quarter of employees discovered their own enterprise social networking apps, while 22.1 percent of employees discovered their own file sync and 30.7 percent found their share apps and IM/VoIP apps.

If employees are sourcing their own applications to do their job, then IT is not delivering the right tools or a good enough service for employees, Absalom said.

 

The dangers of big corporate partners

Finding-Nemo-Shark-Wallpaper-HDSalesforce is writing a cheque for $2.5 billion to buy ExactTarget in a move which should be putting the frighteners on its marketing software partners such as Marketo.

Buying ExactTarget will push Salesforce deeply into marketing software which is a region it has so far looked to its partners to provide.

Salesforce owned several marketing-related technology outfits but these were mostly to put adverts on social media sites. But ExactTarget looks at multi-channel marketing automation, an area where Salesforce.com has generally relied on Marketo.

In the announcement Salesforce highlighted a Gartner report which predicted that chief marketing officers will spend more money on IT than CIOs by 2017.

Salesforce.com and ExactTarget’s products, when combined, will “create a world-class marketing platform across email, social, mobile and the web,” Salesforce.com said in a statement.

Salesforce is coy about the effect that such a move will have on its business partnerships, in fact it is hardly mentioning it at all.

However, the move might cause some alarm. When the economy is at a low ebb, bigger aggressive companies can pick up some of their partners quite cheaply.

Marketo has suddenly found that one of its closest partners has now become a rival. It is fairly likely that it will not be the first channel partner to find itself in such a situation.

It might be worth partners, who are dependent on multi-national, cash rich outfits, to pop around with their sales figures and customer lists and suggest that the bigger companies buy them out. Certainly it might give them some form of job security and direct the bigger company’s attention away from rivals before it is too late.

HP talks up the unsinkable Itanium

Der Untergang der TitanicWhile many in the industry have been writing off HP lately, the maker of expensive printer ink says that it is about to make a comeback, but has made Itanium  part of its cunning plan.

At the unveiling of Odyssey, a project ” to redefine the future of mission-critical computing”, HP said it wanted to transform the server market.

Senior Vice-President and General Manager, Business Critical Systems, HP, Martin Fink told All Africa that HP’s plan is more cunning than a distributed network of foxes wired up in a supercomputer of cunning.

HP has in its hands a roadmap which annex UNIX and x86 server architectures to bring industry-leading availability, increased performance, cure cancer and put everything in a single platform.

Fink said that these days organizations were challenged with increasingly tough service-level agreements and all sorts of terrible pressure to be efficient with their IT budgets.

HP reasons that in a perfect world they would have the availability and resilience of UNIX-based platforms along with the familiarity and cost-efficiency of x86.

So HP is coming up with a development roadmap includes ongoing innovations to HP Integrity servers, HP nonstop systems and the HP-UX and OpenVMS operating systems.

The roadmap also includes delivering blades with Intel Xeon processors for the HP Superdome 2 enclosure and the scalable c-Class blade enclosures , while fortifying Windows and Linux environments with innovations from HP-UX within the next two years, Fink said.

After HP released “DragonHawk,” its customers have been asking HP to expand the mission-critical experience that is delivered today with HP-UX on Integrity to an x86-based infrastructure.

He touted project Odyssey as something that HP partners would really want because it offered a “Intel’s continued innovation with a multigenerational Itanium processor roadmap”, combined with existing and future mission-critical capabilities of Intel Xeon processors, allow HP and Intel to provide customers with greater flexibility and choice.

Together with HP, he said that Intel would be able to give customers the ability to do mission-critical computing on their terms, with a broad range of operating systems and applications, he added with a straight face.

Microsoft cuts the price of Ultrabooks

msSoftware giant Microsoft has twigged that Intel’s dream of Ultrabooks is not proving that successful.

Redmond has been slashing the price of its Touch ultrabooks at the Microsoft Store with the Acer Aspire S7 losing about $300, falling to $1,299 from $1,649. .

There was nothing wrong with the Acer Aspire S7 and it was well reviewed, it is just that no one wants Ultrabooks as much as Intel told the world that they did and certainly not for $1,649.

Perhaps the key to the problem is still the spec. The $1,649 price tag strikes as a lot to pay for something with a 1.9GHz Intel Core i7-3517U processor. A laptop might be heavier but it does more and a lot faster.

CNet  found another one discounted by Vole was the Sony’s Vaio T Series 13 has been reduced to $999 from $1,299 with its 2GHz Core i7-3537U processor that model is a little faster.

And the lower-end of Ultrabook land 0 the Vaio T Series has been cut to $799 from $899 and HP’s Pavilion TouchSmart Sleekbook is now $599, reduced from $699.

To be fair it is not just Intel’s Ultrabook dream which has seen some cost cutting. Microsoft has also been reducing the price on some of its tablets. Some are as cheap as $399.

Dell could go down like Richard III

Battle_of_BosworthTin-box shifter Michael Dell has found himself in the middle of a three-way proxy war for control of his company and might go out like Richard III screaming for a horse and ending up under a carpark.

Dell hit the headlines by allying with Silver Lake in a bid to take his company private. Really, that should have been the end of matters. Dell owns a big chunk of company stock, he founded the company in the first place and it desperately needs a restructuring.

Shareholders should logically be pleased to see a return on their cash at all, as the value of the outfit is likely to get a lot worse before it gets better, if it gets better. For some reason they are not.

Instead we are seeing the various big shareholders ganging up to try and take control before Dell can get the company private.

The question is what they hope to gain. In the middle of a recession, where Dell’s traditional buyers are saving their pennies, the company is paralysed. The only part of the IT industry that is moving at all is the mobile sector and Dell is not a big player there. Dell is doing alright in enterprise.

Logically a company in Dell’s position should restructure, cut back to basics and survive on its cash reserves until things pick up.

This is the opposite of what shareholders want. They want the company to show continual growth so that the share price will increase. By going private, Dell is protected from the wrath of shareholders and can look to the longer term.

While all sides are talking about having the best interests of the company and shareholders at heart, it is fairly clear that the only one who really cares about Dell as an ongoing concern is Michael Dell himself.

Blackstone, Carl Icahn, and Silver Lake Partners all have ideas to take the company private. But their idea can only be to take over and flog off all the company assets and distribute the last of the cash.

This can be the only reason why they are swarming around Dell like flies.

Otherwise any observer who lifts the bonnet of Dell has to take a sharp intake of breath and admit that in the short term Dell is buggered. Its core business market is rotting and its quarterly sales in its consumer sector are sliding.

A management plan presented to the board last July expected $5.6 billion in operating income this year. That was later reduced to $3.7 billion, but is likely to be revised lower still.

Global shipments for PC makers declined 3.2 percent last year and are predicted to fall more than 10 percent in the current quarter. Dell has not really seen any benefits from the launch of Windows 8 or the Ultrabook.

This puts Dell’s board in a difficult position. So far they have supported Michael Dell but now they have to work out if offers from Blackstone and Icahn will lead to a better bid than the one from Michael Dell and Silver Lake.

They will have to look at the deal in terms of cash. They can’t take the perspective that it’s better for the company to go with Michael, they always have to say “the average shareholder will do better”.

The three rival offers are critically different. Dell and Silver Lake will buy out shareholders for $13.65 a share, valuing Dell at $24.4 billion. If the preliminary offers from Blackstone and Icahn do not firm up, this is the best shareholders can expect. Currently you can pick up a second hand Dell share for $14.50 so a lot of people will be out of pocket.

To make matters worse, few people will invest in Dell shares while there is a big argument about the outfit’s future. Corporate buyers thinking about getting in a few Dell boxes want to know if the company is going to be around in a few years.

Blackstone’s offer of more than $14.25 a share to all investors who want to cash out would mean that Dell is worth $25 billion.

Icahn, on the other hand, is offering to buy 58 percent of shares for $15 apiece.

At the moment, analysts say that Blackstone has the highest chance of success. That could cause Dell some major headaches. For a start it is likely that Michael Dell himself will be removed from the company.

There are rumours that Icahn submitted his proposal only to keep discussions going, because he thought Blackstone may not submit an offer. It is likely that he will walk away from the deal but wants to make the most of his billion dollar investment in the company. He will want a large special dividend before he ties up with a rival bid, probably Blackstone.

Michael Dell’s own involvement with Blackstone would seal it, but it does not seem to be playing out that way. Earlier this week the Blackstone deepthroats were telling the press that he would be fired if they had anything do do with it. Officially, though, Dell has said that he will “explore in good faith” the possibility of working with Blackstone or Icahn.

He claimed he would be like Switzerland in favouring a form of armed neutrality.

But Blackstone wants to asset strip Dell’s financial services unit, worth an estimated $5 billion, and has apparently asked ex HP chief Mark Hurd about running the company. Dell, who is always a little hands on, has good reasons why he would not want this to be the case.

Either way all this is going to get a lot messier and is going to take months to sort out. What the three factions have to realise is that Dell, the company,  could be killed off by their final Battle of Bosworth.

IT services market was poor last year

rubbish-tip1Beancounters at Ovum have officially ruled 2012 as bad for the IT services market.

Ed Thomas, Senior Analyst in the Ovum IT Services team said that 2012 was the worst for IT services contract activity since 2002.

He wrote that performance in the three months to the end of December 2012 fell well below the levels seen in the same period of 2011. This makes IT services contract activity the lowest than it has been for more than a decade.

In Ovum’s latest analysis, deals in the IT services market was only $20.8 billion, down 34 per cent on the same period of the previous year.

The number of deals fell 17 per cent in the same period and there was a notable lack of big deals. While the fourth quarter was slightly better than the beginning of the year, that really does not make things better across the year.

Thomas blamed the ongoing economic uncertainty afflicting key markets for IT services such as the US and Europe as a major factor behind the weak performance of the industry in 2012.

His research suggests that many enterprises remain wary of committing to major projects, with issues such as the Eurozone crisis having a particularly significant impact.

In addition, public sector activity has reduced as many governments come under pressure to cut public spending in the face of high debt levels, Thomas said.

Enterprises were just as bad, where the number of deals announced fell by 50 per cent. In healthcare contract volumes were down 39 percent and in the financial services market they fell 18 percent. The only industries in which contract activity was up on the previous year were telecommunications and technology sectors.

Europe was the leading market for private sector contract activity in 2012 but the number of contracts generated by European enterprises actually declined sharply during the year, falling 31 percent to $16.7 billion.

Private sector contracts in America slumped dramatically in 2011, rebounded in 2012, finishing the year up 48 percent at $10.5 billion.

This was mostly boosted by a couple of big contracts from Procter & Gamble and it is too early to tell whether or not this represents a significant shift in approach by enterprises in the region, Thomas said.

Raxton Data rebrands after stonking year

spamCloud based email security outfit Raxton Data, has rebranded itself after what it calls “an exceptional year”.

The company is now calling itself EveryCloud Technologies, we guess Raxton Data was a bit too formal as the name did not seem to have much to do with the company any more,

The company said that it now has more than 100 resellers and 50,000 end users with customers, ranging from small SMEs all the way up to global organisations.

Graham O’Reilly, EveryCloud CEO and Co-Founder claims that EveryCloud Technologies, is among the UK’s fastest growing cloud service providers.

He said that it is now scanning millions of emails every day thanks to having some good antispam software, O’Reilly said.

The name needed to change to reflect where the company is now and where it is going, he claimed.

David Thornton, Technical Manager from Triumph Technologies said that he used EveryCloud’s anti-spam system for around 50 of its customers and have been extremely pleased with its flexibility and accuracy at which it blocks spam.

EveryCloud Technologies was founded in 2009 by Matt Baker and Graham O’Reilly, who describe themselves as two British chaps tired of bad customer service in technology.

It provides cloud based services which allows businesses to security share files and protect against spam and virus attacks.

 

VMware needs luck as it sticks its head in the clouds

cloud (264 x 264)VMware has given up trying to wait for its partners to help it become an important name in the cloud space and has decided to do it itself.

Yesterday the outfit unveiled vCloud Hybrid Service to investors. Well we say unveiled we really mean that it told the world that was intending to set up a public cloud service. But it caught everyone on the hop because it was only a couple of months ago that VMware’s Pat Gelsinger sounded so dead set against the public cloud.

Speaking at the VMware’s Partner Exchange Conference in Las Vegas, Gelsinger said that VMware needed to own the corporate workload. He said that the company would lose if they end up in commodity public clouds.

With comments like that to suddenly come out and launch your own public cloud seems a little silly. However what Gelsinger appeared to be saying was that he did not want corporate data on other people’s public clouds.

“We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both. Own the corporate workload now and forever.”

But Gelsinger’s plans might be a little tricky to pull off.

When it comes to public cloud there is a lot of top notch competition including Amazon, IBM, and HP who don’t take too kindly to strangers in the market. To make matters worse VMware’s offering will not be around until at least the second quarter.

VMware has chucked a bit of money trying to get the idea of the ground. Former Savvis Cloud president, Bill Fathers, will run the vCloud and has said that the idea will get a level of investment appropriate to that priority and to capitalize on a $14 billion market opportunity.

One of the crucial differences about what VMware is offering is that it is the service “hybrid” so that enterprises should see it as part of the VMware’s packages. The software which the vCloud is based on is called Director. It uses an IaaS environment and lets workloads become managed either in the cloud or in the office in the same way.

But all this is being set up because VMware could not interest its partners in building something similar. VMware had a crack at offering similar products through its ISP partners. But these were a little spooked that vCloud implementation would commodise their products. There were mutterings from ISPs who did not want to pay VMware licensing costs when they had cheaper open source alternatives.

VMware has a job on its hands to prove to VMware Certified Professionals that the public cloud is an extension of the data centre while at the same time convincing them that there are some advantages over the “non-cloud” environments they use now.

The public cloud will be aimed at its existing customer base and sold through its existing VAR and SI channel.

However most of VMware’s channel partners don’t have the skills to help their I&O clients transition from static virtualisation to cloud. So somehow VMware is going to have to give its channel the consulting skills and hope they can bluster their way through conversations where real cloud is needed.
Either way the company has a long way to go before it can sit comfortably among other cloud players. It might just pull it off, but it will take a bit of time and a lot of luck.

Microsoft hands over Office 365 to resellers

msMicrosoft has lived up to its pledge made last summer by making cloud suite available through Open licensing from 1 March.

Resellers can bill customers directly for Office 365 eight months after the move was unveiled to applause at the vendor’s Worldwide Partner Conference  in 2012.

This mean that Office 365 will be available to partners on Open and Open Value licensing programmes from next month.

At the moment partners have to use a referral model for reselling Office 365 and get payments for what they sell, with Microsoft controlling billing.

But the new move will mean that resellers the chance to set their own margins and bill customers. It gives them the ability to control and bundle products.

This is important in cloud offerings where resellers show up and offer a one stop shop cloud operation.

It has been a long time coming. Some resellers were expecting to see the plan enacted by the end of the year particularly after Vole launched it with such a big fanfare.  Microsoft claims that the idea has a lot of support, so it is not clear why the plan was so delayed.

However Microsoft still might sail up the nasal passages of resellers by offering a different SKU which means that some customers may still be forced to bypass the partner on billing.  This could be confusing for many customers and resellers who might think they have a product that they don’t.

Sharp moves at the blunt end of financial disaster

calmaThere are some rubbing of paws in the Far East over Samsung’s odd move to invest in Sharp.

For ages the two have been rivals, so sudden moves to smoke a peace pipe is a bit like Apple and Microsoft saying that they had been mates all the time.

The move appears to mostly come from clever negotiating from Sharp which needs an alliance in flat-screen TVs and mobile phone handsets, but it also needs some cash badly.

Samsung appears happy to write a cheque for $111 million in exchange for a three per cent stake in the Osaka-based company. It is likely that it will see a return in its money by getting a stable supply channel of liquid-crystal display panels.

According to NPD DisplaySearch, Sharp has been a key supplier of 40-inch LCD panels to Samsung, shipping over 400,000 units per quarter as well as 200,000 units per quarter of 60-inch LCD panels.

A report into the deal said that Sharp started to ship 32-inch (LCD panels) to Samsung at the beginning of 2013.

This means that Samsung will be buying more than one million panels from Sharp and it does not want someone coming in and muscling in on its supply.

Samsung can concentrate on the development of the next-generation organic light-emitting diode displays (OLEDs), which it has yet to mass produce while keeping its foot in the door with a nice low-cost supply of LCD TV display panels from its new chum.

It also isolates Apple from its main panel supplier. Sharp is currently one of the top display panel suppliers for Apple as it produces displays for the iPhone at its Kameyama plant.

Sharp can’t be too choosy about where its money is coming from. It wanted to raise millions from Foxconn, last year. But the deal fell through because the companies could not agree on the stock price and because Foxconn wanted to tell Sharp what to do.

Even after the deal with Samsung signed, the company still needs more investment. There is talk that either Intel writing a cheque but that might stuff up Sharp’s agreement with Qualcomm to manufacture next-generation LCD panels for smartphones in return for cash investments from Qualcomm.
As it is Qualcomm is already giving Sharp a contract in return for a three per cent stake in the firm once the project is completed.