Author: Nick Farrell

Telefónica Tech swallows Microsoft Dynamics

Posted on March 23, 2022 by - News

Telefónica Tech has bought Microsoft Dynamics partner Incremental for up to £175 million.

Telefónica Tech claims the deal will “strengthen its capabilities and presence” both in the UK and Ireland.

Incremental is based in Glasgow but with offices in India and Bulgaria, Incremental focuses on the data and analytics market and has been a Microsoft Business Applications Inner Circle member for the past three years.

Telefónica Tech CEO José Cerdán said that the move strengthens his companies position as a leader in the UK market for IT services.

“We are now able to provide end-to-end Microsoft services, including digital transformation, managed services and data analytics, and achieve attractive cross-selling synergies with Telefónica Tech UK&I, complementing and positioning us as a leading Microsoft-focused company in the UK.”

Giacom increases in size

Posted on March 22, 2022 by - News

Small business Cloud business Giacom has grown by 20 percent to £58.6 Million and is increasing its hires.

The company said it wanted its team to grow by 22 percent in 2022 across all departments and most of the hires will come from the local Hull community.

To nurture young local talent, Giacom has started apprenticeships within its Marketing and IT departments. The company has also encouraged training opportunities internally and recently launched its Personal Development Plan Scheme, which is available to all staff to up-skill themselves. This has lead to nine staff applying for the highly regarded CMI management certificates.

Additionally, in October 2021, Giacom announced its new partnership with cyber security giant Sophos, being chosen as one of three UK MSP distributors for Sophos.

Novatech goes solar

Posted on March 22, 2022 by - News

Novatech has become the latest IT provider to install solar panels at its HQ in an investment.

The PC builder and public sector supplier has installed 825 solar panels on the roof of its Portsmouth facility as part of wider plans to reduce its carbon footprint. It hopes to start feeding the electricity generated back into the grid from May.

CEO David Furby says will pay for itself within six to seven years and bolster its carbon reduction efforts. Novatech’s 30,000 square foot, south-facing roof and geographic positioning on the south coast made the 400kW installation a “no brainer”, Furby said.

“Everybody’s got to start thinking about how to become some net zero. And one of the big things is the energy we’re using – both gas and electricity – to power our building. We’ve got a very large roof”, he explained.

PubMatic expands EMEA management team

Posted on March 22, 2022 by - Moving People, News

Digital advertising outfit PubMatic has expanded its EMEA leadership team.

Hitesh Bhatt has been promoted to the role of Senior Director, CTV/OTT, leading the rapidly growing CTV arm of the company’s business. PubMatic’s OTT/CTV global revenue grew by more than six times in the fourth quarter of 2021 over the fourth quarter of 2020 and now monetising OTT/CTV inventory from more than 167 publishers globally. Bhatt will report directly to Emma Newman, CRO, EMEA.

Jacqueline Boakye takes the role of Vice President, Customer Success, EMEA, and is now responsible for the strategic leadership of the EMEA customer success team that support PubMatic’s publisher clients. With consumers’ time increasingly fragmented across screens and channels, omnichannel solutions are becoming more important to publishers as they seek to maximise revenue. A key focus for Boakye will be helping to drive the adoption of PubMatic’s omnichannel solutions, including OpenWrap – a header bidding solution that drives incremental yield across all channels, including CTV.

ABBYY launches new partner programme

Posted on March 21, 2022 by - News

ABBYY has announced the launch of its new global partner programme ABBYYOne.

The new ABBYYOne programme is supposed to connect a diverse ecosystem of global partners with ABBYY’s Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) and Process Intelligence solutions.

ABBYY says the initiative will be for more than a 1,000 existing Business Partners, Technology Alliance Partners (TAPs), and Technology Licensing Partners.

All training and certifications will also be offered free via ABBYY University, the firm’s online education hub and training centre.

Board makes key choices on emerging tech

Posted on March 18, 2022 by - News

More than 53 percent of organisations report their board of directors are among the main decision-makers for emerging technology (ET) investments, just behind CIOs and CTOs.

According to a report compiled by  Gartner, ET purchase decisions are not under IT department control any more.

Gartner senior principal research analyst, Danielle Casey said the business has more confidence in these technologies as they move past the hype and toward tangible ROI, resulting in growing investments and scaling out projects.

The analyst claims 5G drew the highest average investment in 2021, with survey respondents reporting an average of $465,000 invested in the technology.

Microsoft scraps partner network

Posted on March 18, 2022 by - News

Microsoft campusMicrosoft has scrapped the Microsoft Partner Network as it rebrands to the Microsoft Cloud Partner Programme.

From October 2022, all 400,000 partners in Microsoft’s egosystem will use the Microsoft Cloud Partner Programme instead of the Microsoft Partner Network.

Gone will be the days of Microsoft’s Silver and Gold-level certification badges along with the Microsoft Partner Network name which was first launched over 15 years ago.

Microsoft said that changing the partner programme name was a reflection of “the enormous and ongoing transition of business operations to the cloud” and how it claims to support partners in the future.

RTI takes on two additional distributors

Posted on March 18, 2022 by - News

RTI has taken on two additional distributors — Northamber and Indigo Distribution — as RTI partners for the UK market.

RTI Chief Executive Joe Roberts said his outfit was strongly committed to the UK market and is seeing its commercial side growing.

Chessington-based, Northamber is the longest established trade-only distributor of IT equipment in the UK, with a 40-year history of providing technology solutions for the SME/SMB market, it’s said. Headquartered in Bangor, Northern Ireland, Indigo Distribution serves integrators across the UK, offering support to help ensure success for every project — from the design stage through to post-installation.

Noname teams up with High Point

Posted on March 17, 2022 by - News

API security outfit Noname and infrastructure provider HighPoint have teamed up.

HighPoint will offer Noname’s API Security Platform across its product range.

Noname EMEA vice president Dirk Marichal said that HighPoint has an excellent track record of delivering innovative services and projects into multiple sectors.

“HighPoint’s values closely align with Noname Security’s and the importance placed on providing solutions that help their clients succeed and overcome challenges as their businesses evolve.”

Computacenter makes a killing

Posted on March 17, 2022 by - News

Reseller Computacenter made more than £6 billion in yearly revenues and claimed it had seen the “highest growth in services revenue for the last 20 years”.

Revenue for the full year jumped 23.6 percent to £6.7 billion with an adjusted profit before tax of £255.6 million – up 27.5 percent from the year before.

The group’s revenue for its Technology Sourcing segment surged 26.2 percent to £5.3 billion. Organic revenue growth excluding the impact of acquisitions was 11.5 percent.

Rackspace faces the music

Posted on March 17, 2022 by - News

Rackspace is helping BMG, the fourth biggest global music company in the world, with its migration to Google Cloud.

With music consumption reaching new highs via streaming platforms and record amounts of data being processed, BMG was looking for a cloud solution that solved its scaling challenges and could power its data-heavy business.

With increasing data volumes, BMG anticipates cost optimisation will become a big initiative. Cloud tooling and provisioning from Rackspace Technology will enable BMG to keep its business economical while providing its services to artists and songwriters.

Google Cloud changes its prices

Posted on March 16, 2022 by - News

Google Cloud has changed its prices to allow “more flexibility for customers” which basically means low-cost options for some but increases for others.

The main changes will come to Google’s cloud storage pricing for data mobility, including replication of data written to a dual- or multi-region storage bucket, and inter-region data access.

It will also include the introduction of a new lower-cost archive snapshot option for Persistent Disk (PD), new outbound data processing pricing for cloud load balancing and new pricing for network topology.

The pricing changes are due to come into effect on 1 October this year.

Writing on the company bog, a spokesGoogle said: “We are announcing we will adjust our infrastructure product and pricing structure to give customers more choice in how they pay for what they use alongside new, flexible SKUs with new product options and capabilities. These changes are designed to help ensure better product fit for our customers’ use cases across a wider array of workloads.”

Redcentric acquires 7 Elements

Posted on March 16, 2022 by - News

MSP Redcentric has bought cybersecurity firm 7 Elements for £2.4 million.

For those not in the know, 7 Elements is based in Edinburgh and provides security testing, incident response management and bespoke security consultancy services.

The company has annualised revenues of circa £1 million and an EBITDA of about£300,000.

Redcentric claims the move will “significantly enhance” its service portfolio with “additional capability within the increasingly important security market”.

Redcentric CEO Peter Brotherton said the addition of 7 Elements services to Redcentric’s existing DDOS, SIEM, managed WAF and information security consultancy services means it can offer a complete portfolio of security services.

Consumers are more privacy conscious

Posted on March 16, 2022 by - News

The 2022 Global Digital Consumer Trends Index, released by Cheetah Digital, in conjunction with eConsultancy, shows that customers facing tightening regulations are more privacy-conscious than ever online.

The report notes huge rises in those turning to incognito browsing (50 percent increase), a PC cleaner (48 percent increase), password generator (40 percent increase), ad blocking tech (37 per ent increase), paid for premium software (31 percent increase), and a password manager (31 percent increase).

Most consumers are still happy to trade personal data for personalised content, but they prefer brands only use data that they’ve explicitly shared directly to the brand (zero-party data). Anything more than that is considered “creepy”.

Punters think that the creepiest methods are ads based on location data (67 percent), retargeting ads derived from tracking cookies (62 percent), and ads related to something they discussed near a smart device (61 percent).

BCN Group gets a Public View.

Posted on March 15, 2022 by - News

BCN Group has acquired application and analytics business Public View as part of its cunning plan to push into the health sector

For those not in the know, Public View provides performance monitoring and benchmarking services to the NHS. It is based around Microsoft’s .Net, and Azure Cloud Platform.  It collects data from hundreds of public data sources automatically before combining them into a single intuitive portal for NHS leaders.

The acquisition by north-west based BCN follows that of healthcare-focused data analytics and process automation specialist Cloud2 in May last year.

And the gold Microsoft and Dell partner claims the addition of Public View will strengthen its existing services to “create a powerful and market-leading portfolio of analytics, reporting and benchmarking services to the healthcare sector”.

BCN Group Rob Davies CEO said: “The acquisition of Public View allows us to provide existing and new clients with a complete and comprehensive suite of cloud-based analytics services delivered by skilled and experienced experts.