Author: Nick Farrell

Financial services offer rubbish security

BouncerFoxFeatureKaspersky Lab and B2B International have worked out that a third of financial services don’t offer customers a secure channel for all their online payments.

This is despite the fact that 62 percent of these organisations have noticed a significant rise in their customers making financial transactions online, and 50 per cent believe online financial fraud is increasing.

The survey found that many banks and payment companies are struggling to fully protect themselves and their customers from financial fraud at a time when customers are using an ever-wider range of devices to conduct a growing number of financial transactions online.

Two-thirds say that customers are increasingly using different devices to make online payments, yet just half have implemented two-factor authentication and only a half  have introduced a specialised, real-time anti-fraud solution.  This is despite the fact that 22 percent believe this is the most effective form of protection available.About 42 percent extend such a solution to customer devices and only 67 per cent implement a secure connection for all online payments.

About half admit that they are only mitigating risk rather than removing it altogether and 29 percent say it is cheaper to deal with online financial fraud incidents as they arise rather than to try to prevent them from happening.

Kirill Slavin, general manager UK and Ireland, Kaspersky Lab said that the study shows that banks and payment organisations are finding it difficult to manage online financial fraud in today’s connected, omni-channel consumer landscape.

“About 38 percent of the organisations we spoke to admit that it is increasingly difficult to tell whether a transaction is fraudulent or genuine, with a worrying one in three opting for a ‘we’ll deal with it as it happens’ approach to fraud protection,” he said.

“If you consider that our own research uncovered 22.9 million financial malware attacks in 2014, targeting 2.7 million customers worldwide, it is clear that dealing with each incident individually is not a viable, long-term option. Customers deserve better and so do the financial services,” Slavin said.

The study found that general Internet-security software solutions are not widely regarded as an effective method for preventing the increasingly well-disguised phishing and malware attacks that can lead to financial fraud. Less than ten percent of respondents favoured this option.

The IT Security Risks Survey 2015, conducted by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International, involved more than 5,000 company representatives, including 131 banks’ and payment services’ representatives, from 26 countries.

[That’s enough percents, Nick. Ed.]

EMC staff “making stuff up” about Dell sale

pinocchioA furious EMC president of global sales Bill Scannell told his sales teams to stop making stuff up about the company’s coming merger with Dell.

According to Channelnomics  Scannell told his staff not to “veer from the script” after the $67 billion acquisition by Dell was announced earlier this month. He slammed some of his staff for saying the wrong thing to customers.

He said that he had seen a couple of things happening in the field where people are veering from the script and kind of making things up.

“That’s not healthy, that’s not going to allow us to make this a painless and very successful merger… Understand what you can and can’t say now prior to the closing, realising this could be another six to nine months before we get the regulatory approvals and the shareholders’ sign-off to do this merger.”

Scannell told his staff to focus on quarterly business and exceeding customers’ expectations. They needed to sure they understand what we’ve said publicly about this acquisition and that it is all is going to be great.

If the deal goes ahead, EMC will go private but VMware – in which it owns an 80 per cent stake – will remain a publicly listed company.  This means that EMC will not have to worry about shipping products at the end of the quarter to make the quarterly revenue numbers.

This is going to have huge impact on savings from inventory with EMC, Scannell said.

Resellers minimum wage shame

shut-up-and-take-my-moneyTwo PC retailers who were named and shamed by the Government for not paying the minimum wage have been fighting back.

We Love Laptops, and Printer Cartridge Supplies made a list of 115 UK companies which failed to pay their staff the minimum wage.

Business minister Nick Boles said: “Employers that fail to pay the minimum wage hurt the living standards of the lowest paid and their families.”

We Love Laptops provides laptop repair services to businesses, schools and individuals and its website claims to work closely with the maker of expensive printer ink HP. Apparently it did not pay £1,079.07 to three workers.

We Love Laptops’ made a statement that the problem was they took someone from the Job Centre who was supposed to be training. The worker then said he was an employee and reported the company to HMRC for not paying him.

The statement did not mention the other two employees

Printer Cartridge Solutions is an online printer and consumables retailer and the government claims it failed to pay £1,096.19 to one worker.

The company said that it was an admin error with a local college concerning an apprentice they had taken on.

 

The “master shopper” has evolved says John Lewis

evolutionThe third annual John Lewis Retail Report has discovered that a new ‘master shopper’ has emerged to take advantage of multichannel retail.

According to the report, this ‘master shopper’ has learned to combine channels and devices in order to create their own optimal shopping experience.

As the report said that using all these options creating a more flexible journey. Shopping today is less about “I need it now” and more about “I need it how, when and where I want.

The report suggests that stores are still important, but fulfil a function which, according to the report, is increasingly linked to leisure time.

John Lewis has noticed that services such as Beauty and spa treatments in its stores are getting a lot of attention.

But the growing use of mobile and multichannel services like click and collect have created a new landscape for retail in which customers switch between devices and channels – online and offline – with ease, the report said.

The proportion of traffic to the John Lewis website from mobiles increased to 60 per cent in the last twelve months and mobile revenue grew by 68 per cent.

The retailer predicts that we’re yet to reach peak usage.

Two thirds of John Lewis customers use both physical shops and online channels and the number who bought from both channels increased by 9 per cent over the past 12 months.

Almost 20 per cent of customers buying a computer have more than ten interactions during a buying journey.

An average of three of those interactions involve online research on John Lewis or on other websites.

Facebook is the most popular social channel for John Lewis, though it uses different channels for different reasons.

What all this means is that multichannel retailers like John Lewis need to realise the number of channels and influences that affect the customer’s purchase and make this process as easy as possible.

With the number of channels used by these ‘master shoppers, it becomes more important for retailers to have a presence on as many as possible.

HP gets off of its public cloud

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudThe maker of expensive printer ink, HP is calling it quits on its public cloud offering.

The Helion Public Cloud will be abandoned next year as the vendor is more interested in private cloud products and rather scared of its chums Microsoft and Amazon.

HP has been denying that it will close Helion for six months, but the signs were there. In April, HP executive Bill Hilf said that HP no longer saw public cloud as a priority and that it made “no sense” for HP to go head to head with the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

He backtracked on this statement and said that HP would continue running Helion which operates  one of the largest OpenStack-based public clouds. Writing in his bog, Hilf confirmed what he denied six months ago and that Helion Public Cloud is doomed.

Hilf said HP has made the decision to “double down on our private and managed cloud capabilities” and confirmed that HP will “sunset” Helion Public Cloud on 31 January 2016.

Public cloud remains relevant to HP as part of its hybrid cloud strategy, but the vendor will now work with multiple partners such as Amazon to satisfy its customers’ public cloud needs.

“In order to deliver on this demand with best-of-breed public cloud offerings, we will move to a strategic, multiple partner-based model for public cloud capabilities, as a component of how we deliver these hybrid cloud solutions to enterprise customers,” Hilf said.

“Therefore, we will sunset our HP Helion Public Cloud offering on 31 January 2016.”

HP has been getting closer to Amazon of late as part of its hybrid delivery with HP Helion Eucalyptus. It has also worked with Microsoft to support Office 365 and Azure, he added.

“We also support our PaaS customers wherever they want to run our Cloud Foundry platform – in their own private clouds, in our managed cloud, or in a large-scale public cloud such as AWS or Azure,” Hilf said.

HP invested more than $1bn in its cloud business over two years when it unveiled its Helion range of OpenStack-based cloud products and services last May so it looks half that money was lost.

Microsoft thinks it knows what businesses really really want

surface-rtSoftware king of the world Microsoft has been asking its enterprise customers how it can improve the adoption of Surface tablets and Windows 10.

Writing in its Bog, Vole said that it had been chatting to customers who made large global footprints and discovered that the service, management and support options were pinching.

“Many told us they wanted to buy Surface from one partner, in one transaction, and have devices deployed all over the world with a single support and warranty SLA,” the blog says.

This is apparently the reason why Vole announced that Dell and HP will now resell Surface tablets and bring their enterprise-grade support offerings to the devices.

Microsoft has added two new additions to the Surface Enterprise Initiative to speed the adoption of Surface tablets and Windows 10.

Starting at the beginning of 2016, Vole will bring in a new “Microsoft Complete for Enterprise” warranty. This has four elements that the firm says its larger enterprise customers have asked for including the ability to pool warranty claims by company versus individual devices.

Microsoft will allow warranty claims against non-bootable devices. It will bring in rapid replace processing and an on-boarding centre to ensure a premium within the first 30 days.

Vole will assist IT staff to get setup with warranty and support processes as well as provide online training for their employees to get productive as fast as possible.

In addition to this there is the Business Device Trade-In Program.

“Many customers have told us that they want to upgrade to Surface and Windows 10, but have invested in devices and need to maximise the value they receive from those assets,” the blog said.

“With the Business Device Trade-in Program we make it simple. This is different from other trade-in offers in that it is a permanent program for business customers, rather than a limited time promotion.”

With 24 hour quotes, prepaid shipping labels and secure data wipe, business customers can trade their used business laptops, tablets, and phones for credit towards the purchase of new Surface devices.

This offer will be available in the coming weeks to business customers in the US, Canada, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Soon it will be rolled out to Australia, France, Germany and the UK.

VIP offers smaller resellers kit to sell

2c72b03VIP Computers is offering indie PC retailers sale or return gaming packs in a bid to help out the smaller resellers.

The packs include a variety of goods from VIP’s key PC gaming vendors and marketing assets, will be sent out next week.

Each pack has a trade price value of £2,500 and are being sent out on a sale or return basis. To get one you have to be a member of the VIP Club which is the VIP’s programme for independent PC retailers.

In the kit are five £99 Razer Blackwidow Chroma gaming keyboards and Deathadder and Naga mice.

The deal gives the independants some free stock to have a crack at flogging in the run up to Christmas.  It helps solve the retailers high stock cost problems, which prevents them from buying high-ticket items or ones they don’t think will sell.

The Indies don’t need to pay the invoice until January 2016, at which point they can pay the invoice or return the goods – whatever they haven’t sold can sent back to VIP.

More than 100 resellers have already signed up to receive a pack.

 

Western Digital to buy SanDisk

westerndigitalWestern Digital is almost certain to buy the memory chipmaker SanDisk as part of the consolidation of the chip industry.

Word on the street is that the pair are in “advanced talks” which is business speak for working out who gets access to the executive gym and inherits the CEO’s drinks collection. A serious announcement is expected later in the week.

Western Digital has seen off other rivals for SanDisk, which has a market capitalisation of $14.6 billion, the people said.

The sector has been consolidating to cope with demand for cheaper chips and new products, as well a driver from technology companies to consolidate suppliers.

Any deal with SanDisk will require a sign off from Toshiba. SanDisk uses Toshiba’s foundries to make its chips and the two have an important intellectual property-sharing joint venture.

Analysts have said Toshiba is more likely to accept Western Digital as a buyer for SanDisk than Micron, a rival memory chip maker.

Western Digital, which has a market capital of about $22 billion, is also expected to receive a $4-billion cash infusion from China’s state-backed Tsinghua Holdings Co  if the deal passes regulatory scrutiny in the United States.

SanDisk, which is scheduled to report quarterly results on Wednesday, has grappled with falling prices in the flash memory market and miserable inventory levels.

EU gives US three months to clean up privacy act

cia-cleanerEuropean privacy regulators have given the European Commission and United States three months to come up with a new privacy system enabling them to shuffle data across the Atlantic.

The highest EU court struck down the Safe Harbour rules used by over 4,000 firms to transfer personal data to the United States.

Under EU data protection law, companies cannot transfer EU citizens’ personal data to countries outside the EU deemed to have insufficient privacy safeguards.

The court decided that the US with its history of spying on the EU and court orders demanding its citizens hand over European data was not safe.

The EU watchdogs issued a statement over the weekend saying that: “If by the end of January 2016, no appropriate solution is found with the U.S. authorities and depending on the assessment of the transfer tools by the Working Party, EU data protection authorities are committed to take all necessary and appropriate actions, which may include coordinated enforcement actions.”

However it is a bit tricky. The Commission and the United States have been in talks for two years to reform Safe Harbour after Edward Snowden revealed the existence of mass US government surveillance programs.

Talks have been hampered by the difficulty of extracting sufficient guarantees by the fact that the US believes that it rules the world and can do what it likes.

The regulators said in their statement the EU and the United States should negotiate an “intergovernmental agreement” providing stronger privacy guarantees to EU citizens, including oversight on government access to data and legal redress mechanisms.

Multinationals can set up internal privacy rules which have to be approved by regulators to transfer data to the United States, known as binding corporate rules. However, only about 70 companies currently use this system.

Lawyers have said alternative data transfer systems could also be at risk to legal challenge since they do not provide stronger protection against US government snooping than Safe Harbour did.

Walmart takes on Amazon with open source cloud

ASDA1US retail giant Walmart is looking to an open source cloud to turn the tables on Amazon.

Walmart, which owns Asda, saw its shares fall 10 percent this week following news that the company will grow just three to four percent over the next three years, with profit dropping 12 percent in 2017.

Chief Financial Officer Charles Holley blamed rising wages, and the increased cost of training staff. It’s not until 2019 that revenue will grow again.

Walmart is still bigger than Amazon in terms of revenue, but after 18 years, Amazon.com’s market value stands at $254.8 billion. Walmart this week managed to wipe more than $21 billion off its value, down to $213.9 billion.

This is where the cloud comes in. Walmart is creating WalmartOne, which runs on the open source OneOps cloud computing code.

OneOps is Walmart’s own cloud platform, with the company claiming it changed the way its engineers developed and helped shaped how Walmart launched new products to customers.

This week WalmartLabs said OneOps will be released to the world as open source, with the source code being uploaded to code repository GitHub by Christmas.

This means that Walmart is taking the fight to Amazon Web Services by giving developers a chance to avoid vendor lock-in, a situation in which companies are stuck to contracts and technologies supplied by one cloud provider.

King added that by making the platform open source, OneOps will drive competitors to “compete based on price, customer service and innovation.

VMware expands AirWatch channel

vmware-partner-link-bg-w-logoVMware wants to have 500 partners for its AirWatch channel.

AirWatch is the mobile management and security firm VMware bought for $1.55 billion. It had only let partners get their hands on it in the second half of last year.

This had miffed some of VMware’s resellers who had muttered to the company that they would like to sell it.

While it is unclear why this was the case, VMware is more than making up for it John Churchhouse, VMware’s EMEA SMB director, said he is targeting heavy recruitment of resellers for AirWatch.

At the moment VMWare has 120 partners focused around mobility solutions, and it wants to get it to 500 in 2016, as a minimum requirement, he said.

These partners were mainly going to be from within the existing VMware partner base, and on the whole it would be resellers focused around SMB and mid-market.

VMware is also increasing its AirWatch reseller rewards based around something it has dubbed a Power Play. A Power Play with VMware is chosen every six months, and it aligns all of the resources in terms of marketing and a partner perspective to drive that Power Play.

Google and Amazon will win cloud wars

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudBeancounters from Forrester believe that the future of cloud computing belongs to Amazon and Google.

Analyst John Rymer says “public cloud services,” which is where the future lies and even Dell’s EMC purchase can’t change that.

Amazon and Google now offer their own infrastructure to the rest of the world as cloud computing services. This will be bad news for Microsoft which is bigger than Google at the moment.

Forrester’s report, which draws on interviews with vendors and customers across the market, looks exclusively at “public cloud services” rather than private clouds.

Rymer and Forrester now call the public cloud a “hyper-growth” market. Its new report predicts that this market will grow to $191 billion by 2020. That’s 20 percent more than they predicted in their previous report, back in 2011.

“The adoption among cloud among enterprises, which is really where the money is, has really picked up steam. It’s a big shift. The cloud has arrived. It’s inevitable.”

The report encompasses a wide range of services, like Amazon’s EC2, which serves up virtual machines where you can run practically any software you want and Microsoft Office 365, a suite of pre-built and configured software applications you can tap into via the ‘net.

It said that companies like Amazon and Microsoft and Google continue to expand across all these areas. Amazon just introduced a sweeping array of new services last week.

According to the report, “cloud platform services” like Amazon EC2, where you can build and run your own software, will be a $44 billion market by 2020. Meanwhile, back-end business services will reach $14 billion, and cloud software applications will hit $131 billion.

“A lot of businesses are now saying: ‘I want to move my operational application, back office applications, into public clouds. That’s a big deal. In the past, so many people said: ‘I’m never going there.’ Now they’re actually working at it.”

The public cloud won’t take over the whole IT market, Rymer says, but this is where the big growth lies. According to Rhymer, software-as-a-service offerings such as Office 365 are growing the quickest at the moment.

The biggest winner here will likely be Amazon because it has a massive customer base and they’re been at it longer.

Amazon has revealed that its cloud operation is now a $4.6 billion business, and the company expects it to grow to $6.23 billion by the end of the year. The next-biggest player is Microsoft. In April, Redmond said it’s on track to reach $6.3 billion in revenue this year, including sales of its Office 365 and its Dynamics customer relationship management service. Google, in many respects, has a technical lead on Amazon and Microsoft, but it was slower to market. IBM, with its acquisition of a company called SoftLayer is also a presence.

Services from Google and IBM may not grow as quickly as Amazon’s. But they will grow. It’s where the world is moving, the report said.

Google increases targeted advertising power

 

google-ICGoogle has released a new advertising project called Customer Match, lets advertisers upload their customer and promotional email address lists into AdWords.

The new targeting capability extends beyond search to include both YouTube Trueview ads and the newly launched native ads in Gmail.

It is the first time Google has allowed advertisers to target ads against customer-owned data in Adwords. Google matches the email addresses against those of signed-in users on Google. Individual addresses are hashed and anonymized. Advertisers can set bids and create ads specifically geared to audiences built from their email lists.

In the past Advertisers could serve ads to site visitors and customers with display ads using retargeting lists captured in Google Analytics. Another product, Retargeting Lists for Search Ads (RLSA), allows users to bid on and serve ads tailored to audiences when they search on Google. Retargeting lists are built with cookies, which users can delete or block and aren’t suited for mobile. Email addresses and user sign-ins, on the other hand, are more stable across devices.

The Customer Match offering brings Google into line with those available from both Facebook and Twitter. Enabling CRM uploads and targeting has been incredibly successful for Facebook, and Twitter and advertisers have been pushing for Google to do the same.

In addition to reaching existing segments such as newsletter subscribers, recent buyers or loyalty program participants, advertisers can target new prospects with an expansion of Similar Audiences.

To get started with Customer Match, advertisers upload their email lists to Audiences within AdWords either manually or via the API. There is no limit to the number of lists.

Fiorina’s attempts to dig up Jobs fails

carlyfiorinaFormer HP CEO turned US presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina has been targeting the Apple fanboy vote by claiming she was friends with late Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Iit appears that if they ever were friends, that did not stop the self-serving megalomaniac from getting one over on her. Fiorina has forgotten the sad story of the HP/Apple deal which went sour.

Apple wanted HP to stop installing Windows Media Store on its PCs and replace it with iTunes Music store. Jobs basically offered Fiorina the chance to sell iPods branded with HP’s name if she did this.
Fiorina nodded and the deal went through. However Apple upgraded the iPod, making HP’s version outdated and HP was still stuck with iTunes.

It got worse for HP. After it purged Fiorina in 2005, HP ended the iPod deal in July that year, but because of Fiorina’s deal HP was banned from selling its own music player until August 2006.

All’s fair in love and business, but it does seem odd that Fiorina would suggest that she was a “good friend” with a bloke who mugged her and HP’s shareholders for his own evil cunning plan.

Jobs had effectively got his software installed on millions of computers for free, stifled his main competitor, and got a company that prided itself on invention to declare that Apple was superior.

Fiorina seems to think that Jobs was her mate because he rang her to say he was sorry she got canned. Of course, that could have just meant that Jobs was upset because he did not think he would get another deal like that past a different HP CEO.

EU denies it is “anti-American”

euThe EU has denied US corporate claims that it is “anti-American” in its recent wave of litigation against top American tech companies.

European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager’s accusations of anti-US bias over her decision to go after Google for abusing its internet search dominance and Apple over an Irish tax deal, saying such talk was a fallacy.

The US media fails to understand why all the cases on Vestager’s agenda all happen to be big companies from the Land of the Free – Google, Apple, Amazon and Starbucks. The feeling is that regulation is for non-American companies and the US should be allowed to do what it likes in its colonies.

Vestager told the Foreign Policy Association in New York that the nationality of companies played no role in her assessment.

“Yes, US companies are often involved when we investigate the digital industry. But you will also see many Japanese firms in our car-part cartel cases,” she said.

The European Commission is now studying Google’s response to antitrust charges of favouring its Google Shopping service over rivals. It is also investigating the company’s popular Android operating system for smartphones.

Amazon is in the EU’s crosshairs for a Luxembourg tax deal and Starbucks for a Dutch tax arrangement.

The EU is also wondering if it should ban cloud connections to the the US while its intelligence agencies insist that they have the right to steal it.