Category: News

Land Register goes digital

Posted on April 6, 2018 by - News

400_news_imageCoventry Building Society and Enact Conveyancing had signed a digital mortgage for a property in Rotherhithe, South East London in what is the first digitally signed mortgage deed filed into the Land Register.

The organisations used the “Sign your mortgage deed” service from HM Land Registry, which requires the mortgage applicant to have an account with the government’s identity service, Gov.UK Verify.

The move is crucial as it shows how deeply digitisation is going into the UK civil service.

The government claimed that, in future, it shouldn’t be necessary “for a witness to watch as the homeowner applies an ink signature to a paper mortgage deed”, and then sends it in the post to the conveyancer or solicitor.

It believes that digital mortgages will be more efficient and secure for homeowners, lenders and conveyancers. The new service is part of an ongoing digital transformation of HM Land Registry with the aim of implementing “quicker and simpler digital services and improved use of technology” and “making transactions instantaneous where possible”.

“This fully-digitised journey will mean that a customer can sign their mortgage deed online at a time and place of their choosing, securely underpinned by the GOV.UK Verify platform.”

Pitney Bowes teams up with digital snapper Alaris

Posted on April 5, 2018 by - News

19th-century-photographerPitney Bowes is teaming up with Alaris and secured Premiere Partner status in the Alaris Partner Programme.

The collaboration, which covers the UK market, will combine Alaris’ portfolio of document scanners, capture software and service, with Pitney Bowes’ existing range of physical and digital technologies to automate business processes and accelerate digital transformation initiatives.

Commenting on the partnership, Alaris Marketing Manager Owen Balloch, said: “Successful digital transformation requires an integrated approach to information management. The journey starts with information capture – however, the scale and complexity of data today require a holistic solution, to help organisations not only capture, but to process, store and share all of this information. As a Premiere Partner, Pitney Bowes will play a vital role in the IN2 Ecosystem through their ability to connect, configure and create new solutions that meet customer needs.”

Ryan Higginson, VP SMB Solutions at Pitney Bowes, said: “Our clients are at different stages of their digital transformation journeys, but they’re all facing the same challenge of digitising documents in a secure, accessible way. The partnership with Alaris extends our portfolio and widens choice for clients, helping them accelerate their digital transformation programmes.”

Higginson continued: “This collaboration is a perfect example of our ‘client first’ approach – we listened to what our clients need for their organisations and sought a partnership which would help us deliver exactly that.”

DXC buys eBecs

Posted on April 5, 2018 by - News

Finding-Nemo-Shark-Wallpaper-HDDXC Technology has written a cheque for Chesterfield Microsoft partner eBECS.

DXC was formed last year when Hewlett Packard Enterprise span off its services business and merged it with CSC. Chesterfield-based eBECS took on investment from DXC’s predecessor in 2016, but will now become part of DXC’s Eclipse practice.

The services giant has also acquired Melbourne-based Sable37, another Microsoft Dynamics 365 partner with the aim of enhancing its Eclipse global business..

DXC Technology senior vice president Troy Richardson said: “The acquisitions of eBECS and Sable37 will enhance our ability to address client needs and add significant value to DXC’s Eclipse global business.

“It allows DXC to expand and enhance its cloud-first business with software, services, systems integration and cloud offerings – particularly in financial services, retail, manufacturing and public sector verticals.”

eBECS CEO Kevin Hall said: “This is a truly exciting time for our customers, our team of professionals, and the Microsoft community in our regions.

“DXC’s maturity as a global systems integrator and respected Microsoft partner is an ideal fit for eBECS. Being part of DXC means having the strength and certainty of a long-term business partner with the global infrastructure, high-calibre resources and experience to allow us to lead our customers on their digital transformation journeys .”

 

Intel flogs Wind River

Posted on April 4, 2018 by - News

217ba0277f5d3df269c8e25024247c2e--victorian-london-victorian-lifeIntel is flogging its industrial Internet of Things software provider Wind River to private equity firm TPG Capital.

Wind River said the transaction would result in it becoming independent. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed, and the deal is expected to close in the second quarter.

It is a little odd for Intel to dump Wind River which has been a player in the industrial IoT market and a strategic priority for Chipzilla.

However, Tom Lantzsch, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s IoT group, said the sale of Wind River is “designed to sharpen our focus on growth opportunities that align to Intel’s data-centric strategy”. Words, words, words.

“Wind River will remain an important ecosystem partner, and we will continue to collaborate on critical software-defined infrastructure opportunities to advance an autonomous future. We expect this transition will be seamless for our mutual customers and partners.”

An Intel spokeswoman claimed the sale of Wind River doesn’t run counter to the company’s strategic focus on IoT, adding that the company “will continue to be an important industry partner”.

Wind River is part of Intel’s Internet of Things Group, whose annual revenue grew 20 percent to $3.2 billion last year, but the subsidiary has been a small percentage of that business group, according to a source close to Intel. The company declined to break out Wind River’s sales but said it is profitable.

Chipzilla acquired Wind River in 2009 as part of its effort to grow beyond the PC and server markets. The business, which had been operating somewhat like an independent subsidiary, was then fully integrated within Intel in 2017 as part of an effort to better align Wind River with other Intel groups.

 

Commsworld has record £15 million revenue

Posted on April 4, 2018 by - News

PIC PHIL WILKINSON info@philwilkinson.net www.philwilkinson.net 01316186373 - 07740444373 Scotsman business interview pics. Ricky Nicol , Chief Executive of the telecoms company Commsworld.Scottish telco Commsworld has reported record revenue of over £15 million thanks to getting several large public sector deals.

Commsworld – which has offices in Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh – saw turnover for the year ending 31 December 2017 jump 15 per cent to £15 million and is expecting to hit £20 million in its current year.

Ricky Nicol (pictured), chief executive of Commsworld, said: “It has been a terrific year and it’s a testament to the hard-working team we have that we’ve enjoyed this record year of growth. We’re all delighted that 2017 has been the best year in our history. After deciding to provide a personal and tailored service to businesses, we’ve seen more and more clients join us or choose to renew their contracts with us.”

One of the bigger deals was a contract with Glasgow City Council which will see the 23-year-old comms firm transform Glasgow into “one of the world’s most digitally advanced cities”.

It will also roll out an IP telephony solution to more than 16,000 council users.

Intel rebranding sparks hopes for boost to channel sales

Posted on April 4, 2018 by - News

wintel_blimp_featureIntel is launching a new brand for its eighth-generation Core processors and the hope is that it could boost PC sales.

Chipzilla said that the new brand is an Intel Core platform extension that will promote the bundling of the i5, i7 and i9 processors with the performance-boosting Optane memory module that Intel announced a little over a year ago. These processors that come with Optane memory bundled are receiving a modified naming convention: i5+, i7+ and i9+.

Optane memory was previously only compatible with Kaby Lake.

The company showed off the first eighth-generation Core i5, i7 and i9 processors for laptops and a new set of 300-series motherboards. In addition, the company announced Coffee Lake processors for Intel’s vPro platform that provides PC remote management and other features for enterprises.

Intel has been pitching the new Core i+ products as a complete new brand which will be promoted as a retail box that comes with the processor and Optane memory that bears the Core i+ brand. Intel will also promote the brand by offering Core i+ badges to system builders and other solution providers who are selling systems that come with either an i5, i7 or i9 CPU and Optane memory.

The brand could ultimately help partners, because it will force customers to badger the channel with questions about  how it will help them.  Intel appears to be putting a lot of emphasis into trying to drive the replacement cycle and Optane is a way to do that.

Chipzilla appears to be  chucking a lot of cash into the Core i+ brand.

Optane memory is based on the 3D XPoint nonvolatile memory technology developed by Intel and partner Micron Technology that can speed up the performance of hard drive disks. With a 32 GB Optane memory module running on the Core i7, Intel promises speeds of up to three times faster for opening large media files, up to 3.9 times faster for loading video games and up to 2.1 times faster for everyday tasks.

 

 

Softcat hits market value parity with Computacenter

Posted on April 3, 2018 by - News

manchester-office.e305cf8ca08d97fb61c0d5bde3cc9a88Softcat’s market value has hit parity with its larger rival Computacenter.

Softcat’s market capitalisation stands at £1.34 billion compared with £1.32 billion for Computacenter.

Softcat’s revenue run rate is close to 1 billion with its recently posted interim results showing 1H 2018 revenues powering up 25 percent to £472.8 million. Its shares have more than doubled since it listed on the LSE in November 2015.

Of course, Softcat is smaller than Computacenter in almost every respect, but it is nice to know that the market value numbers are the same.

The company’s long-standing CEO Martin Hellawell has announced that he is retiring from the role and is stepping back to the non-executive chairman role to make way for his chosen successor Graeme Watt.

IBM speeds up cloud access

Posted on April 3, 2018 by - News

ibm-officeBiggish Blue has launched new Cloud Object Storage services to speed up how documents get onto clouds.

Writing in his bog Philip Buckellew, general manager of Cloud Object Storage at IBM, said that the new service would speed data transfer and gain ‘instant insights’ from that data.

Through a partnership with Aspera, IBM is previewing the new high-speed data transfer option; it claims that transfer rates are as much as five hundred times faster than standard HTTP/FTP.

“Businesses have moved 100TB of data in 24 hours over a 10Gbps network”, Buckellew wrote in his blog.

Aspera’s direct-to-cloud technology, which protects data in transit, is built into IBM’s Cloud Object Storage.

 

Verizon tweaks partner programme

Posted on April 3, 2018 by - News

verizonVerizon is rolling out a new fees structure from 2nd April in a bid to get new partners and better serve its global systems integrator plans.

It has created a US style master agent model for agent, and service provider businesses and provided increased flexibility for its channel engagement models.

Verizon will also roll out more favourable fees at least for its US agents, now matching total billed revenue, and it will provide extended resources in the country to address customers’ changing requirements.

As part of its international expansion plans, Verizon will be on the lookout for more partners across the world, to grow its reach beyond the United States. This will enable the company to push its non-network based services further afield, including its networking, machine-to-machine (M2M), advanced communications and security solutions.

SMB Partner Channel for Verizon Business Markets director Bill Hooper said the outfit was deeply committed to helping connect our members with the right resources to address customer needs.

“As our programme expands, we felt it was time to take it to the next level. Our updated model enables us to work with customers as effectively and efficiently as possible. We view this as a natural evolution of our programme, and an obvious step to help our VPP members and customers. This program was designed to respond to the way companies buy technology solutions in today’s marketplace.”

 

Microsoft’s pay gap better than average but still pretty terrible

Posted on March 30, 2018 by - News

glass-ceiling_1Microsoft’s female UK staff are paid on average seven percent less than their male counterparts, which is depressingly better than the rest of the overall workforce.

The government’s Gender Pay Gap report legislation, enacted last year, requires all firms with over 250 employees to disclose their pay gaps and Vole revealed that the mean hourly pay of its female staff is 6.55 percent lower than its male staff. The median figure stands at 8.42 per cent.

Although this sounds pretty bad, the overall gap in the UK national workforce is 17 percent. Vole also has significantly lower pay discrepancies than the rest of the UK.

In its gender pay gap report, Microsoft revealed that 26.5 percent of its UK workforce is female.

However, that percentage falls to 18.2 percent for technical roles and 22.9 percent among its leadership team. The bonuses Microsoft gave its female employees last year also trailed those handed to males by 11.22 percent.

Vole said that the reason there is any difference is probably due to having more men in its senior echelons but also highlighted the worrying lack of females choosing to study IT.

“To be successful in reducing the gender pay gap, we need to acknowledge the industry-wide challenge we face for available skills,” the report stated. This year, the number of female IT graduates in the UK dropped from 16 percent in 2016 to 15 percent in 2017, with a similarly disappointing picture of just 14 percent female graduates in Engineering and Technology. In 2017, just 10 percent of the entrants for A-level computing were female.

“This, combined with an industry average of 26 per cent female representation in the technology industry workforce, indicates a clear need to invest further in the future skills, talent and leadership pipeline for our industry.”

Microsoft is running a DigiGirlz programme, which is designed to provide secondary school girls with a better understanding of what a career in technology is all about by inviting them to spend a day at our UK headquarters.

Microsoft’s UK Boss Cindy Rose said that throughout her career, she had been a passionate advocate for women in the workplace.

“This is an issue of critical importance to me and to Microsoft. And, while I’m encouraged by the progress we are making on gender equality and representation, we still have a long way to go. We can always do more, and I feel the urgency to do so.”

Partners make money living on the edge

Posted on March 30, 2018 by - News

edge 620_1Aruba Networks founder and president Keerti Melkote told the assembled throngs at Aruba Atmosphere in Las Vegas that partners who have been given a good kicking from the move to the cloud are seeing a new opportunity for cloud-based profits.

Melkote said that there had been a timeline in the networking trends biz from centralised with the mainframe from 1960 to 1970, distributed with client-server from 1980 to 2000, centralised with mobile and cloud starting in 2005 and distributed with edge intelligence beginning in 2020.

The market’s next step is a return to the edge, where the client-server architecture needs to be reimagined in the context of the Internet of Things, where devices, like self-driving cars, function in constrained environments lacking elastic compute and storage.

Melkote said that the investments that everybody is making in Silicon Valley and beyond is going into building this next-generation architecture that is edge-centric. “And the edge and the cloud are going to be cooperating and working together to enable this next level of intelligence in our infrastructure.”

But while this may present solution providers opportunity, Melkote stressed they would also need technical skills to integrate services to solve customer’s business problems, as well as expertise in edge computing, security and software.

Over the next year Aruba will look to evolve from a provider of wireless networking to a more holistic provider of edge infrastructure – wireless, wired, compute and storage delivered through software-defined architectures. This will be combined with more software and services-centric approach, as opposed to hardware.

IT staff expect pay increases this year

Posted on March 30, 2018 by - News

Oliver_Twist_-_Samhällsroman_-_Sida_005Beancounters from Robert Walters have been asking around and discovered that 59 percent of IT professionals are expecting their salaries to rise in 2018 and more than half of them want a bonus for their efforts.

Robert Walters Associate Director, Ahsan Iqbal, said that IT and technology professionals are well aware that their skills are highly sought after across a wide range of industries, particularly those specialising in cyber security and web development. As a result, they have high expectations regarding salary increases.

Iqbal said: “Demand for specialists across cyber security and development has been high for the past few years, driven by the rising threat of cyber-crime and the drive towards digitalisation projects. As a result, salaries for IT and tech professionals are already at a notably high level as employers compete to secure top talent. However, with demand for these skills remaining high, IT professionals still expect employers to offer increases in remuneration.”

The majority of employers plan to increase salaries for IT professionals, with 43 percent planning increases of 1-3 percent and 29 percent planning increases of 4-6 percent. A third have no plans to increase remuneration which might see them losing IT staff.

These employers will have to consider alternative strategies in order to attract and retain IT professionals in a highly competitive market.

Ahsan Iqbal continues: “Particularly for smaller firms, meeting the salary expectations of IT specialists may be challenging, with large multinational firms out competing them in terms of remuneration. However, this may not necessarily be a barrier to securing top talent. Increasingly, IT professionals are emphasising the importance of a good work life balance when considering a role. By embracing flexible working strategies and putting policies in place to allow staff to work remotely, employer may be able to gain an edge over competitors.

“In addition, the potential for career progression is a high priority for many IT specialists. By demonstrating a commitment to providing training and offering professionals the chance to develop their careers, businesses can attract top calibre professionals.”

Intel claims support for data-centric plans

Posted on March 29, 2018 by - News

brian-krzanich-trumpChipzilla supremo, CEO Brian Krzanich, thinks Wall Street is starting to understand the company’s true potential with its move to a data-centric strategy.

In a recent interview CNBC’s “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer conducted with Krzanich on March 15 he said that despite the company’s issues with Meltdown and Spectre, Intel has fared relatively well on Wall Street, with the company’s stock price up roughly 13 percent since the beginning of this year.

“As we move to a much broader data-centric strategy, I think Wall Street’s just now starting to believe and understand just what that means — and you see it in our stock price, right? You see people believing in that.”

Krzanich downplayed a report that Intel was preparing a bid to acquire Broadcom before the competitor’s plan to buy Qualcomm was squashed by the Trump Administration.

“I can’t speak about rumors, but I can tell you we made two big acquisitions, biggest acquisitions in Intel’s history with Altera and Mobileye”, Krzanich told Cramer. “We’re heads down on making those successful, and they’re our growth engines for the future.”

Atmosera sees increasing cloud compliance and security business

Posted on March 29, 2018 by - News

56f884651f7b35416b9b4ca955d350b3--pom-pom-mobile-cloud-mobileAtmosera has said that it is seeing enterprise cloud security and compliance adoption increasing as the market wants more cloud-based systems.

For those who came in late,  Atmosera is a  Tier-I Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP).

Apparently, there is increased adoption of its cloud security and compliance solutions as companies gravitate toward cloud-based environments for their mission-critical applications. The governance and security of modern IT environments are increasingly lacking for on-premise environments which are creating a coverage gap. As a result, the demand for cloud-based alternatives from CSPs like Atmosera is on the rise.

AtmoseraVice President of Information Security & Chief Information Security Officer Ray Espinoza said that companies are under pressure to implement a better Information Security posture to preserve the integrity of their data and applications which are critical to their business success.

“Staying abreast of all possible IT-related threats, and the means to counter them has become paramount for any company and not just those who are in regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services. We have a deep understanding of enterprise-level cloud security and continue to rapidly evolve our services to stay on top of the evolving threat landscape and ensure our customers have the best possible solution.”

 

Polycom sold to Plantronics for $2 billion

Posted on March 29, 2018 by - News

His_Master's_VoiceHeadset maker Plantronics has written a $2 billion cheque for Polycom.

This is the second time in 18 months that Polycom has been sold.  It had been under the countrol of private equity firm Siris Capital.

Plantronics claims the acquisition will create “the broadest portfolio” of complementary products and services in the UCC market.

The deal will consist of an estimated $690 million of net debt, roughly $948 million in cash and 6.35 million Plantronics shares. Plantronics claims the deal is likely to close in the third quarter of this year.

Ironically, Plantronics’ offer at $2 billion represents the exact same valuation given by Siris Capital, when the private equity firm saw off a $1.96 billion takeover attempt by UCC vendor Mitel in July 2016.

The deal was not particularly loved by some Mitel partners who thought Polycom’s videoconferencing products were”legacy technology”.

Plantronics claims the acquisition will enable the firm to “capture additional opportunities” in a UCC market worth $39.9 billion, in addition to giving channel partners an expanded services offering with a “meaningful presence” in management and analytics services.

Plantronics CEO Joe Burton said: “With the addition of Polycom’s solutions across video, audio and collaboration, we will be able to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of communications and collaboration touch points and services to our customers and channel partners. This will put Plantronics in an ideal position to solve for today’s enterprise collaboration requirements while capitalising on market opportunities associated with the evolving, intelligent enterprise.”

Polycom generated revenues of $1.14 billion in 2017 and an operating profit of $94.8 million. Plantronics claims the deal will help it achieve annual run-rate cost synergies of $75 million within 12 months of the transaction’s close.

Polycom CEO Mary McDowell said that Polycom has returned to growth by focusing on building strong ecosystem partnerships and delivering innovative, smart solutions for our customers and partners.

“Bringing Plantronics and Polycom together will broaden the breadth of solutions available to customers and partners and create a consistent end-user experience across many collaboration applications and devices. As one company, Plantronics and Polycom will make it even easier for all customers to solve big-business problems through human-to-human connection,” she said.

There has been a lot going on in the UCC space. Mitel acquired rival ShoreTel last year, Avaya entering Chapter 11 last January before re-emerging as a public company a year later, and Extreme Networks snapping up business units from Avaya and Brocade.