Category: News

Large suppliers focusing on G-Cloud now

Posted on August 25, 2017 by - News

lightning-cloudWhile it was supposed to encourage small suppliers to bid for government contracts, bigger suppliers still managed to snaffle more than half of the G-Cloud contracts.

Large suppliers have taken 53 percent of the £2.4 billion spending all spending through G-Cloud and account for the lion’s share of spend through G-Cloud, according to figures from Crown Commercial Service (CCS) released today.

This is a significant jump on the 44 percent of spend large suppliers accounted for when CCS released data in January, when the overall sales figure stood at £1.7 billion.

A Cabinet Office spokesperson suggested that at least some of the difference could be explained by the fact that some SME suppliers on G-Cloud were reclassified following their expansion.

“We have improved the way we manage our data and we know that a number of suppliers have grown beyond SME status over the reporting period”, the spokesman said.

“Today we published figures that show SMEs have delivered over £1.2 billion of cloud and digital services for government and the public sector since 2012. This means that almost half of digital spend, or £1.39 in every £3, is going to SMEs – giving a major boost to the technology SME sector.”

It is also possible that larger suppliers are now beginning to take the government’s frameworks more seriously.
Larger suppliers had avoided the frameworks because they were public and that would mean showing their price lists to the public domain.

HP is now the bright star and HPE is the red-headed stepchild

Posted on August 25, 2017 by - News

Youre-adoptedWhen HP and HPE split, the smart money was on HPE cleaning up, while HP followed the death of the PC into oblivion.

However the latest figures show something strange has happened, and the hardware maker of expensive printer ink is doing better than its enterprise orientated evil twin.

HP third-quarter numbers saw revenue growth hit double digits and profits came in ahead of guidance. Meanwhile HPE has failed to meet expectations for four consecutive quarters. HP’s shares are up by almost a third and the latter’s down by nearly a fifth over the last year.

There really is no reason for this different. PC shipments are in the midst of a five-year slump, according to Gartner. Yet HP’s Personal Systems arm had a third straight quarter of double-digit revenue growth, with desktops returning to growth in the quarter.

CEO Dion Weisler said it reflected the reinvention of its product line in this area: “In calendar quarter two, we outgrew the PC market unit growth by 9.5 points year over year, remaining the number one global PC market share leader with 22.8 percent share.”

HP overall growth accelerated to 10 per cent year on year, compared with seven percent in its Q2, with growth achieved in both its Personal Systems and Print segments for a second consecutive quarter.

The printer market is also in the doldrums, but HP saw growth thanks to a 10 per cent hike in supplies sales, its Print arm grew sales six per cent year on year, and Weisler said HP Inc now has a 38.5 percent total print unit market share.

Weisler vowed that “profitable growth will continue to be our priority”, pointing out that its Personal System Group’s profits, margins and revenues all grew sequentially in Q3 despite the industry-wide component cost headwinds.

“We’ve been proactive with our ongoing productivity efforts, repricing actions and focus on product mix”, he said.

Weisler described Q3 an “outstanding quarter, showcasing strong execution of our strategy he added that the vendor is investing in “future categories”.

It had “raised the bar” in the premium segment with its new Spectre x2, adding that it had expanded its Omen gaming portfolio with a new virtual-reality backpack.

HP made its big entrance into the 3D print market last summer, and Weisler said the vendor has now amassed 45 resellers for the technology globally, as well as more than 20 Reference and Experience Centres. Its 3D print customers include Jaguar Land Rover, Flex and others in the automotive, pharmaceutical, government and education industries.

All up, it looks like HP is doing well.

Digital algorithmic trading firm buys two key competitors

Posted on August 25, 2017 by - News

Sports-TradexThe digital algorithmic trading company Sportstradex has bought rival sports trading software firms Algorbet and Global Sports Exchange in a deal speculated to be in excess of £32 million.

Both companies had developed digital algorithmic trading systems that many suspected were based on the pioneering SportsTradex algorithm source code that revolutionised the sports trading market in 2012. The exact figure for the purchase remains undisclosed.

Increasingly high levels of investment are being placed into the Sportstradex Digital Algorithmic Trading System, giving the company a substantial increase in worldwide market share.This unique trading system is designed to identify significant mispricing across several international sports betting exchanges, utilising historical sporting data and input from internal sporting analysts to deliver unprecedented returns for clients and investors.

Further acquisitions are apparently planned as this deal has given http://www.sportstradex.co.uk an opportunity to further dominate the sports trading market and is now firmly positioned as the nearest competitor to sports trading pioneers Star Lizard.

With plans already in place to acquire other rival trading software development companies over the course of the next 12 months, we are certain to see Sports Tradex dominating the badminton courts.

The sports trading market is now estimated to be worth over £1 trillion and with recent announcements from Former Major League Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent and his belief that sports betting will be legalised in the United States, this figure is only set to rise.

Experts predict that the legalisation of sports betting in the USA would be one of the biggest developments in sports since the introduction of television, or the invention of cricket.

Security skills shortage

Posted on August 24, 2017 by - News

securityIntelligence analyst Cybersecurity Ventures has warned that the cyber-security market is facing an “epidemic” skills shortage.

The California-based research firm has compiled a quarterly Cybersecurity 500 list since 2015, cataloguing what it sees as the hottest and most innovative industry leaders

Feedback from 2017’s top three – Herjavec Group, IBM Security and Raytheon Cyber has revealed growing concern over the widening gap between security threats, and the number of people qualified to tackle them.

The single biggest trend, globally, is that there are chronic work shortages of qualified cyber security staff. It’s an absolute epidemic, the survey found.

From the end of 2013 to 2015, Cisco published research on global cyber security that showed there were one million cyber security positions open globally and Cybersecurity Ventures’ own research suggests that this deficit become worse.

There is a predicted growth in cybercrime coming and by 2021, the company expects there to be 3.5 million vacant cybersecurity job openings.

“The pipeline of security talent isn’t where it needs to be to help curb the rise in more widespread, and more sophisticated, cybercrime.”

There are shortfalls in specialised education in information technology and computer science.

Out of the top ten ranked firms, seven are based out of the US; one in Canada; one in IT security hub Israel; and one UK outfit: Sophos.

Other UK high flyers include BAE Systems (14), BT (29), PwC (32), NNT (54) and KPMG (57). DFLabs in Lombardy, Italy was the highest-ranked continental European firm, at number 19.

Salesforce slags off rivals for abandoning CRM

Posted on August 24, 2017 by - News

Salesforce_Logo_2009Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has slagged off his CRM competitors for doing “a horrible job” which has cleared the way for his outfit to make a fortune.

The cloudy software vendor saw its revenue for the three months ending 31 July jump 26 per cent year on year to $2.56 billion – making it the first enterprise software company to hit $10 billion,.

However that would not have been possible, claimed Benioff, if Salesforce’s CRM rivals had not “abandoned” the CRM market.

“When you’re in enterprise software you have to realise, its hard work [and] not everything is going to be perfect all the time – there is going to be problems,” he said. “That’s why being so committed to the customer is more important than ever.

“I have to say our competitors have really done a horrible job in last few years. I just would say that a lot of them have abandoned the CRM market.

“If you talk to the major CRM analysts, and we do that, we just had one of them at our management conference, they are shocked. We’re shocked at how these companies have really walked out of the CRM market. Companies that had huge multibillion dollar positions in the CRM have conceded that market to us.”

Benioff said the actions of others in the market has created an “exciting” opportunity for Salesforce and its chums.

Dell EMC allows top partners to buy VMware software

Posted on August 24, 2017 by - News

michael-dell-2Dell EMC’s key UK partners are testing a scheme where they can buy VMware software from the vendor.

The big idea is that the vendor will make sure they can deliver a more complete solution by allowing its level one titanium and titanium black partners get access to VMware software.

Apparently, it is something the channel wanted so partners could combine that technology with the hardware it is selling from Dell and EMC.

The latest move will not have any impact on the VMware channel partner programme and Dell EMC’s distributors have been briefed on the plans and have reportedly given it their blessing.

Michael Collins, senior vice president for Dell EMC Channel Business in EMEA, said that it had always promised partners that it would be simple, predictable and profitable and it had to respond to the demand from its largest partners to make it simpler to add VMware to a converged solution sale.

The scheme is in pilot mode for the second half of this year and being run in the UK and France in Europe as well as the US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil with plans to potentially extend it to other countries in the future.

Most of those partners that will be eligible to buy VMware through Dell EMC are already selling the virtualisation software but will now have more choice about how they pull it all together.

 

Scots politicians slam Misco’s Scotland warehouse closure

Posted on August 23, 2017 by - News

scots angerInverclyde MP Ronnie Cowan has slammed Misco’s Scotland warehouse closure.

Cowan posted on Twitter that he was meeting with Scottish government agency Scottish Enterprise to discuss the issue – while also contacting skills and training agency Skills Development Scotland.

Misco wants to shut its Greenock warehouse at the end of the year, with all 65 warehouse staff set to be made redundant.

In other social media posts, the Scottish Labour Party’s political director Martin McCluskey criticised Misco bosses for the redundancies, claiming their rationale “doesn’t show much imagination about how [the] facility could be re-used to save jobs”.

Misco has since responded to Cowan and McCluskey on Twitter, offering them the chance to speak with the company.

A spokesperson from Cowan’s office said the MP is due to speak him either today or tomorrow, while McCluskey had not responded to CRN’s request for comment.

The company said the decision had been made to shut down the warehouse because it was no longer economic.  It was set up to ship 6,000 parcels a day and only does 400 and 500 parcels.

Misco is working with the Scottish agency PACE [Partnership Action for Continuous Employment], a Scottish Government initiative designed to help people into a new job, he added.

 

Cloudy Elastifile signs up BigTec

Posted on August 23, 2017 by - News

cloud (264 x 264)Hybrid cloud storage start-up Elastifile has signed BigTec as its first European distributor.

The Israeli vendor, which claims its software can help firms move to the public cloud and prevent cloud lock-in, has raised $65 million in funding over the last year, and launched a UK office in January.

Elastifile’s sales director Eddie Galvan said that BigTec’s success building sales for other storage start-ups made it a natural ally.

“We want to successfully penetrate not just the UK market but the European market: we’ve signed an agreement with them across Europe. I’d describe them as an unconventional distributor, meaning they roll up their sleeves and actually generate opportunities and really assist in the sales effort.”

Elastifile’s software is designed to remove barriers for businesses moving to public cloud, and prevent cloud lock-in, by providing a menu of integrated public cloud access.

Resellers with customers that are moving to the public cloud are finding that one of the biggest inhibitors is that they have to re-factor their applications in order for them to run in AWS or Google, or move to a new application, which can be costly and time consuming.

“We enable their customers to move those workloads to the public cloud without this, then save them money on resources in the public cloud when running those applications there, and thirdly, enable them to avoid getting locked into cloud vendors like AWS, by providing the ability to seamlessly move back if needs be,” he said.

Elastifile is backed by Dell, Cisco and Lenovo and has the bandwidth to take on 10 reseller partners across the region. The vendor wants to have another round of funding at the back-end of 2017 aimed specifically at scaling out its sales and channel teams.

Platinum Equity wants to buy Pattonair

Posted on August 23, 2017 by - News

shark_attack_painting-t2 (1)Platinum Equity has signed a definitive agreement to acquire global aerospace and defence supply chain provider Pattonair from Exponent Private Equity.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close during the fourth quarter of 2017.

Headquartered in Derby, Pattonair is a global supply chain provider boasting a 40-year history. The company supports blue chip engine and airframe manufacturers and MRO customers with tailored supply chain management solutions. It offers a global service though dedicated facilities in Singapore, China, Poland, Brazil, Canada and five cities in the United States.

Platinum Equity Partner Louis Samson said:  “Pattonair is a well-respected business with a proven management team and strong long-term customer relationships. We share the company’s commitment to exceptional customer service and look forward to partnering with Wayne and Pattonair’s leadership team to pursue additional growth, both organically and through prospective add-on acquisitions.”

Pattonair CEO Wayne Hollinshead said Pattonair and Platinum Equity were a great fit.

“This is exciting news for our company and our customers and we are thrilled about the prospect of partnering with Platinum Equity. Platinum has exceptional operational and M&A capabilities, a strong presence in Europe and a track record of helping portfolio companies reach their full potential.”

Pattonair represents Platinum Equity’s latest European investment, joining Exterion Media, Worldwide Flight Services, Terratest and Ecka Granules in the firm’s global portfolio of operating companies.

Samson said Europe is an important focus for Platinum Equity as it continues deploying its most recent fund, Platinum Equity Capital Partners IV, a $6.5 billion global buyout fund.

“We have more than 20 years of experience in Europe, a dedicated team in London and our portfolio companies employ more than 16,000 people in the region,” said Mr. Samson. “We have the capital base and the depth of experience to continue growing our European portfolio and will remain very active in this market.”

Government warns that company security is rubbish

Posted on August 22, 2017 by - News

fail-sleeping-security-guards12The government has warned that the UK has “a long way to go” to making its cybersecurity any good.

A survey, conducted by KPMG on behalf of the government, found that 68 percent of board members at the UK’s 350 biggest companies have received no training to deal with cyber incidents.

This is despite the fact that more than half thought cyber attacks were a top risk for their business.

The government’s minister for digital, Matt Hancock, said: “These new reports show we have a long way to go until all our organisations are adopting best practice and I urge all senior executives to work with the National Cyber Security Centre and take up the government’s advice and training.”

The government did see a silver lining in the report – 53 percent of businesses are claiming they are putting cybersecurity measures in place, up from 33 percent last year.

The government also highlighted the encouraging response to survey questions regarding General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), with 97 percent of respondents saying they are aware of the impending legislation.

However, just 13 percent said GDPR was a regular topic of conversation in board meetings, with only six percent claiming to be fully prepared for the May 2018 implementation date.

150 suppliers awarded a spot on government framework

Posted on August 22, 2017 by - News

ukflagOver 150 suppliers have been awarded a spot on the new  government framework which could net them up to £3 billion in government contracts.

Crown Commercial Service (CCS), which runs the Technology Services 2 (TS2) framework, sent out intention to award notices to successful suppliers and started a standstill period. About 162 suppliers are set to be awarded a spot on the framework when the standstill period ends, with 15 bidders not making the cut.

The framework will see a range of IT services provided to central and local government and is estimated to be worth of £1-£3 billion.  Prevous frameworks have only managed £200 million which was awarded to 85 suppliers.

TS2 is broken down into four Lots, with Lot 3 and Lot 4 broken down further into sub-categories. Suppliers had been left waiting by CCS, with intention to award notices missing their estimated receipt date of 7 August.

A Cabinet Office spokesperson confirmed that the CCS was behind schedule, but added that the notices would be sent out by the end of the week.

 

Misco to close UK warehouse

Posted on August 22, 2017 by - News

il_570xN.386643874_phvgReseller Misco is to close its UK warehouse at the end of the year.

The outfit said that the rise of drop-shipping has decimated its usage and made it inefficient. Instead it had a cunning plan to save a minimum of £1.5 million a year by outsourcing its warehouse functions to a third-party logistics provider.

Misco’s CEO Alan Cantwell confirmed that all 65 warehouse staff at the 80,000 sq ft location will be collecting their p45s and pink slips.

The existing 24 sales staff will relocate to a new office nearby in Q1 of 2018, he said.

Cantwell led a management buy-in of Misco in March and the move is part of the new team’s efforts to return it to break even after group losses reached about £16 million last year.

Some 105 UK staff have already left the business under a recent sales and marketing restructure, while headcount at Misco’s Budapest shared service centre has also been slashed from 340 to 200.

The logistics centre there was set up to ship 6,000 parcels daily, and at present the company is only shipping between 400 and 500. This was mostly because it is drop shipping pretty much everything and most parcels now go straight from logistics through to the clients.

Misco is in the throes of negotiating a contract with a third-party logistics provider which will take over the functions before Christmas. Its shortlist has been whittled down to two, with a decision set to be made in the next week.

ConvergeOne buys Strategic Products and Services

Posted on August 21, 2017 by - News

Finding-Nemo-Shark-Wallpaper-HDConvergeOne has written a cheque for $300 million for networking Strategic Products and Services (SPS). outfit

The move makes ConvergeOne into the ranks of billion-dollar solution providers. John McKenna, ConvergeOne’s chairman and CEO said that the acquisition advances the company’s strategy to continue to grow ConvergeOne’s managed services and cloud solutions.

“With this acquisition, ConvergeOne gains scale, portfolio expansion with a growing video solution, additional managed services, and technical resources backed by decades of experience and certified expertise,” he said.

SPS had been owned by private equity outfit Court Square Capital Partners since September 2011. As part of Clearlake Capital-owned ConvergeOne, the company will now go to market as SPS, a ConvergeOne Company.

The 800-person SPS practice will be led by John Lyons, president and CEO of ConvergeOne’s Avaya-focused Enterprise division, Clark said. The current SPS CEO, Ed Nalbandian, will be leaving the company. Nalbandian joined SPS in September 2016 as its COO and was promoted to the CEO role just four months ago.

SPS’s Avaya and Cisco practices will provide ConvergeOne with much more scale as it relates to technical expertise, professional services and managed services around those vendors. The company has hundreds of engineers and tons of certifications focused on those vendors.

Cisco and Avaya together comprise approximately 60 percent of ConvergeOne’s total product sales, Moody’s Investors Services wrote in May 2017. Similarly, SPS is a Platinum Avaya Partner, a Premier Cisco partner, and a Microsoft Gold Communications partner, according to the company’s website.

Both companies focus primarily on medium and large enterprises, Clark said, and derive a large percentage of their revenue from professional, managed and cloud services. SPS holds more than 3,000 technical certifications, Clark said, and the company combined will enjoy relationships with roughly 300 IT vendors.

ConvergeOne has grown its headcount over the past two nearly by nearly 25 percent – or 150 workers – to a staff size of 800, according to LinkedIn. The company just last month bought Cisco Gold Certified Partner Annese & Associates, No. 226 on the 2017 CRN SP 500, to boost its public cloud capabilities. SPS, meanwhile, has gone through a lot of executive transition recently, with Tom Praschak holding the
CEO role for just 11 months before leaving the company in November 2016 and becoming interim CEO at Harrisburg, Pa.-based Essintial Enterprise Solutions. Following Praschak’s departure, former SPS CEO Tom Poole filled in on a temporary basis until Nalbandian’s April 2017 promotion.

Like SPS, ConvergeOne has made some acquisitions in recent years. The company purchased managed services and collaboration provider Spanlink in October 2014 and cloud computing and data analytics firm SIGMAnet, No. 131 on the 2015 CRN SP 500, in December 2015.

Ex Infosys boss goes Kali about company founder

Posted on August 21, 2017 by - News

Statue of Hindu goddess KaliInfosys CEO Vishal Sikka resigned unexpectedly Friday, penning a three-page rant about his long-running feud with the Indian IT outsourcing company’s founder.

Sikka wrote in the letter: “Over the last many months and quarters, we have all been besieged by false, baseless, malicious and increasingly personal attacks. The continuous drumbeat of distractions and negativity over the last several months/quarters inhibits our ability to make positive change and stay focused on value creation.”

Infosys COO U.B. Pravin Rao was named as interim managing director and CEO of the Bengaluru, India-based systems integrator. Rao will report to Sikka, who will serve as executive vice chairman until a permanent CEO takes office, which Infosys said is expected to happen no later than March 31, 2018.

However the rant makes for interesting reading:

“I cannot carry out my job as CEO and continue to create value, while also constantly defending against unrelenting, baseless/malicious and increasingly personal attacks. After much contemplation, I have decided to leave because the distractions, the very public noise around us, have created an untenable atmosphere.”

The company’s board backed Sikka and deflected criticisms made by company founder and former chairman NR Narayana Murthy, who claimed in recent emails that Infosys’ independent directors felt that Sikka was more CTO material than CEO material.

“The Board is profoundly distressed by the unfounded personal attacks on the members of our management team that were made in the anonymous letters. The Board denounced the critics who have amplified and sought to further promote demonstrably false allegations, which have harmed employee morale and contributed to the loss of the company’s valued CEO.”

Murthy fired back several hours later, noting that he voluntarily left Infosys’ board in 2014 and was not seeking any money, power or positions for his children. Murthy has in the past questioned pay raises granted to Sikka and Rao, as well as the size of severance payments given to others.

“I am extremely anguished by the allegations, tone and tenor of the statement,” Murthy said in his response. “My concern primarily was the deteriorating standard of corporate governance, which I have repeatedly brought to the notice of the Infosys board.”

CEOs coming around to computer security idea

Posted on August 21, 2017 by - News

BouncerFoxFeatureIt seems that CEOs are finally getting the message that they will have to invest in cyber security.

Bean counters at KPMG found that many feel an investment in cyber protection is a revenue opportunity.

The KPMG CEO Outlook 2017 asked 150 CEOs for their thoughts about security and found that 70 per cent viewed it as a chance to find fresh revenue streams and innovate, rather than an overhead cost.

The survey also found that CEOs are also becoming more comfortable with the idea that they personally had a responsibility for ‘mitigating cyber risk’.

Paul Taylor, UK head of cyber security at KPMG said that it was good that business leaders are finally seeing cyber security investment as a positive figure on the balance sheet rather than a negative one.

“More needs to be done to make sure their businesses are prepared for  a cyberattack, whether it’s from external sources or even insiders,” he said.

The warning that came with the KPMG findings was the continued lack of investment in cyber security with many CEOs admitting that they were not fully prepared for business data theft or an employee-led data breach.

The combination of positive feelings about the potential of security to drive revenue and the need for further investment should be a perfect storm for those in the channel with the right skills.

“With recent high profiles attacks like Wannacry hitting the press, cyber security should be on every CEO’s radar. Businesses now need to match their investment in innovative technology with their investment into cyber security, in order to stay one step ahead of cyber criminals,” added Taylor.