Category: News

IT services specialist Adept has written out a £5 million cheque for Shift F7 and the deal total cost likely to be as high as £8 million.

The cunning plan is to provide Adept a larger customer base and  more depth in its IT services offering without compromising its geographical focus on London and the South East.

The deal starts with a payment of £5 million with a further £2.9 million being payable depending on the performance of the Shift F7 business in the first year after the deal closes.

For the year ended May, Shift F7 delivered revenues of £5 million. The deal covers not just Shift but also its commercial services operation Greencorn. That contribution will be added to the £46.4 million generated by Adept in the year ended in March.

Adept CEO Ian Fiskwick said: “We are delighted to have acquired such a high quality, well-run and profitable business with a strong management team. Shift F7 is an excellent fit because it enhances our market position in IT, particularly in London. After the Shift F7 acquisition, more than 70 per cent of Adept revenue will be generated from managed services including IT support, unified communications and data networks.”

The Bank of England’s (BoE) chief economist, Andy Haldane warned this morning the UK will need a “skills revolution” in order to face the disruption of what is called the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Haldane underlined the need to reskill as artificial intelligence is making an increasing number of jobs obsolete.

Big Data LDN questioned data experts last year about the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on skills and UK businesses have not been as unprepared as Mr. Haldane thinks, even if there is still a long way to go.

The report said that the skills gap could be saved by self-sufficiency. When asked how they will obtain the skill sets needed for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 60 percent will identify and redeploy staff with transferable skills, and only two percent of UK businesses surveyed will outsource.

UK organisations said that they had only short-termist ambitions for UK organisation. Four times as many UK organisations use data to analyse existing customer engagement and loyalty as to develop new products – just 13 percent.

Almost all UK enterprises have a data strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. However, the majority of organisations (48 percent) have only been recently delivering against it for the last year.

Data Leaders indicated Enterprise Information Management (29 percent), Self-service data preparation (27 percent and Cloud (25 percent) platforms are the technologies needed to deliver value and business growth in the new revolution.

MP Alan Mak, Chair of the All-Party group on the Fourth Industrial Revolution welcomed the report saying: “Data will be as important to the British economy in this century as oil was in the previous one, so it is vital that as we prepare for Brexit we invest wisely in the skills and new technologies needed to harness the opportunities of the 4IR.”

Still, man cannot live on data alone.

The Home Office is looking for a partner to help migrate the Police and Public Protection systems from a traditional data centre to Amazon Web Service (AWS).

Apparently, the Home Office and it is looking for a vendor to support its programme team with migrating to AWS.  It wants a vendor with skills and experience in leading and delivering software, working with Oracle database, Java EJB’s, WebLogic Server, RHEL, IDAM Solutions, Secure networks such as PSN for Policing and have a working knowledge of AWS IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

According to the advert:

“The Police Open Systems currently reside in a traditional data centre and provides an extended capability to police forces on top of the services provided by the Police National Computer (PNC). The software and infrastructure on which these systems reside are not of a satisfactory status or versioning, and as such, there is a desire to migrate these systems to Amazon Web Services.”

“The Home office requires a highly skilled team that is able to design AWS architecture to support existing Police systems that are inclusive of storage, network and compute elements and also support the accreditation of the architecture in step one.

“The team must also support user acceptance testing and Go Live activities during the development and transition of the system.”

The Home Office already has an existing AWS subscription in place and the new team will work out of offices in Croydon and Hendon and alongside a programme manager, project manager, an enterprise architect and a technical architect.

The closing date for applications is 28 August.

Security players should have a good time knowing that Gartner thinks that worldwide spending on products and services in that market will increase by 8.7 percent  next year.

Big G has been shuffling its tarot cards and predicts that spending will hit $114 billion this year, which represents a 12.4 percent increase, and that the momentum will continue into 2019. Either that or someone is going to meet a tall dark stranger next Tuesday.

There are several reasons for the ongoing growth, with GDPR among them, as customers continue to get on top of the European data protection regulations.

Garnter researcher and medium Siddharth Deshpande said: “Persisting skills shortages and regulatory changes like the EU’s GDPR are driving continued growth in the security services market. Security leaders are striving to help their organisations securely use technology platforms to become more competitive and drive growth for the business.”

Gartner has predicted that at least 30 per cent  of organisations will spend on GDPR related consulting and implementation services next year.

Along with established spending on alleviating risk, reacting to the business needs and industry changes there are signs that privacy is going to become major area of concern.

Security scans performed on 218,000 Magento ecommerce websites revealed 86 per cent are missing critical security patches

Cyber security consultancy Foregenix focused on SME company websites globally, including around 15,000 in the UK, also revealed 2 per cent of the websites analysed are compromised and were being harvested for their customers’ data.

Benjamin Hosack, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Foregenix, said: “The rise in cybercrime threatens to undermine confidence in e-commerce, especially in markets leading the way in online sales such as the US and UK. While heavy penalties by card providers put many smaller traders at risk.

“Magento and other e-commerce platforms release regular software updates in response to vulnerabilities. These security patches, if not used, can leave websites highly vulnerable to hacking.

“Online businesses often assume web developers and agencies take care of security. Design agencies are great at producing beautiful, transactional websites that sell, but their expertise on security issues generally isn’t as well developed. Agencies and their clients need to be aware of e-commerce security issues, as even a single breach can be devastating for a small business.

“Simple precautions can make a real difference to reducing a company’s risk from criminals such as changing default settings on the administration interface and using stronger passwords. Risk can never be entirely eliminated, so companies should also consider investing in a cyber insurance policy.”

QuantiQ has acquired the Dynamics business of Profile Enterprise Solutions which will see 40 Microsoft Dynamics partners move over to QuantiQ.

CEO Stuart Fenton claims  the move will bolster the firm’s recurring revenue as Dynamics is moving to a fully SaaS (software-as-a-service) application.

He said that the platform was updated each month and twice a year it goes through major updates.

“It rewards partners with much deeper skills and more scale to support the client, but I have never seen this relentless pace of development from Microsoft in the nearly 30 years I have been in the IT industry and I think the smaller firms are going to struggle to keep up. At Profile the owner recognised they were under scale and couldn’t achieve the success they wanted, so they started talking to us about how they can extricate themselves from the business. I think those trends will continue.”

QuantiQ expects the acquired business to have made a tangible contribution to QuantiQ, via recurring revenue, in around three years.

Fenton  said that QuantiQ will continue to eye up acquisitions of this nature, but added that the firm has tended to opt against full acquisitions.

Puzzel VP Sales Colin Hay has said that contact centres that blend technology with the human touch will reap rewards in the digital age.

He said that the rise of artificial intelligence solutions in contact centres continues to be a hot technology trend that shows no signs of slowing down. There is solid business reasoning for deploying bots because in today’s ‘always on’ environment customers expect 24×7 service through their preferred channel. Chatbots are a key component in deliverin real-time, on-demand approach that customers expect.

“Although technology has altered the way customers interact with contact centres, when it comes to complex interactions, person-to-person communication is still the channel of choice. Good customer service is not just about dealing with enquiries in a timely manner it is about resolving the issue to the customer’s satisfaction and to achieve that, it is important to understand the customer’s emotional state when responding to them. Agents that can understand how the customer is feeling and use that information to find the right words to influence a positive result are priceless”, he said.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, understand and manage our own emotions whilst identifying, understanding and influencing the emotions of others. This is a beneficial skill to have in any workplace but especially within customer service teams, thinks Hay.

Hay said some agents may naturally have high emotional intelligence, however with training it can be nurtured and therefore improve the quality of interactions between agents and customers.

Emotional Intelligence training provides agents with the knowledge and skills necessary to cultivate a higher empathy with customers. Understanding and engaged communication between agents and customers develop the right environment for better problem solving, Hay said.

“Another benefit of an emotionally intelligent workforce is the ability for employees to embrace and adapt to change. The traditional contact centre is rapidly evolving to respond to customer needs and as channels become more digitised, the role of agents will also change. An empathetic well trained workforce will be able to make the leap to higher skilled activities that deliver a more personalised customer centric and revenue rewarding approach.”

Customers often judge a successful interaction not just by the outcome but by how much effort is required on their part. Agents that can read the situation and manage their own emotions as well as the customer’s are extremely valuable in more complex cases, where out-of-the-box and creative thinking will dictate the customer experience, he added.

“Rather than bots and artificial intelligence replacing humans altogether, a more realistic scenario is a blended approach where technology replaces the mundane and transactional interactions. Technology is a fantastic enabler and by merging the best aspects of human agents with automated services like chatbots, contact centres can free up talented and professional agents to do their job even better. With the ability to access accurate information quickly, agents can focus on delivering a more personalised and sales focused service. A happy customer is a loyal customer and a happy motivated workforce is less likely to seek employment elsewhere,” Hay said.

While it is important for contact centres to remain relevant and integrate new, innovative technologies to enable more efficient business processes, it is also important to acknowledge the role that people play in a customer’s experience of a brand or company.

“When it comes to complex matters, the human touch is invaluable. With all the benefits that artificial intelligence and bots can deliver, it still cannot compare to the understanding and compassion of human agents. Why have humans who sound like robots when empowerment, training and coaching can make all the difference?” Hay said.

The UK’s Cloudreach is set to acquire Relus Cloud, a US born-in-the-cloud consulting services company.

Apparently the cunning plan is to boost Cloudreach’s  data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Relus uses data and analytics to focus on AWS adoption, migration and enablement.

The purchase will bring the UK cloud service provider’s global headcount to more than 700 across Europe and North America.

Aaron Painter, Cloudreach’s newly appointed CEO, said: “Cloudreach and Relus Cloud share a similar culture and a strong sense of purpose.

“Together, we have a significant community of cloud-native talent, proven solutions, and industry experience across North America and Europe.”

The purchase of Relus Cloud is Cloudreach’s third since investment firm Blackstone bought a majority stake in the company last year.

After the acquisition is formalised, Cloudreach plans to use its newest addition to scale “at a level that smaller boutique cloud consulting organisations cannot reach”.

A third of businesses in the UK have fessed up to not being compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

According to a survey conducted by Marketing Signals more than 37 percent of UK businesses admit to not being compliant with the new regulations, while 35 percent said they are still sending marketing emails without expressed consent from the recipient.

Gareth Hoyle, managing director at Marketing Signals, said: “The research shows there are many ways that businesses are admitting to not following the newly enforced GDPR.

“GDPR is the most fundamental change to ever happen to data privacy, so it is imperative that businesses follow this and complete the process as soon as possible.

“Businesses need to understand that acting responsibly and ethically with customer data is crucial to protect and enhance brand reputation and ensure customer trust. Not only this, but it will enhance the quality of data collected, which is a good thing for UK businesses.”

The research also found that 31 percent of respondents admitted holding the data of subjects who have not opted in to their data being stored.

More than a quarter admitted not having adequate cybersecurity protection in place in the event of a ransomware attack.