Author: Nick Farrell

Blackpool Council is inviting data centre operators to support its endeavour to establish a technology campus, Silicon Sands, to take advantage of the town’s proximity to the North Atlantic Loop undersea fibre cable network.

The 40-acre Silicon Sands campus will be situated within the Blackpool Airport Enterprise Zone and will be home to data centres powered by renewable energy. The Council hopes this will draw businesses seeking low-latency connections to high-performance computing (HPC) resources. Read more…

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is worried that the flourishing UK cloud market is consolidating around Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

The probe was initiated last year after the communications regulator, Ofcom, discovered evidence suggesting anti-competitive behaviour within the UK cloud industry.

The CMA’s investigation concentrates on several key areas, including the overall competitive landscape of the UK cloud market, the impact of technical barriers and data transfer fees (egress fees) on cloud provider switching, and the potential anti-competitive effects of cloud provider discounts. Read more…

Analysts at Forrester have been consulting their Tarot cards and have concluded that 2025 will be the year of the AI PC.

According to Forrester’s “The Year of the AI PC is 2025” report, penned by principal analyst Andrew Hewitt, PC and chip manufacturers such as AMD, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Intel, and Nvidia announced AI PC innovations to arrive next year.

Approximately 50 AI PC models are available for purchase today, and multiple AI chips are ready for enterprise deployment. The report said Forrester expects certain roles with high computing needs, such as creatives, data scientists, and developers, to benefit substantially from AI PCs. Read more…

Logicalis reported a revenue surge of 12.1 per cent.

The reseller saw its revenues in increase to US$645.4m (£504.2m), compared to US$575.6m (£449.3m) in the same period of the previous fiscal year (H1 FY23).

Despite facing macroeconomic hurdles, the company said its performance shows its resilience and strategic positioning within the industry.

Logicalis continued to experience a strong order intake during H1 FY24, although slightly lower than the exceptional levels seen in the previous fiscal year. Read more…

Global Distie Westcon-Comstor has reported strong financial results for the fiscal year ending 29 February 2024.

This performance has been enhanced by a strategic shift towards recurring revenues and a data-driven approach, with significant growth in the cybersecurity and networking sectors.

Overall revenue increased by eight per cent to £2.88 billion, up from £2.67 billion in FY23. This growth has been attributed largely to robust software performance. Strategic vendor gross sales saw a ten per cent increase, maintaining a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of ten per cent over the past five years. Read more…

PC market shipments plummeted by over 100 million units during  2023, culminating in a historic low for the industry.

According to number crunchers at Stocklytics.com, Global PC shipments fell from approximately 342 million units in 2021 to around 242 million units in 2023.

The site’s financial analyst, Edith Read, said that shipment volume in 2022 and 2023 dwindled considerably, mainly due to waning consumer demand for PCs in the wake of a detrimental economic crisis with inflation flaring up. Read more…

British technology magnate Mike Lynch has appeared in a US court to defend himself against allegations of fraud related to the sale of his company, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011.

Lynch described his experience of the trial as “surreal”, emphasising that he was not involved in the transactions under scrutiny.

Lynch co-founded Autonomy in 1996, and it became one of the UK’s leading technology firms. Despite once being described as the British  Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Lynch now faces the possibility of up to 25 years in prison if convicted. Read more…

PC manufacturer Lenovo has posted another positive quarter after it returned to growth (3 per cent) in Q3, this time posting a 10 per cent increase in revenue year-on-year to $13.8bn (£10.76bn).

However, this wasn’t enough to offset a miserable financial year, which was still down by eight per cent to $56.8bn (£44.30bn).

Lenovo’s Q4 FY23/24 report mentioned other areas of expansion and growth, including its pocket-to-cloud AI portfolio, solutions and services group (SSG) and infrastructure solutions group (ISG), intelligent devices group (IDG), and commitment to sustainable growth. Read more…

Tech suppliers to the public sector might want to buckle up because they’re in for a bit of a bumpy spell around the general election, according to TechMarketView.

TechMarketView’s top analyst, Georgina O’Toole, said the UK’s public sector tech scene is expected to take a breather for the next six weeks after Rishi Sunak decided to surprise us all with a snap election on 4 July.

“Uncertainty is a bit of a buzzkill for growth. Now, we’ve got the General Election date set in stone. But who will call the shots afterwards is anyone’s guess,” she said. Read more…

The Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) has given the thumbs up to TD SYNNEX’s plans to cut emissions in the short and long run.

TD SYNNEX is joining the ranks of fellow distributors Westcon-Comstor and MSP Logicalis in getting their targets stamped with approval by the org.

TD SYNNEX CEO Rich Hume said:”I was pleased to sign our pledge to the SBTi’s Business Ambition Pledge as one of my first acts after the merger that brought our company to life in September 2021, so it’s a no-brainer that sustainability’s been top of our list from the get-go,” Read more…

TD SYNNEX has broadened its partnership with NVIDIA to Ireland, facilitating the distribution of Nvidia’s enterprise software and accelerated computing products.

This strategic development aims to enable Irish partners to exploit AI opportunities with Nvidia’s offerings fully.

TD SYNNEX now grants Irish partners access to an extensive array of products and platforms, encompassing NvidiaAI Enterprise, Nvidia Omniverse enterprise software licences, high-performance networking adaptors, and accelerated computing GPUs and superchips. Read more…

Troubled open-saucy database MariaDB has garnered shareholder support for a private equity acquisition offer.

The MySQL derivative, which counts Samsung, Nokia, and ServiceNow among its clientele, has recently been the focus of competing bids from the private equity firm K1 Investment Management and the application development and infrastructure company Progress Software. Read more…

The UK government’s newly established AI Safety Institute (AISI) has published a report highlighting significant vulnerabilities in large language models (LLMs).

The findings suggest that these AI systems are highly susceptible to basic jailbreaks, with some models producing harmful outputs without attempting to bypass their safeguards. Read more…

Black Box announced that by working with Nokia and Corning, it has successfully tested and verified a system that enables the economical implementation of carrier signals and private 4G/5G wireless services over a single distributed antenna system (DAS).

Through this new technology partnership, Black Box successfully integrated the Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) private wireless solution as a signal source for the Corning Everon DAS system, effectively uniting private and commercial wireless networks on the same infrastructure. Read more…

Infrastructure and cloud MSP Celerity has acquired Chester-based Chilli-IT. This marks the company’s first acquisition and is aimed at bolstering the MSP’s technical expertise and broadening Celerity’s cloud services and client base.

Celerity stated that the acquisition would enable it to use Chilli-IT’s specialised knowledge within the IBM ecosystem, penetrate new markets, and augment its talent pool. The merged entity boasts an annual turnover exceeding £40 million and a combined workforce of 95. Read more…