Author: Tamlin Magee

Canon snaps up IrisLink

Canon logoPrinting powerhouse Canon is bidding to take over all shares of scanning and document managing company I.R.I.S. Group SA, which runs irisLink.

There has been talk for some time over a potential takeover,but it has today officially entered a public takeover bid for all shares, warrants and stock options. The acceptance period runs from 6 February and ends 20 March 2013.

Offer price per share is EUR 44.50. Canon bought a 17 percent stake in the company in July 2009. According to an official statement, the deal will allow the two to “cooperate more closely” in developing technology – so it seems that IrisLink will still exist as it is but with Canon cracking the whip.

Iris president Pierre de Muelenaere said in a statement that Iris’ portfolio should complement Canon’s strategy nicely. The board of directors and management are unanimously supporting the bid so it looks like a sure thing. Sitting here in Louvain, Belgium, In a lengthy keynote, Muelenaere is highlighting the cloud and managed services, the latter which made the company become “more international” over 2012.

“Our customer doesn’t need a product anymore, they need a solution,” Muelenaere said.
Denis Hermesse, CFO, said that over the last year there has been a very difficult business background. He quoted a recent IMF release that revised the world economic outlook down again, particularly in the countries that do business with Iris. Customers need to “identify expense reduction” and that is the background over 2012.

Despite that, Hermesse pointed out that the company’s gross margin at EUR 61.4 million – revenue was EUR 100 million, and otherwise the company was stable over 2012. There has been a 12 percent increase with VARs and BPO, with Hermesse pointing out this is repeated growth. In the Canon segment, Iris increased the business by 15 percent. “We still have some cash,” Hermesse said, while Muelenaere added that over 2013 the company will be investing in growth initiatives, that 2012’s results were satisfactory, but he hopes 2013 will be better.

 

Box pushes, with force, into EMEA channel

boxfactoryEnterprise cloud and collaboration company Box is launching a channel partner programme packed with incentives and organised by industry veterans to boost growth in the UK and EMEA.

The Silicon Valley firm posted an impressive end of fiscal year in 2012 with its technology in roughly 150,000 enterprises and with about 15 million users, channel director Chris Penner told ChannelEye, along with over 17,000 developers actively building custom apps for the platform. Pre-partner programme, the company has been busy boosting its roster of seasoned executives and went on a poaching spree over a six month period, bringing on staff with experience at Salesforce, VMware, HP, NetApp, Cisco and more to make sure it gets the channel strategy right on the first try.

One such hire is David Quantrell, who joined Box in September 2012 to run Box’s channel strategy in EMEA. Prior to this role he was President, EMEA for McAfee, and also has experience at HP and Nortel.

Wayne Cook, another hire, was previously at McAfee and is now a VP for channel and alliances at Box.

Penner told us that for the poached staff, moving over to Box presented an opportunity “of a lifetime” in a company that is well positioned with proper venture backing, a tremendous install base, and $40 billion pre-IPO. “A lot of ingredients that don’t come along every day,” Penner said. “We are building a really fundamental industry leading channel”.

Box Partner Network will create an “ecosystem of strategic alliance, channel and platform partners” that will bring Box’s content into new markets and, it hopes, drive further lofty aims of expansion. In a press release, the company boasted that, although in relative infancy, the company already had tons of big business clients signed up, including EA, NBC, Nationwide, Discovery Communications, Sony Music, and Netflix.

Starting partners include Autodesk, AtTask, Fonality, Marketo, CollabNet, Clarizen, TIBCO, Tidemark, and Xero – while five new partners, CollabNet, Clarizen, Fonality, tibbr, and Tidemark, will be tasked with leveraging the Box Embed HTML5 framework introduced late last year.

50 resellers have been signed up on a global basis over the last four months, including big hitters such as Ingroam Micro.

Interested channel players should head here.

As for Box’s position in the tech industry, Penner is optimistic: he tells us that end users love the service for its collaboration tools and simplicity, while IT likes Box because they know exactly what technology is going to be on premises and can control and manage every level of content in a secure manner – which is not the case for consumer alternatives, Penner said.

 

Liberty mulls Virgin Media buy

rbransonVirgin has confirmed that it is in talks with American billionaire John Malone about a possible takeover of Virgin Media – that could lead to a bid within the week, threatening Rupert Murdoch’s leading BSkyB TV service.

A purchase will be a challenge to Rupert Murdoch’s monopoly on paid-for TV services in the UK with BSkyB. Liberty Media, a subsidiary of Liberty Global, owns a hefty chunk of cable TV in the United States, and has the financial clout to inject competition into the British market.

According to principal analyst at Ovum, Adrian Drury, said in the near term the UK will become a “slug fest” for the two global pay TV heavyweights – that is, John Malone and Rupert Murdoch. TV subscribers will not be the only segment up for grabs, as the action could also kick off a price war in fixed broadband and voice subscribers.

“Depending on how Malone might choose to leverage the Virgin Mobile asset,” Drury said, “it may also spill over in consumer mobile services”.

Malone’s involvement would bring business experience from cable operations in 13 major markets, Drury points out, as well as leverage across multiple territories with the major studios and sports federations. Liberty’s Horizon platform would also gain a foothold in the UK. However, Drury said competing with BSkyB will be “facing off against a jewel” – as it is one of the best run operations in the world, not to mention its technology platform strategy and exclusive content rights with HBO and contracts with Premiership football.

The UK is also an emerging territory for streaming content services, with the two big players being Netflix and Amazon’s Lovefilm. Both BSkyB and Virgin have been offering their own streaming packages, however, that has seen a battle between companies that offer streaming to getting the best licensing deals. As such, Ovum suggests, it will be a a test for Liberty’s vision of cable TV and web services.

“Also expect that there would be some collateral damage, potentially other UK telcos trying to solve their triple play pay-TV challenge, such as Talk Talk and BT,” Drury said.

Avnet brings FlexPod, Expresspod to EMEA

avnettsEnormous distributor Avnet has teamed up with both Cisco and NetApp to open up integration services based on FlexPod and ExpressPod architecture to resellers in EMEA.

FlexPod and ExpressPod are data centre design architectures built with virtualisation and the cloud in mind. The idea behind Avnet’s programme is to give partners access to these technologies on a basis that will let them roll out as fast as possible. Included is pre-sales support, single order capability, assembly and testing, and ship completion and tracking. Avnet’s Cisco, NetApp and VMware teams will offer additional support.

Avnet says that by partnering with three top market players it has landed itself in an advantageous position for the region.

The programme will be available in every EMEA country where Avnet has distie rights for Cisco and NetApp – which includes the UK & Ireland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark.

In a statement, Cisco’s EMEA director for data centre and virtualisation, Ed Baker, said that the opportunity presents resellers with a “great way to position new services and increase customer relevance”.

NetApp’s VP for partners and pathways EMEA, Thomas Ehrlich, said the potential for the technologies is “immense” because the flexibility of the architecture pays off for resellers and customers.

Dell EMEA pres, Aongus Hegarty, outlines company’s vision

AongusHegartyHaving delivered a keynote designed to outline Dell’s positive outlook in enterprise to a room full of press and analysts at a remodeled gas-works, the Westergasfabriek, on the edge of an Amsterdam park, Dell EMEA President Aongus Hegarty took some time out of his schedule to speak with ChannelEye, joined by Edmund English, Director, EMEA commercial marketing.

The latter  confirmed Dell is actively looking at ARM servers.

As CEO Michael Dell is rumoured to be funding taking the company off the market, with investment from Microsoft, it is hard not to see Dell in a transitional phase. Although Dell holds a strong presence in the enterprise already – the whispers at Tech Camp were about just if and when the company would dump its consumer division.

Hegarty said that from a business perspective, Dell has been going through significant change over the last three years. “We’ve been concentrating on enterprise,” he said. “We are at a significant stage in our transformation, very much linked to our customers deploying technologies”. English added that looking at the company’s market strategy, Dell recognises that there are “a lot of great things that brought us to where we are” and that the firm must not forget about them – and that it is adding capabilities rather than cutting them. It is, English emphasised, an “evolution”.

Channel players in particular will have noted Dell’s product portfolio swelling in hardware and in services, not to mention opening itself up to a partner network rather than dealing directly with the company. “Our company five years ago would have been predominantly direct,” English said. “Five years ago we changed and unlocked choice for our partners – because of that our channel business has grown strongly over a number of years.

“Dell is predominantly a commercial company,” Hegarty added. “About 15 percent in consumer and 85 percent in business to business”. With a lot of work around the enterprise, Dell has been building its portfolio in the full enterprise, including in networking, storage and servers.

It is clear from the company’s shopping spree in the enterprise space that Dell is keen to continue as an established player, adding intellectual property as it goes, including with acquisitions such as Quest, Wyse, Kace, and the others that now form Dell Software Group. “That said,” Hegarty pointed out, “we’ve been continuing to invest in our PCs and tablets” – in line with Windows 8 launching late 2012. It did, however, pull out of its brief flirtation in the smartphone space.

“We have continued to invest in the prosumer as well as the commercial side,” Hegarty said. “You see a lot of trends from the consumer space, features and functionalities, influencing, like in Bring Your Own Device – we are very focused with our commercial customers to enable that choice, to work with security elements and access to data”. For example, with Dell’s Latitude Ultrabook.

Although the Intel logo was plastered on Dell’s Tech Camp banners – a similar blue to Dell’s own logo – English confirmed to ChannelEye that the firm has been actively looking at ARM servers. Efficiencies in power are the talk of the day, and English said that Dell takes its lead from its customers. “That’s what we build into our portfolio,” he said. “We are seeing asks and interest, specifically in the hyperscale space”. That said – there have also been “tremendous” efficiency gains on x86 generation on generation. “We are looking at it, yes – have we done engineering and back end testing? Yes.

“We look at our total cost of ownership,” Hegarty said. “At the end of the day, it is about providing the most efficient technology for our customers”. English added that efficiency can span more than classic power efficiencies: “You’re also talking about staff, driving more automation into backend infrastructures, changing architectures, and thinks like that rather than just keeping the lights on”.

Aside from trends such as tablet usage and mobility in the commercial sector, for SMBs, more should be focusing on social media and the building trends that are happening organically and those that are technology led. “For small businesses,” Hegarty said, “they need to be aware – it’s one of the key mechanisms to connect in business, but also in getting feedback and listening to your customers”. Of ten small businesses Hegarty recently spoke to, at least half of them had no social media strategy or approach adopted in their business.

Considering the soothsaying from influential analyst house Gartner, which said in a recent report that the biggest hitters will have their own in-house social networks, this is an area where businesses cannot afford to be playing catch-up.

For trends in the enterprise, English said that convergence is increasing. “It’s a long time since a customer rang up and asked for a server,” he said. “What they’re looking for is a collaboration service, they want a prescripted solution, the fabric, the storage, the compute, and how you manage and orchestrate that – you’re seeing more conversations happening at a holistic level and an application level”.

Hegarty invited interested channel players to start a conversation with Dell. “What’s exciting for Dell’s channel partners is they’ve seen the portfolio of business expand and grow,” he said. Three or four years ago, partners particularly focused on servers, but the wider portfolio is open for business, and Dell is finding that those partners are investing in other capabilities as well. “Using the enterprise space as one example, the acquisitions that we’ve done – a lot of those companies had been doing business through channel partners, so that’s brought new partners into our network too – Dell uniquely has a full portfolio of technology, end to end, and it creates opportunity for partners.

“The best advice I can give to partners, is come talk to Dell,” Hegarty said.

What does the wider market look like to Dell, right now? Hegarty said that, of course, he couldn’t speak for the rest of the market – but for Dell, it is “very much focused on our customers”. Dell must – and is, Hegarty said – understand customer needs and requirements, as well as trends in the market place, whether it’s in a business environment or at home. The strategy Dell has been developing has been working, according to Hegarty, who cited some slides from Marius Haas earlier in the day – himself an ex HP man, that demonstrated it is “winning in that space”.

As for Dell’s competitors – Marius Haas, formerly a heavy hitter at HP and top ally with ousted chief exec Mark Hurd – led the company’s networking division towards serious success. HP itself has an aggressive channel partner program and is providing subsidies and loans to potential partners as well as buying back rival equipment and end-of-lifing it if it can’t be recycled.

How can Dell respond to such aggression from its top rivals? English told us that primarily, the message in the enterprise is total cost of ownership with storage. “I’m very keen to go and have a five year TCO conversation with anybody versus the competitors,” he said, before acknowledging that Dell had similar “tactical tools” for the channel – including where it buys back terabytes in storage. “But for me that is not going to be a primary vehicle of acquisition, I don’t want to press the price of labor, I want to have a holistic conversation”.

“That really reflects a reaction to the success we’re having with the end to end solutions,” Hegarty said. “I can point to the IDC data globally – we’ve been taking share from HP now six quarters in a role, with the launch of 12g technology. Nothing beats investing in R&D to innovate, and to improve the TCO. Different competitors will react in different, potentially kneejerk ways, to deal with that – but nothing beats innovation”.

 

Channel must be emission transparent or risk losing customers

earthcropIf big vendors and other large firms don’t become transparent about their energy usage and carbon emissions, they may start losing contracts with ecologically minded companies, according to sustainability data reporting site Ecodesk.

Ecodesk named CA Technologies, Eurostar, ISS, Compass Group, PepsiCo, Mitie, and GlaxoSmithkline as examples of companies that are now measuring and posting data on sustainability – thanks in part to mandatory legislation, as well as part of risk mnagement for investors, and CSR initiatives.

By doing this, not only are they more ecologically sound, they are also making cost savings. As a result, they are extending sustainability programs to the supply chain – where there are also ost savings to be made.

Ecodesk’s CEO, Robert Clarke, said in a statement that the channel is a big player in energy use and carbon emissions. When margins are consistently squeezed, it’s important to stand up and listen to customers – or risk losing contracts. “Any business that can measure and report will find its own cost benefits and be able to trade on progress to boost business relationships and viability,” Clarke said.

According to Ecodesk’s data, just half already have calculated or intend to calculate energy and carbon emissions for customers over the next 12 months. Although 17 percent pointed out this would not be a possibility for various reasons, such as company policy or privacy, the rest out of the 1,300 sample did not commit or weren’t sure where to go.

Brother sticks cash into marketing

broombroomBrigitte labels everything, even her labels. And her post-its. Reminiscent of the Fast Show’s office clown dipped in a large and sticky vat of social anxiety, Brigitte has turned her obsessive compulsive disorder into a way to cheer up the office.

 

 

 

Actually, printing company Brother UK found Brigitte somewhere in a £1.5 million marketing kitty, and it hopes her feverish habit will enourage companies to spend more on its labelling machines. Following a TV campaign last year, Brother UK boasted that label printer sales rose 52 percent.

There’s an opportunity to win a holiday to Mexico – by answering the question at the end of the video – as well as a concerted effort to build online advertising and social media engagement, Brother says.

“Our intention is to shake up the labeling market with innovative and surprising marketing activity that clearly communicates product benefits, but with a sense of humour,” James Lawton-Hill, head of marketing, said.

YouTube user Peepingbotham said: “Keep making clips using attractive women and I’ll (as well as lots of other people) will keep watching, and maybe even even buy a label printer. ATTRACTIVE women, though. Not the one with the tattoos.”

Another added: “She seems very immature to be in management, but very cute, quite like to have seen a full length shot of her, I assume she has OCD, nevertheless adorable!”

A spokesperson for Brother UK told ChannelEye that the video, concept, script and strategy were put together by Manchester-based Code Computerlove, while the film was produced and directed by Chief Productions. “We’ve had a great response to the video so far and a large number of entrants to the competition,” the spokesperson said.

 

Dell: we’re serious about enterprise

haas330Dell CEO Michael Dell, so the rumours go, notoriously hates his company being referred to as a box-shifter.

While speculation about him personally taking the company off the market to exert more control increases, European bigwigs here at Dell’s Technology Camp, Amsterdam, took to the stage promising a packed room of analysts and reporters that Dell is on an aggressive push into enterprise, but that it is very much established there already.

Dell believes it will find opportunity in a world plagued with recession, and heavy hitters such as Marius Haas, president for Dell Enterprise Solutions, are fighting the company’s corner.

Opening the presentation was Aongus Hegarty, president, Dell EMEA. He insisted that Dell’s position is as an established software company, and that its many recent acquisitions – recently herded into one umbrella group as Dell Software, are paying off. Recurring themes from all the speakers were the company’s broad intellectual property and a vast stockpile of patents, swelling with each acquisition.

Crucially, Aongus pointed out that Dell is unique to the competition. Showing a slide that presented the company in a very favourable light within the enterprise, his statement was backed up by HP veteran Marius Haas. Haas said that over the last 10 or so years, people have been mostly thinking about performance and value – but the trend has shifted onto how also to provide operational efficiency across the board.

Haas pointed out that systems can be expensive to maintain, and flagged the Itanium as an example. Although these systems can provide some operational efficiencies, costs are there because they don’t provide the full package, according to Haas. Even with cheaper Chinese vendors (naming no names), though capital costs may be at bargain prices, operational costs can be higher because there are other factors to think in – and they still must be maintained. This is where Dell differs, he said.

Scalability is another key point. Being able to deliver services from the SMBs to enterprise level means more opportunity and flexibility. Haas mentioned an initiative by the British government to store all data from every study in a digital format: this leads on to conversations from high computational requirements through to what is possible with tape storage, or the cheapest options to protect and keep that data.

Although there has been a slow down in business spending, Dell fully expects the second half of this year to pick up. We will have to wait and see. What is clear, is that Dell is serious about further entrenching its brand as an enterprise company and its execs were quite convincing. Can a further shift away from shaky consumer territory be on the cards?

Triple dip recession threat leaves channel unbothered

gosborneAccording to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the British economy shrank 0.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, reflecting wider economic woes in the Eurozone and further afield.

The figures were lower than expected for the last three months of 2012 and have sparked fears that, if the economy does not pick up, the UK will enter an unprecedented ‘triple dip recession’ – although arguably, Britain never left the recession at all. Chancellor George Osborne has warned that tough times still lie ahead for the country, but shirked advice from the International Monetary Fund that he and the Coalition should ease up on the policy of austerity.

On the GDP figures, Osborne said: “We have a reminder today that Britain faces a very difficult economic situation”.

The figures serve as a “reminder that last year was particularly difficult” and that the country faces problems at home “because of the debts built up over many years and problems abroad with the Eurozone, where we export most of our products, in recession”. The opposition accused Osborne and Prime Minister David Cameron of being “asleep at the wheel”, although the macroeconomic environment is unrelentingly difficult and both Labour and Conservatives differ on many minutae of policy – with the wider climate beyond their control.

GDP, meanwhile, was flat compared to the same time last year. Production output decreased by 1.8 percent for the quarter, negating a 0.7 percent increase between the second and third quarters. Service industry output was flat from Q3 into Q4, although that followed a 1.2 percent boost between Q2 and Q3 2012.

Britain enjoyed steady GDP growth from 2000 right up until the world markets crashed in 2008, and according to the ONS, the decline of economic conditions in 2008 and up until now has had a significant effect on construction and production – though the service sector wasn’t hit as hard, and is now slowly returning to 2008 levels.

In October last year, channel analyst house Canalys’ CEO, Steve Brazier, said that, despite the difficult economic climate, there is still opportunity in the channel. Although growth was not exactly meteoric, Brazier said that by carefully steering the ship, channel players could weather the storm, although the market will be tough.

 

Senior analyst at Canalys, Rachel Brindley, offered some thoughts to ChannelEye on just what channel players can do to push through the crisis. She tells us the situation isn’t exactly all doom and gloom.

“Some partners will struggle if this economy goes into a triple dip recession,” Brindley said, “but there is a chance that it could happen. That being said, a lot are well placed – those who focus on customer service, keeping existing customers very close, growing their services business an diversifying their portfolio into things like managed services and data centres, will rise to the difficult times we’ve been going through”.

“Generally,” Brindley said, “those that focus on their customers, and diversify their business away from traditional hardware and box shifting will come through OK, it will come down to careful planning and taking opportunities in spaces like the data centre and looking at what’s going on in the networking space”.

Emerging markets open up to increased data centre investment

datacentrebatteriesAccording to a report from Tariff Consultancy Ltd, which focuses on data centre development in 11 emerging markets, Russia and Turkey are way ahead of the pack.

TCL looked at Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and the Ukraine. Of these, the four largest are Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and Bulgaria respectively, though in the group, Russia by itself is expected to account for half of all data centre floor space by the end of the year.

Generally speaking, the size of the data centres are relatively small, TCL noted. In the 11 regions, the average size was just over 800 square markets, which is a great deal less than in established markets. The largest facility has up to 10,000 square metres of raised floor space. However, over the next five years, the total space should rise to 143,000 square metres, up from 109,000 at present – or a 30 percent increase going into 2018.

Pricing will also increase, with the average rack space rental increasing 10 percent up to 2018. The most expensive pricing is in the Russian market.

Trends outlined in the report mirror a transformation in the regions which are seeing more and more development and investment, both from foreign investors and by government, with a view to boost economic growth in the countries. This could also, of course, prove a boon to channel players looking for new markets to open up in. Ultimately, TCL concludes, the development of data centre space in these emerging markets proves high spec housing and hosting is no longer exclusive to established markets.

 

 

 

ONS data shows low retail growth for Xmas 2012

bromleyhsUK retail sales grew 0.3 percent in December, the Office for National Statistics has revealed, which is the lowest rise on record since 1998.

There was an upward tick in retail from August 2011, however, in December 2012 the growth was lower than expected. The quantity of goods grew 0.3 percent from the same time last year, while overall amounts spent was estimated to have grown 0.7 percent.

Except for December 2010, when retail was severely affected by bad weather, December 2012 was the lowest growth since 1998, which was at -0.4 percent. Comparing the month with November 2012, both quantity bought and amount spent dropped by 0.1 percent.

Online sales were 1.2 percent higher compared with December 2011, but compared with November, the ONS says the proportion of web sales fell at a slower rate than in previous years – which is seasonally unusual. Retailers told the ONS that online shoppers helped with overall sales and made up a larger proportion of sales in December than expected.

According to data from Experian, December 2012 was the busiest Christmas ever for online retailers, with plenty of consumers going online on Boxing Day and Christmas to spend festive cash and vouchers. There was a 30 percent growth in visits since last year.

Year on year growth from non-store retailing and non-food stores was cancelled out by large drops in spending at food stores and petrol stations. Overall, the estimated weekly spend in all retail was £8.5 billion for the month, compared to £8.4 billion in December 2011.

 

Ovum: the cloud is unstoppable

clouds3Analyst house Ovum has released a report that forecasts trends to watch in the cloud for 2013 which predicts the industry shows no signs of slowing down.

According to senior analyst Laurent Lachal, cloud computing will evolve to tackle two challenges it has faced so far, namely reducing implementation costs and boosting innovation. Vendors and enterprises face some problems with successfully building both private and public clouds, but Lachal insists they will “make it work” in 2013 – on their own and as part of increasingly complex ecosystems.

Public, private, and hybrid clouds are building momentum, according to Lachal, and increasingly approaching enterprise grade class, but Ovum believes it is “early days” for both vendors and enterprises. We can expect the cloud to begin reaching its maturity in 2013, however, it will take another five years before this is complete, according to Ovum.

Ovum believes that in 2013, cloud computing will begin to form its own ecosystem. Rather than being viewed as a single platform as part of a larger infrastructure, public clouds will be seen as a central ecosystem hub both for cloud service providers and consumers.

“They offer a new way to accelerate participation in the rapidly evolving social networking and mobile ecosystems of the internet age,” Lachal said. “Some industry sectores are benefiting from the data centre as a hub, an increasingly cloud computing-centric ecosystem of partners that assembles in a key location or data centre such as around financial exchanges, web and online services, or media content”.

Data itself will drive further adoption of the cloud. As cloud services along with the apps that run on it generate data, cloud services and applications are needed to make sense of it, Ovum said. This means that cloud will evolve in line with other upcoming industry trends such as machine to machine communication, smart cities initiatives, the consumerisation of IT, open government data, and big data.

Ovum notes that the market is currently focused on big data in particular, however, the group thinks that from this year onwards there’s going to be an interest in the shift from vendors and enterprises to turn data into a manageable resource – something they can make money from. The start, Ovum believes, will be data abstraction, sharing, and valuation.

HMV pooch put down, Blockbuster busted

nippergonerHMV’s pooch has been put down. Staring into a rifle rather than a gramophone, Nipper’s one of the latest goners in the struggling high street. The question is just why exactly he and the chain have taken this long to croak.

His Master’s Voice had been shouting – with a sickly sore throat – for quite some time about how it is still relevant. HMV tried to launch a digital on-demand service, it committed more of its shelf space to electronics, and attempted to lift itself out of an inevitable quagmire. All the nostalgia is fair enough considering the brand’s longstanding legacy (though this Telegraph article makes a compelling case otherwise) – what doesn’t make sense is the illogical idea that Britain’s high street is integral to its national character or even its larger economy. Britain went through the luddite movement once already. Haven’t we learned our lesson? Once the technology is out there, you can’t turn back the clock, and trying to do so is understandable, but stupid.

Shopping online makes sense. This is why it is so successful. Given the choice between getting on a bus, standing in a queue, paying more, and with a limited selection – compared to one click ordering in under a minute, cheap, for exactly what you want or need – is it any surprise the consumer has largely chosen the web? It is possible that a retailer will figure out a hybrid model at some point in the future, and bargain or pound shops are unlikely to have many problems in a recession, but for the sort of commodities that don’t need to be tried on, the internet is a better option.

Any sympathies in wake of the bust must be directed toward the thousands of staff that lost their jobs because management refused to innovate in an age where taking risks and doing so is the  only way to succeed. Consistently playing catch-up, and thoroughly outpaced, it is a miracle HMV managed to hold on as long as it did. As for the unfortunate staff: let the demise of HMV, and all the others, work as a warning that in a permanently connected society it’s now nearly impossible to rest on your laurels and run a successful operation. HMV, of course, is only one of the most recent. Jessops (which previously shared the same chief executive as HMV’s last) was another casualty, before it, Comet, and before that, more. It has just been announced that Blockbuster will go into administration – South Park aired an episode about the inevitability of this outcome in October 2012.

Britain’s high street hasn’t been about some vague and nostalgic notion of community for a long time. Its steady transformation from local merchants and butchers to identikit hubs of big brand shops, that look the same in every British suburb, was complete years ago.

Adam Smith described Britain as a nation of shopkeepers, and that – first published in 1776 – is still true today. But it is something that must change. The high street’s death rattle has only just begun. An economy committed to hiring people to sell products – let alone barely producing –  is bound to fail, and we can only expect more casualties to come.

According to some critics, the blame is solely in the hands of management. Speaking with ChannelEye, Luke Ireland, business strategy adviser and non-executive director, said: “It is no surprise that we see three more major retailers succumb to the power of the internet.

“Don’t blame tax avoidance or government policy blame the management for not embracing the internet.

“It’s not going away and unless you fundamentally build it into everything you do your business will fail. I feel for the staff but if you work for a retail business which ignores the internet I’d look for another job.”