Category: News

IDE has reported a revenue of £65 million for its last financial year, thanks mostly to the three firms it acquired.

IDE, which  was formerly known as Cortex, saw sales for the year ending 31 December 2017 spike 50 percent on the previous year.

In 2016 the company bought Selection Services and C4L Group and took over 365 ITMS in a £4.6 million deal last April.

365 ITMS contributed £10.4 million to the overall revenue during the nine months it was under IDE’s ownership last year.

IDE’s interim chairman Bill Dobbie said: “2017 has been a year of continued investment and building upon the foundational work that commenced in 2016. Concurrently with this investment, we delivered 18 per cent organic revenue growth and achieved significant sales success.

“Fundamentally, this illustrates the competitiveness and relevance of our portfolio of products and services within our target market.

“Our intention for 2018 is to complete the integration of the three businesses we have acquired in the last two years, significantly reducing our cost bases and becoming more focused on sustainable, recurring margins than revenue growth.”

It was not all good news, IDE saw operating losses widen from £3.8 million in 2016 to £12.5 million last year.

The group said that in 2017 a number of high margin legacy contracts came to an end, and that a number of managed services contracts were one-off deals rather than recurring agreements.

IDE commissioned a “lifecycle facility” in Dartford, in response to demand from customers to refresh devices.

As a result of “disappointing cash generation” IDE embarked on what it referred to as a “major cost reduction programme” in January which will see it reduce overheads and shave £2 million from its personnel costs.

It added that further costs reductions will be necessary to make the business profitable .

Top Vole and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claims that the world is becoming a computer with computing getting embedded in everything that moves and somethings that don’t.

Talking to the assembled multitudes at Vole’s annual Build conference Monday, Nadella said that means that suppliers have a responsibility to protect people’s security and privacy, as well as to sustain and grow economic opportunity around the world.

“We have the responsibility to ensure that these technologies are empowering [everyone], that these technologies are creating equitable growth by ensuring every industry can grow and create employment”, he said. “But we also have a responsibility as a tech industry to build trust in technology.”

In his speech, Nadella said the shift to cloud and edge computing can be compared to the industrial revolution, where the period’s core technologies, such as electricity and internal combustion, weren’t something that could be seen. He called the opportunities in the growth of cloud and edge computing, “in some sense, endless”.

New applications, platforms and capabilities in cloud and edge computing were the primary focus of Microsoft’s announcements at the 2018 Build conference. They included the open-sourcing of the Azure IoT Edge Runtime, a new Speech Devices SDK and the Project Kinect for Azure sensor developer kit.

Nadella warned of creating worlds which could have been written by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, saying “none of us wants to see a future” that they imagined.  He quoted philosopher Hans Jonas, who once said: “Act so that the effects of your actions are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.”

“We need to develop a set of principles that guide the choices we make because the choices we make are going to guide our future”, Nadella said.

Xerox CEO Jason Jacobson and six board members are to remain at the vendor, despite a deal being reached with activist investors that would have seen them depart.

For those who came in late, the Xerox board and two activist investors (Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason) had a scrap over the outfit’s direction and an agreement was announced last week that would see Jacobson and a host of board members clearing out their desks, to be replaced by Icahn favourites.

But now  Xerox released a statement overnight claiming that this agreement has expired, meaning all leadership will remain in place.

Icahn and Deason have attacked the Xerox board for displaying “brazen self-interest”.

The statement said: “The settlement agreement we entered into with Xerox and a unanimous Xerox Board earlier this week expired without the Xerox Board permitting the agreement to take effect, once again intentionally violating their fiduciary duties to Xerox shareholders by pursuing their own brazen self-interest.

“This inexplicable turn of events occurred for one reason only: the Xerox Board recklessly refused to follow through with the leadership and governance changes we agreed to, demanding unprecedented additional approvals for their own personal self-interest.

“Over the next few months, we intend to see that ‘massively conflicted’ Jeff Jacobson and old guard directors like Bob Keegan, Ann Reese and Chuck Prince – who have already done so much damage to the company, and are continuing to do more damage with these actions – are held fully and personally liable for their misconduct.”

The dispute was largely a result of Icahn and Deason opposing the proposed merger of Xerox and Fujifilm.

The merger plans looked to be in ruins after the agreement between the investors and the board was reached last week, but is perhaps more likely now that Jacobson appears to be back in charge.

Fujitsu has launched a pilot programme that will enable service providers to have a crack at building their solutions.

The firm is aiming to increase its involvement with  MSPs and those using the scheme to encourage more to take its products out to market as part of a services proposition.

The Service Provider Programme pilot will run for a year as the vendor continues to step up its commitment to the channel.

The company said that the emphasis on collaboration and customisation is the main highlight of the MSP programme, which promises partners the chance to co-create solutions with the vendor.

It said that there were opportunities for partners in helping customers manage applications and data, infrastructure and next-generation solutions.

With more users looking for help with digital transformation projects the vendor would also be helping MSPs by developing that helped IT managers get a single view of their operations.

Fujitsu is looking at rolling out more products and services this year that lend themselves to an MSP approach, and Mclean said that it was building on positive momentum from last year.

The plan is to significantly grow the indirect share of the product business and take it from the current levels of around 65 percent up to 90 percent in the next six quarters.