Author: Nick Farrell

Retail media advert channel exploding

Posted on December 20, 2022 by - News

Retail media ad spending will hit €25 billion in Europe by 2026, according to IAB Europe forecasts.

According to its report, in collaboration with Xandr, retail media can no longer be described as “an emerging channel” given the Covid-19 pandemic “fundamentally changed” consumer shopping habits. For example, now three-quarters of shoppers in Europe go online.

This forecast and study come as Channel 4 and ITV have inked deals with Sainsbury’s Nectar 360 and Tesco’s Dunnhumby respectively to match broadcaster viewing data with first-party retail media datasets.

Wavemaker global ecommerce lead Mudit Jaju described the retail media market worldwide as going through a “massive explosion in every way” with the number and variety of offerings in retail media “exploding”, with ensuing high volatility, inflation and opportunity in The Media Leader Podcast.

Luton goes full fibre

Posted on December 20, 2022 by - News

CityFibre has put the finishing touches to its plans to network in Luton and Dunstable investing more than £45 million to make them two of the world’s best digitally connected communities.

This latest milestone sees thousands of homes in Luton, where the network rollout started, gain access to the best available digital connectivity. This includes premises in Stopsley, Wigmore, Round Green and Crawley, where residents can access broadband services from UK launch partner Vodafone, on selected Vodafone Pro Broadband, as well as a wide range of other internet service providers including Giganet, Air Broadband, Zybre, Yazi, No-one, IDNet, A&A, Octaplus, Link Broadband and Facto.

French Atos carves up UK defence contract

Posted on December 19, 2022 by - News

French services giant Atos has won a new contract with the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The outfit will provide support for the MoD  CORTISONE programme which focuses on the transformation of Defence Medical Services delivery within the UK’s Defence services.

It aims to improve patient outcomes while maximising resource efficiency and the number of service personnel fit for the role.

Atos said it is working in partnership with the MoD to transform healthcare information systems to support evidence-based patient-centric healthcare for the UK armed forces.

Zero Trust is getting on a bit

Posted on December 19, 2022 by - News

Cyber security vendor Illumio says that 2022 was the year that zero trust “matured”. Whatever that means.

According to Illumio, channel partners and customers have embraced the concept and the levels of activity around tools and solutions in that category have increased over 2022.

Illumio senior director, channel and alliances EMEA Scott Walker said there had been a huge uptick in a number of key areas of both an understanding of what zero trust really means and, more importantly, how that translates into the problems it solves for businesses.

Rubrik appoints Microsoft top cat to board

Posted on December 19, 2022 by - Moving People, News

Insecurity experts Rubrik have  appointed former Microsoft chairman and Symantec CEO John Thompson as its lead independent director.

Thompson brings more than 40 years of leadership experience in the technology industry. His claim to fame is that he succeeded Sir William Gates III as chairman of Microsoft’s board and now serves as its lead independent director.

Previously, Thompson was the chairman and CEO of Symantec and currently serves as the chairman of Illumina’s board.

Rubrik co-founder and CEO, Bipul Sinha said that his outfit had built an elite leadership team of cybersecurity experts across public and private sectors to better equip our customers in the ongoing battle against data threats such as ransomware.

“Thompson is a cybersecurity pioneer. His proven leadership and experience building iconic companies will help us continue to deliver data security innovations and define the future of cybersecurity.”

 

Barracuda snaps up Billante

Posted on December 16, 2022 by - News

Barracuda Networks has appointed Joe Billante as its new chief financial officer after half-inching him from eBay.

Billante has been at eBay for 13 years in several businesses, finance, and analytics executive leadership roles.

Before this Billante spent 11 years at General Electric in several finance roles, including CFO for a $1bn international division of GE Healthcare.

Barracuda CEO Hatem Naguib said: “We are excited to have Joe on our team, with his deep expertise in business strategy, financial integrity, stakeholder engagement, and operational excellence.”

N-able cuts five percent of staff

Posted on December 16, 2022 by - News

N-able has cut or restructured about five percent of its workforce despite reporting strong financial results in its third quarter.

N-able president and CEO John Pagliuca said that the moves were part of the annual planning process where all roles and responsibilities were evaluated across the company and a focused action was taken to reduce and in some cases, restructure certain positions.

“Our business remains healthy and therefore this may have felt a bit unexpected.”

IGEL deepens HP relationship

Posted on December 16, 2022 by - News

Just months after moving to a software-only strategy, thin client OS expert IGEL has got cosier  with HP,

In March IGEL gave up on hardware to focus on its software and said it would develop partnerships with HP, Lenovo and LG to cover hardware.

It seems that HP has certified the IGEL OS for its Elite t655 thin clients and will be pre-installed on the devices, which started shipping today.

Cloud use skyrocketing

Posted on December 15, 2022 by - News

Beancounters at analyst outfit Kaseya predict that more than 75 percent of client workloads will be cloud-based over the next three years. This is a 25 percent increase compared to last year.

The firm found that almost all MSPs are looking to exploit emerging opportunities around cloud integration. More than 90 percent of MSPs can offer cloud-based infrastructure design and management.

Users are worried about budgets, which underlines the need for managed service players to be clear and transparent in their pricing structures.

Kaseya VP Chris McKie said these research figures demonstrated the rapid acceleration and acceptance among cloud technology businesses. More are witnessing the benefits of cloud applications, including easier collaboration between employees and improved productivity.

Attacks on Rackspace calm down

Posted on December 15, 2022 by - News

It appears that attacks on Rackspace’s email service have calmed down since the FBI started investigating.

Rackspace has confirmed that it has restored email service to two-thirds of its customers since the outage was reported nearly two weeks ago. But the company signalled Wednesday that the outage is still impacting thousands of other customers on its Hosted Exchange.

CrowdStrike has confirmed no further attacker activity within Rackspace’s Hosted Exchange environment.

The FBI’s entry into the investigation was first reported by Barron’s, which  reported that “tens of thousands” of clients were ultimately impacted by the attack.

Nutanix starts new channel referral programme

Posted on December 15, 2022 by - News

Cloudy Nutanix has started a referral programme for channel partners offering rewards across a product’s complete lifecycle.

The outfit has refreshed its Elevate Partner Programme to ensure involved partners who were not there when the deal was finally signed are recognised and rewarded.

Nutanix said the changes could work with every partner type and reward those that are involved at different stages of the buying journey, particularly those involved in helping the user develop their strategies before they settle on the final purchase order.

Nutanix sales VP Adam Tarbox said that analysts are fond of talking about how customers engage with at least seven partners across the lifecycle of any project and there are multiple touchpoints.

IBM backs down on price hikes

Posted on December 14, 2022 by - News

Biggish Blue has backed down on software price rises of 24 percent, but appears to have confused its partners and customers in the process.

Last month customers in the UK, as well Canada, Europe, Japan, Morocco and South Africa, had been told by Big Blue that they faced software rises of 24 percent. This week, IBM changed its mind saying that the rise in some SaaS products will be 15 percent.

This marks the second change in policy around price hikes by IBM since September when IBM told us that price rises in the UK would be eight percent.

Exertis becomes Seceon’s first UK partner

Posted on December 14, 2022 by - News

Exertis has been named as US cybersecurity specialist Seceon’s first UK partner.

Seceon’s claim to fame is creating AI driven cyber threat detection and fixing platforms for enterprises and MSSPs. It is based in Massachusetts, and has an MSSP roster of more than 200.

Exertis Enterprise sales boss Dominic Ryles said he was excited to have Seceon join the Exertis Enterprise – Security solution stack as it gives our channel partners the tools they need to better equip themselves for visibility and actionable insights into the types of malicious threats that are targeting organisations today.

Giganet brings staff Christmas cheer

Posted on December 14, 2022 by - News

Full fibre ISP Giganet is helping its staff as the country faces its cost of living crisis this Christmas.

As well as a cost-of-living payment to all employees earlier this year, excluding executives, the ISP is looking after its people over the festive period by investing in financial planning and health workshops, nutrition workshops and individual health checks for all interested employees at its recent wellbeing days.

The company has committed to paying the Real Living Wage, and, as a result, has uplifted salaries across its Customer Service teams and junior roles. All employees have also received a Christmas bonus payment in the form of a £150 shopping voucher, in addition to rounding off the year with festive gatherings in Fareham and Reading.

Gartner predicts governments are about to spend on tech

Posted on December 13, 2022 by - News

Beancounters at Gartner think that Global government IT spending is forecast to total $588.9 billion in 2023 which is an increase of 6.8 percent from this year.

After consulting its tarot cards, the analyst predicts government IT spending will increase across all segments except devices.  Gartner believes that governments bought enough devices when the pandemic broke out.

Software will be the highest-growing segment in 2023 (12.5 percent) followed by IT and internal services. While datacentre systems will see the most cash injection of more than $25 billion, Big G said.