Category: News

Blue Blue blames Brits for poor results

Posted on July 20, 2017 by - News

ukflagIBM has seen its revenue decline for a 21st consecutive quarter and it is blaming the Brits.

For the three months ending 30 June, IBM saw revenue drop five per cent to $19.3 billion, while gross profit was down 9.4 percent to just under $8.7 billionn.

On a geographical basis, IBM again blamed the UK and Germany for bringing down overall performance in Europe.

IBM however pointed to the areas of the business it classifies as “strategic imperatives” as a true reflection of the company’s future direction. These parts of the business – namely cloud, analytics, mobile and as-a-service offerings – saw year-on-year revenue growth of five percent to $8.8 billion.

IBM CFO Martin Schroeter said: “We’ve been focused on helping our enterprise clients transform their businesses to leverage their data for competitive advantage and to improve the efficiency and agility of their IT environments. Our strategic imperatives performance has been an indication of our progress in moving to these areas.

“Our clients are taking the productivity savings we’re delivering to them in the more traditional areas of IT and reinvesting those savings to move into these new areas; these are the dynamics you’ve seen in our revenue.”

IBM saw year-on-year growth in its cloud business of 15 percent, up to $3.9 billion, but the Technology Services and Cloud Platforms division which encompasses cloud saw revenue drop five percent to $8.4 billion.

Declines in revenue were also seen across Cognitive Solutions, Global business Services, Systems and Global Financing.

IBM however highlighted revenue growth in its analytics and mobile businesses, which grew four percent and 27 percent respectively. Revenue from security was also up four percent.

 

All software will soon have an AI component

Posted on July 19, 2017 by - News

robby the robotAnalyst outfit Gartner group believes that by 2020 all software will need some form of AI component and software resellers will need to be ready.

Big G claims market hype and growing interest in AI are pushing established software vendors to introduce AI into their product strategy, but this is creating considerable confusion in the process.

Gartner research vice president Jim Hare said that as AI accelerates up the Hype Cycle, many software providers are looking to stake their claim in the biggest gold rush in recent years.

“AI offers exciting possibilities, but unfortunately, most vendors are focused on the goal of simply building and marketing an AI-based product rather than first identifying needs, potential uses and the business value to customers.”

Gartner predicts that AI will be a top five investment priority for more than 30 percent of CIOs by 2020.

There is a widely held fear that AI will replace humans, the reality is that today’s AI and machine-learning technologies can and do greatly augment human capabilities, stated Gartner.

Machines can do some things better and faster than humans can and, once trained, the combination of machines and humans can accomplish more together than separately, suggested the research house.

“Software vendors need to focus on offering solutions to business problems rather than just cutting-edge technology. Highlight how your AI solution helps address the skills shortage and how it can deliver value faster than trying to build a custom AI solution in-house.”

 

Inspur announces M5 based servers

Posted on July 19, 2017 by - News, Products

bb6ca181438a098828227500ef8b4accInspur officially announced its new generation of M5 series server platforms.

The new M5 series family, designed based on different deployment and application scenarios, includes four major product groups (General Purpose, Enterprise, Application Optimized and Converged Architecture Series), 35 products, for cloud computing, big data, AI to provide customers with excellent and robust computing performance as well as reliable and efficient business protection.

General Purpose Series Servers and Enterprise Series Servers have enhanced RASUM (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability, Usability and Manageability) features are integrated to provide ERP, CRM and other traditional enterprise applications with strong, reliable and flexible supportive platforms.

The outfit’s new M5 Application Optimised Series Server meets the needs for computing-intensive applications and data-rich applications. In this group, some servers are designed for cloud data centers.

And some are designed to manage big data, deep learning and other emerging data-rich applications. All these servers provide physical storage capacity and heterogeneous computing power far better than general products. For example, the NF5288M5, a purpose-built deep learning server, offers superb performance for extreme AI computing and HPC mission.

Converged Architecture Product Series is the next generation data center modular solution. The physical indicators, including product performance density, storage density and energy efficiency, as well as the scalability of computing, storage, I/O and other various resources are far superior to traditional servers.

The new M5 series family is equipped with multi-dimensional automatic management solution, and supports OpenBMC and Redfish, the two standard management API interfaces. Inspur also participates in all Open Data Center Projects, which include OCP, OCS, ODCC, Open19.

 

PKWARE does deal with Digital Pathways

Posted on July 19, 2017 by - News

181551Data security outfit PKWARE has announced a new value added partnership with Essex-based Digital Pathways

Digital Pathways, established in 1997, specialises in data protection and cyber security. The company works with companies to ensure the safety of their data and their compliance with applicable regulations.

PKWARE CEO Miller Newton said that Digital Pathways’ expertise in ensuring businesses have the correct data security infrastructure in place is a perfect match for PKWARE’s encryption and persistent data-protection solutions.

“We are thrilled to be able to work together to provide stronger data security offerings for customers to protect their sensitive information, intellectual property, reputation and brand.”

Under the deal, Digital Pathways will be authorised to sell the Smartcrypt product suite. PKWARE will leverage Digital Pathways professional services for assessments, design, configuration and implementation. The partnership will benefit customers across the financial, manufacturing, healthcare and central and local government sectors in need of a defence-in-depth data protection strategy to ensure sensitive data is fully protected against both insider and external threats.

Digital Pathways Managing Director Colin Tankard said PKWARE’s global business data protection products, such as secure mail, file and cloud encryption, will broaden Digital Pathways’ “ability to truly protect our clients’ data wherever it resides and enable the company to integrate with other solutions that may already be in place”.

Huawei about to crack firewalls

Posted on July 19, 2017 by - News

huawei-liveHuawei has been named as a potential challenger in the enterprise firewall market.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant report assesses vendors based on two criteria: completeness of vision and ability to carry it out.

Big G has moved Huawei was moved to the Challengers slot due to its position as a major player in the global firewall market as well as its innovative dimensional defence system consisting of high-performance hardware NGFWs, cloud-based virtual firewalls, and cloud sandboxes.

NGFWs are becoming rather important for security minded corporations.

Kevin Hu, President of the Huawei Switch & Enterprise Gateway Product Line, said: “We think that Huawei’s promotion to Challenger is a high recognition of Huawei’s persistence in providing customers with ACTUAL (Application, Content, Time, User, Attack and Location) awareness-based NGFWs.

“It’s also a recognition of Huawei’s efforts in joint innovations with industry customers, handling new security challenges, and holding fast to continuous product R&D investment. As cloud computing is gaining momentum, the range of attacks targeting enterprise infrastructure continuously expands, and enterprises are facing an increasing number of unknown threats. Enterprises need on-demand security protection capability, orchestration and scheduling, and the network security defense systems based on AI, and machine learning to proactively defend against unknown threats. Huawei is in the process of building service-based, intelligent, and automated next-generation network security and develop intelligent network-wide detection and proactive defense systems for enterprises.”

According to the Gartner said that many enterprises were looking to firewall vendors to provide cloud-based malware detection instances to aid them in their advanced threat detection efforts, as a cost-effective alternative to stand-alone sandboxing solutions.

” By integrating cloud-based sandboxing inspection services, Huawei NGFWs can inspect millions of files per day and detect zero-day vulnerabilities around 30 hours earlier than the average in the industry. Enterprise customers can rapidly obtain the latest threat intelligence worldwide as well as online security service support for deep inspection on suspicious traffic to perform proactive defense against unknown known and unknown threats,” the report said.

Revenue from 2015 to 2016 of Huawei firewalls saw a higher growth rate that year than any competing vendor in the industry. Huawei NGFWs are serving more than 100,000 enterprises in over 70 countries to help customers building a proactive, network-wide, and intelligent threat detection and defence system for digital transformation.

Sabio acquires DatapointEurope to expand footprint

Posted on July 18, 2017 by - News

giantfootprintSabio has written a cheque for DatapointEurope as part of a cunning plan to give it a bigger European footprint.

Sabio sees itself as a significant European customer experience managed service player. The exact terms of the deal were undisclosed but described as a “multi-million pound acquisition” for a business that when combined with Sabio creates a £60 million revenue business.

Sabio wants to double the size of its business through both organic growth and acquisition and got a boost with an investment from Lyceum Capital last year. Last year it added SaaS specialist Rapport and has been developing its own skills in house.

DatapointEurope  gives Sabio a continential presence and takes the enterprise customers up to 250, across three continents.

Sabio’s CEO Andy Roberts said: “Geographical expansion is critical to Sabio’s growth plans, so the acquisition of DatapointEurope – with its broad reach across Europe and the Americas – is an important next step for the company.”

Ericsson sulks over results

Posted on July 18, 2017 by - News

ericsson-logoEricsson President and CEO Börje Ekholm had a Nordic sulk over his companies results and said he was not satisfied with the outfit’s underlying performance.

Ericsson saw continued declining sales and increasing losses in the quarter and while its brand new business strategy was gaining traction, there will need to be some costs cut.

“We will accelerate our actions to ensure that we can meet our target of doubling the 2016 operating margin beyond 2018. Actions will be taken primarily in service delivery and common costs and do not include R&D,” he said.

Sales adjusted for comparable units and currency declined by 13 percent. Based on the development in the first half of the year, Nokia’s current view of the Radio Access Network (RAN) equipment market outlook is in line with external estimates of a high single-digit percentage decline for the full year 2017.

“Considering the current market environment, the company position, and the more focused business strategy, we continue to assess risk exposure in ongoing contracts. Depending on the outcome, we see an increased risk of further market and customer project adjustments, which would have a negative impact on results, estimated to SEK 3-5  billion. for the coming 12 months, of which 30 percent is estimated to impact cash,” Ekholm said.

The decline in the Networks result in the quarter was mainly caused by lower software sales, driven by two key factors; unusually strong software sales in the second quarter last year and cautious mobile broadband investment levels. On the positive side, Ericsson did well in radio.

He said that Ericsson will improve its Networks will be generated through both the continued ramp-up of Ericsson Radio System (ERS) and cost reductions, mainly in service delivery. The ERS continues to prove its competitiveness and now represents 49 per cent  of radio unit deliveries in the quarter. During the quarter, we announced a break-through contract to support Vodafone UK to evolve its 4G network and to provide 5G radio technology. To safeguard a future leading portfolio, we have started to increase R&D investments in Networks.

“In line with our more focused strategy, we signed an agreement in the quarter to divest the power modules business.”

IT & Cloud had another challenging quarter with significant losses. The sequential increase in losses is largely explained by lower capitalization of R&D expenses. Gross margin continued to be negatively impacted by large digital transformation projects, he said.

Sales decreased by eight percent. The RAN equipment market for 2017 is estimated to show a high single-digit percentage decline compared with previous estimate of two to six percent.

Gross margin, excluding restructuring charges, was 29.8 percent. Operating income was $140 million.

 

Oracle announces 1,000 new sales jobs

Posted on July 18, 2017 by - News

oracleOracle has announced 1,000 new jobs in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Under the ‘Change Happens Here’ banner the company is hunting for sales representatives to support its Cloud computing business.

The move comes on the back of the company recently posting record financial results with total cloud revenue up 58 percent.

Oracle claims it is the fastest growing scaled cloud company and thinks its cloud business will accelerate into hyper-growth in the current year.

Oracle wants to recruit candidates with a strong sense of personal drive and the ability to successfully sell some of the world’s most exciting  cloud technologies.

Candidates can apply immediately for a range of positions throughout EMEA, by visiting the ‘Change Happens Here’ page – oracle.com/experience. Oracle is looking for graduate level candidates who have a genuine interest in technology and the passion for the transformation cloud computing can bring to enterprises.

Tino Scholman, VP of Oracle Cloud in the EMEA region, said: “Our cloud business is growing at incredible rates, so now is the right time to bring in a new generation of talent to our company. We are looking to hire relationship focused people who are self-motivated and smart, who thrive for business transformation for our customers and love delivering great results. Diversity is one of the cornerstones of the unique Oracle culture. We want to offer 1,000 talented individuals the opportunity to change their career for the better, to access the best possible training and development, as well as the chance to accelerate their career within the fastest growing Cloud company at the centre of a generational shift to digital enablement.”

Ci Distribution signs a trio of new partnership agreements

Posted on July 18, 2017 by - News

satanic pactBasingstoke-based Ci Distribution has been doing several new deals to boost its portfolio.

Ci has signed deals with gaming memory brand Ballistix, hardware manufacturer Cooler Master, and Wi-Fi connected home devices iBaby.

Paul Reynolds, North Europe Channel sales manager at Ballistix said: “By expanding its gaming offering with the inclusion of Ballistix memory into its portfolio, Ci-Distribution will help bring the proven performance and reliability of Ballistix to gamers across the UK. As a brand of Micron, Ballistic owns an inherent advantage in design, technology, and manufacturing that can’t be replicated. Ballistix memory is trusted by PC gamers and pro eSports teams around the world and is the only major brand of gaming memory that builds and tests products from start to finish. Our partnership with Ci-Distribution will help to deliver brand awareness within the gaming reseller channel by working together to create unique, personalised campaigns through our Micron Partner Program.”

Katie Pinnock, UK country manager at Cooler Master said: “Cooler Master are extremely excited to bring on CI Distribution as one of our main partners. The industry is excited to see CiD fight and win business to live up to their reputation, therefore Cooler Master feel privileged to be a part of this journey. Cooler Master are going through a very exciting time, with new releases and great products; we are definitely getting our name back to where it used to be – with CI’s help we believe we can be the best!”

Elnaz Sarraf, president at iBaby noted: “After four years of developing connected family devices, we’ve expanded our product line to include the entire home with AirSense. AirSense is the one device that will give families the peace of mind they deserve, knowing they are breathing the cleanest air possible. The air purifier and VOC sensor allow families to live happier and healthier lifestyles by eliminating unhealthy, and often undetectable impurities in the air. A partnership with Ci Distribution will greatly help us grow our market share and brand awareness in the entire UK. We are excited for the opportunity that this partnership will bring us.”

Ci Distribution business Manager Iain Gillagoley said: “The announcement of these further three new partnerships is really exciting for Ci Distribution as our vendor portfolio continues to grow from strength-to-strength. All three companies offer market leading and innovative products that we are proud to bring to our expanding UK customer base.”

 

Blockchain will transform the financial services market

Posted on July 17, 2017 by - News

531596-web-1-0Those businesses who flog Blockchain tech in the financial services market are going to clean up, according to a new market intelligence report by BIS Research.

The report with the catchy title ‘Blockchain Technology in Financial Services Market – Analysis and Forecast: 2017 to 2026’ , claims blockchain could lead to a per-year cost savings of $6-8 billion in KYC/AML, $30-40 billion in trade finance, and $50-60 billion in capital markets.

Blockchain is seen as one of the most disruptive technologies to hit a number of industries including financial sector. This is being driven mainly by the increasing need to acknowledge the inefficiencies in the existing technologies and processes in the industry and increasing mistrust of the consumers in the financial services market, post-2008 economic recession.

For those who came in late, a blockchain is a distributed digital database that records and maintains a list of all transactions taking place in real time.

Each blockchain record is time stamped and stored cryptographically, which is tamper-proof and immutable. While the use cases of this technology are largely being explored across different industries such as healthcare, real estate, media and travel, and hospitality among others, the financial institutions have been the front runners in the development of blockchain technology and have already implemented a host of successful use cases, ranging from pre-IPO trading platform released by NASDAQ to cross-border payment platform created by Ripple.

By cutting out the middlemen and increasing the efficiency, blockchain is anticipated to cut the transaction and infrastructure costs by over 50 percent for finance companies. Consequentially, leading financial institutions and banks, including Citibank, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Barclays among others, have all taken the steps to deploy the technology.

Due to the large scale investments being poured into the blockchain technology by venture capitalists, financial institutions and private equity firms, hundreds of start-ups have emerged in this space, spanning across use cases such as cross-border payments, supply chain management, trade finance, asset management, capital market post-trade solutions, identity and authentication, insurance, and lending among others.

The potential of various benefits such as cost-cuts, the elimination of intermediaries, the increased transparency and security among others, presented by this technology have impelled the companies to explore the technology. The financial push from financial monoliths coupled with the rising support from governments and central banks across countries are the key factors driving the growth of the blockchain technology.

According to BIS Research Analyst Shazlie Khan: “The blockchain technology could save the financial institutions over $40 billion per year in infrastructure, IT, operational, third party fee, and administrative personnel costs.”

The blockchain industry witnessed a pivotal change for the future of its market in June 2017, when this technology entered into the mainstream financial services, with IBM building blockchain for seven of Europe’s biggest banks, which are Deutsche Bank, HSBC, KBC, Natixis, Rabobank, Societe Generale and Unicredit, in the area of trade finance. This agreement marks one of the first real-world use cases of blockchain technology in financial services, and will pave the way for further development and expansion of the blockchain technology market across the globe.

The report presents an in-depth analysis of the various factors governing the growth of the market in addition to the Porter’s five forces analysis, gauging the competitive attractiveness of the industry. The key strategies and developments segment has been added in the report to provide the readers with the recent strategic activities of the leading industry players in the market.

Doomed Entatech was nearly sold

Posted on July 17, 2017 by - News

indexEntatech was close to being acquired before it went bust, with a prospective sale falling through on the day it was set to complete, according to an administrator’s report.

The adminstrators, KMPG, said that the preferred bidder pulled out of the deal on the day it was set to complete (5 May).

Entatech went into administration in May, after failing to secure a buyer following a sale process. However it was a near run thing.

The Entatech received interest from 130 investors and 30 trade parties, 17 partners expressed and interest and 10 signing non-disclosure agreements.

By the 21 April offer deadline there were two bids, including one from Entatech’s management, before a third bid was made on 26 April – which went on to be the preferred bid.

KMPG said that an acceptable offer was negotiated, contracts were progressed to final draft and solicitors were in funds.

“Completion was set for Friday 5 May 2017, but unfortunately the bidder confirmed on this date that it could not complete.”

Entatech went into administration and its assets were acquired by managing director Dave Stevinson’s GNR Technology.

According to the administrator’s report preferential creditors will be paid in full, while unsecured creditors are expected to receive a dividend of an unspecified amount.

James Bond joins the security Q

Posted on July 17, 2017 by - News

james_bond_movie_poster_006GCHQ’s Cyber Accelerator programme is looking for UK-based cybersecurity start-ups who can be shaken but not stirred.

The programme will help start-ups develop security software into fully fledged commercial products and connect them with tech experts across GCHQ itself and the National Cyber Security Centre.

The spooks originally selected seven vendors for the first phase of the scheme in January, but has now extended the programme to nine months and is encouraging another wave of start-ups to apply.

The first seven vendors have raised more than £2.7 million in investment, the government said, and have won deals with tech giants including Cisco.

Matt Hancock, minister for digital, said: “We are working hard to make Britain the best place to start and grow a digital business, and the safest place to be online.

“The GCHQ Cyber Accelerator is a vital part of this work and has already helped some of the most innovative cyber security start-ups develop cutting edge new products and services. I’m pleased to announce the programme is being extended and encourage the nation’s talented entrepreneurs to apply.”

Channel invests a fortune in digital transformation

Posted on July 17, 2017 by - News

magician-portrait-290The channel is investing in technology to ensure it has a better future under the new wave of digitial transformation.

Research commissioned by Agilitas has found that innovation projects cost channel leaders on average £66,587.74 last year and that figure is expected to rise by 50 percent by 2020.

Technology innovation was the main area of spending, followed by solutions, business analytics and contracts as the channel looked to make sure it continued to be ahead of the game.

Agilitas CEO Shaun Lynn said that as the industry faces disruption, complacency doing the same thing is no longer an option.

“What has been clear over recent years is that there is demand for us to continue to adapt our offerings as the needs of the technology industry and business community evolves,” he said.

His advice was for the channel to make sure that they create environments where they can be open to encouraging, accepting and developing fresh ideas.

“As a result, creating and fostering a positive environment, where new ideas are trialed and embraced is set to be critical as we approach 2020, particularly if the current levels of uncertainty continue to be seen across the market,” he said.

The research revealed that many channel firms were hiring and around a third were prepared to invest in training that would encourage innovation and just over a quarter were happy to explore employee ideas.

“It is critical to understand that the only thing in the channel that remains constant is change. As an industry, we need to make sure that challenges are met with creative new ideas. Our research has highlighted positive movement, and I expect to see continued investment growth as we approach 2020,” Lynn said.

There have been warnings to the channel that it needs to invest in digital transformation to make sure it can convince customers that the skills and knowledge is there to help them.

 

Nadella joins the chorus singing the Channel’s praises

Posted on July 17, 2017 by - News

satya-nadella_650x400_81496331285Software King of the Solar System with exclusivity on the rings of Uranus, Satya Nadella, has been praising Microsoft’s channel to the skies.

Talking to the assembled throngs at the Inspire conference, Nadella thanked Microsoft partners for their commitment and underlined a world of opportunities that they can exploit thanks to digital transformation

Nadella talked about a ‘paradigm shift’ that is being driven by digital transformation. Apparently these rogue paradigms are not the enemy of humanity which need to be defeated by a new female Dr Who but are opportunities for the channel.

The Microsoft CEO told 17,000 partners that Microsoft had an ethos of being partner-led and it will be there in everything it did.

“We see a real rapid shift to a new paradigm that we describe as the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge,” which he said would be defined by three characteristics: everything will be multi-device and multi-sense, be infused with AI and the need for more application development and management.

“With increasing digitisation where every part of our economy is being transformed by digitisation the opportunity is greater than it ever was before,” he said.

He added that Microsoft had always been at the forefront of industry developments being there to democratise the PC, then mobile, the cloud and now the intelligent cloud era. “Being in this industry and being in this ecosystem the opportunity is tremendous.”

He said that it had taken the lessons of the last couple of years and had used that to change how it built its products and developed its go-to-market and partner experiences.

Infosys first quarter revenues grew 3.2 percent

Posted on July 14, 2017 by - News

infosysudacityOutsourcing King Infosys saw its first quarter revenues grow sequentially by 3.2 percent with a six percent improvement on last year.

The outfit announced that its revenues were $2,651 million for the quarter ended June 30, 2017 and its operating profit was $638 million for the quarter ended June 30, 2017.

Infosys CEO Dr. Vishal Sikka said that the company’s focus in Q1 is reflected in broad-based performance on multiple fronts- revenue growth, resilient margins despite multiple headwinds, healthy cash generation and overall business results.

“I am encouraged by the uptick in revenue per employee for six quarters in a row, and the strong momentum in our new high growth services and software, as we accelerate our focus on innovation-led growth. The widespread adoption of our grassroots innovation and education initiatives continue to fuel our transformation, and I am proud to see Infoscions embrace and drive Infosys towards becoming a next-generation services company.”

The company saw broad-based growth across geographical and industry segments and the bottom line was helped by new services and software offerings.

Company Revenues are expected to grow 6.5 percent to 8.5 percent and the moves towards automation and innovation such as Cloud Ecosystem, Big Data and Analytics, API and Micro Services, Data and Mainframe Modernisation, Cyber Security and IoT Engineering Services will grow.

Infosys is also expecting good things from its next-generation AI Platform Nia which was launched in April.