Author: Nick Farrell

Public cloud continues to grow

Posted on December 21, 2021 by - News

Beancounters at IDC have added up some numbers and reached the conclusion that the European public cloud market is growing at a double-digit pace

The analyst estimates the public cloud supply chain contributed almost $500 billion to European GDP.

Writing in its  Public Cloud’s Contribution to the European Economy: A Macroeconomic Approach report IDC said this has significantly increased over the past two years, with a spike in 2020 due to the digitisation journey that many organisations undertook during the pandemic.

IDC research analyst, European cloud and multi-cloud management, Filippo Vanara said that for the past five years, the public cloud market has significantly changed the IT industry and grown like no other segment of the European IT market.

Sage takes the rest of SaaS vendor Brightpearl

Posted on December 21, 2021 by - News

Sage has spent £225 million acquiring the remaining stake in SaaS vendor Brightpearl.
The UK-based ERP software vendor initially acquired a 17 percent stake in Brightpearl at the end of last year and the latest move will see Sage acquire the remaining 83 percent stake in the business. The acquisition will be funded via Sage’s existing cash and available liquidity.

Brightpearl is an SaaS vendor which offers a retail management system to retailers and wholesalers to give real-time business insights and help customers automate workflows.

The business will combine with Sage Intact to combine financial management, inventory planning, sales order management, purchasing and supplier management, CRM, fulfilment, warehousing and logistics management.

Brightpearl expects to generate £20 million in revenues for the 12 months ending December 2021, which would represent a 50 percent increase on the previous year. Its operating profit will break even during the same time frame, Sage claims.

The deal is expected to close in January 2022.

Sage CEO Steve Hare said that together, Sage and Brightpearl will remove the barriers that hold back retailers and wholesalers, streamlining their systems and enabling them to focus on growth.

“I’m delighted to welcome Brightpearl, its management team and colleagues to Sage, and look forward to executing on our strategic priorities together and delivering accelerated growth”, he said.

 

 

Dell boss studies crystal ball for 2022

Posted on December 20, 2021 by - News

Dell Technologies president and chief technology officer (CTO), John Roese, sees edge, private mobility, data management and security as the key areas companies will focus upon next year.

He said that edge plans will be divided between platforms and workflows/software stacks.

“I think the world is coalescing around things that aren’t in datacentres, that are part of the modern application and data pipelines, from a topology perspective, under this domain of edge that’s now starting to form”, he said.

“We are now realising that there is a significant proliferation of edges. What that means is that each of the data pipelines – the cloud services, the data services, the application environments – that have originated in public and private cloud environments are starting to push to the edge independently. That’s resulting in a proliferation of edge stacks, architectures and even hardware”, added Roese.

Aruba scores Commonwealth Games contract

Posted on December 20, 2021 by - News

HPE and its partner Aruba have been named as the Official Venue Network Infrastructure Supporter for Birmingham 2022.

As part of the partnership, HPE will provide the portfolio of Aruba networking technology as a service to support the hybrid workforce behind the delivery of the Games and an efficient information flow for broadcast and media.

This will include the deployment of a programmable edge-to-cloud solution, using Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, and AI-driven security and management in the cloud via Aruba Central to connect, protect, analyse and act on events and requests that come across the network.

NTT Data working with Amazon web services

Posted on December 20, 2021 by - News

NTT Data is teaming up with AWS to support clients’ use of cloud services to accelerate “digital transformation”.

The global agreement will combine NTT Data’s solutions that match clients’ business needs with AWS to develop new services.

The cloud solutions will be in areas such as data collection, analysis and security, and NTT Data say they will all be available on AWS Marketplace.

NTT says it also intends to increase the number of its AWS certified engineers in the NTT Data Group from 2,300 to 5,000 by the end of March 2025.

Exertis remembers the Almo

Posted on December 17, 2021 by - News

Exertis has written a cheque for the Almo Corporation in a move it touts as “the biggest yet” in the history of parent company DCC.

The distributor’s move extends its presence in the Pro AV sector and ramps up its expansion across the pond.

DCC Technology & Exertis MD, Tim Griffin said the acquisition of Almo Corporation is the largest in DCC’s history and signals his outfit’s confident and ambitious intent to expand DCC Technology.

Vectra AI appoints Steve Cottrell

Posted on December 17, 2021 by - Moving People, News

Security outfit Vectra AI has appointed Steve Cottrell as its EMEA CTO.

The company said that Cottrell will work to strengthen relationships with customers and prospects, security communities, and government and intelligence agencies to identify key security pain points, while helping evolve security strategies in support of digital transformation and cloud adoption.

Cottrell will help security decision makers communicate the value of AI-driven threat detection and response tools to their teams and senior stakeholders.

Cottrell said that for decades, security teams have been hampered by information overload, and the task of finding the needle in the haystack using a traditional SIEM based approach has largely failed.

Component shortages hit Proact

Posted on December 17, 2021 by - News

Proact has warned that delivery delays due to component shortages are expected to impact its fourth quarter revenues and results.

The outfit said it has seen strong demand for its systems solutions as well as its services so far during the fourth quarter.

However, it warned the global semiconductor shortage is contributing to significant delivery delays at several of Proact’s largest suppliers, which is expected to result in systems deals worth an estimated €14- €24 million will not be able to be delivered during the fourth quarter.

Proact added that despite the good order intake, revenues are expected to be negatively impacted by the corresponding amount.

Sharp UK makes a “get back to work package”

Posted on December 16, 2021 by - News

Sharp UK launched a range of new technology stuff designed to support the safety of employees upon their return to the office.

The new solutions include: an updated Optimised Visitor Management system; the Communicate and Collaborate furniture range; and the Plasmacluster Air Purifier.

Sharp saw an opportunity to market such packages in June when it surveyed more than 6,000 office workers in small-to-medium sized businesses across Europe and found that over half claimed it was important for them to be able to meet with and work with colleagues physically. In addition, almost 58 percent said that working in a dynamic office environment had become more important since the pandemic.

Hyperoptic hire’s BT’s Neale as its MD of Infrastructure

Posted on December 16, 2021 by - Moving People, News

Broadband outfit Hyperoptic has appointed Lisa Neale as its MD of Infrastructure. Neale will report into Dana Tobak, CEO and Founder of Hyperoptic, and will be responsible for delivering the company’s network rollout ambitions.

Neale joined BT as an engineer at age 18, she has spent twenty years steadily rising up the ranks in telecoms. She recently held a number of leadership roles at Openreach, including the Director of Fibre Build in UK East, and Director of Fibre and Network Delivery in UK West.

Neale said: “I am really excited to have a key role in enabling Hyperoptic to connect new customers so that they can enjoy a whole new broadband experience. In parallel, I am also looking forward to collaborating with the senior team on new innovative tools and techniques that will help fast track our rollout schedules. I feel that I will be able to add a lot of value from consolidating everything I have learnt through my career.”

UK workers find workplace info difficult

Posted on December 16, 2021 by - News

Research released by Sinequa reveals that UK workers face greater challenges finding information in the workplace than their US counterparts.

While nearly half of UK workers think it is harder than it should be to find information at work, only just over a third of US workers agree. Similarly, 71 percent of UK workers say it’s harder to find information on work systems than it is to find information on search engines like Google, compared to 57 percent of US workers.

While Sinequa’s research reveals that employees in both the UK and the US face challenges when searching for information at work, US employees report fewer problems than UK workers on average. The difference between the countries may partly be accounted for by the differing emphasis on tools designed to help with search needs. Two times more US respondents (14 percent) than UK respondents (seven percent) said their organisation had implemented an intelligent enterprise search tool to help adapt to new working environments.

Fragile supply chains, ransomware, lack of security investment makes 2022 looks rubbish

Posted on December 15, 2021 by - News

Global technology distributor, Westcon-Comstor, is not predicting a great time for the channel in 2022.

The outfit has released its predictions for next year covering ybersecurity, the supply chain, subscription models and hybrid working and it does not seem like a great year to get out of bed.
Westcon-Comstor VP Cyber Security & Next Gen Solutions Daniel Hurel said that ransomware attacks have been the most prevalent form of cybersecurity threat this year, with this threat type taking hold of businesses of all sizes and sectors.

“We have begun to see more companies taking the realities of ransomware seriously, which will prompt further investment into ransomware protection in 2022. we’re anticipating an uptick in technologies and tools in the back-up software and antivirus software spaces”, he said.

Security needs a rethink

Posted on December 15, 2021 by - News

A poll conducted by SentryBay, the UK-based cybersecurity software company has found that 69.1 per ent of professionals with security responsibility believe a rethink is needed to deal with the threat of cybersecurity now that devices and applications have moved outside the corporate network.

The poll, which was conducted on Twitter amongst cybersecurity professionals, aimed to assess attitudes to cyber threats and methods of protecting vulnerable devices. It found that 58.3 percent of respondents believed that a zero-trust approach to security was essential, and 19.9 pe cent thought it was important. When asked if their organisation had adopted zero-trust, however, only a third said they had.

One barrier might be the difficulties that companies are experiencing in implementing BYOD models, for which zero trust is the recommended approach to securing corporate perimeters. Over a third (33.5 percent) said that adopting BYOD was too complicated. The role of enterprise users has also been a BYOD challenge with user privacy concerns being cited by 28.1 percent of respondents and user engagement/friction cited by 19.9 percent . Management overheads were a challenge for 19.9 percent.

Avaya scores Learning People Contract

Posted on December 15, 2021 by - News

Avaya is providing career and tech education company, The Learning People with its Avaya Cloud Office UCaaS solution.

For those who came in late, Learning People provide curated career counselling and online training for more than 35,000 students, many of whom have landed careers in the tech industry with the help of the company.

Apparently, Learning People selected Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral, an all-in-one cloud communication solution, to enhance its customer and employee engagement, and support future expansion.

The move was part of the outfit’s attempts to adopt work-from-home technology during the pandemic.

Tech Data signs a European distribution agreement with Nvidia

Posted on December 14, 2021 by - News

Tech Data announced a European distribution agreement with Nvidia.

The new agreement extends an existing agreement, in which Tech Data offers Nvidia Networking solutions across the region, to now include Nvidia hardware, the AI Enterprise software suite and DGX systems, as well as the Omniverse Enterprise platform.

The agreement also adds Nvidia DGX systems, enabling businesses to scale AI development with solutions purpose-built for enterprise.

Tech Data said it will reinforce its Nvidia offerings with a comprehensive range of professional and managed services and will leverage its own Solution Factory methodology to develop customised solutions with Nvidia products at the core for a variety of vertical use cases.