Category: News

BT wins big Boots contract

Posted on March 8, 2016 by - News, Products

boots_1419530bBT has won a big contract to provide the underling infrastructure for Boots as it prepares to push forward with an ‘omni-channel’ strategy.

Boots has contracted BT to overhaul its IT infrastructure in the UK and the rest of Europe as part of a wider digital transformation. It wants to get better at omni-channel retailing, it thinks that is where the money is.

The high street retailer will soon be bringing in more ways for customers to interact with the brand online and in-store. And new voice and communications technologies for staff will also be introduced.

Boots has a lot more network requirements and a lot more bandwidth requirements – with that goes resilience.

“If you become dependent on digital tools in-store, you don’t want those things to be unavailable.”

BT will roll out dedicated fibre Ethernet services and copper-based networks to flagship stores, improve internal systems, and shops will have a “future-ready” network to adapt to new technologies. This should also speed up in-store processing time for pharmacy orders, stock replenishment and booking appointments.

Currently the outfit has a lots of different legacy systems – in data, in data centres, networking and other infrastructure. So the company was after a way to centralise network services in one place, in a way that was better for security and application control.

It is also an early adopter of BT Connect Intelligence IWAN. It’s a managed service that allows for automatic routing and optimisation of network traffic, and the intention is to provide more visibility on applications performance.

Boots tried several contractors but BT came out on top in terms of reliability and for its innovations like IWAN. It was also a good deal money wise.

 

HPE lets 1000 Enterprise Services staff “go”

Posted on March 7, 2016 by - News

INDUSTRY HP 1HPE is planning to tell 1,000 Enterprise Services staff to clean out their desks and pick up their P45s in the UK.

Most of the cuts are in the Infrastructure Technology Outsourcing (ITO) department where 780 people are at risk.

Staff in the UK were sent an “internal use only” memo on Friday afternoon revealing that hundreds of them could be out of work by the end of April. Of course if you send an email like that out someone is certain to leak it.

This is the second jobs warning at HPE. In January. HP told 166 ITO employees in England that they would be fired. Those at-risk workers are based in HP Enterprise’s Lytham site in Lancashire, and they provide infrastructure services for public-sector clients, including the UK government’s Department for Work & Pensions.

Today’s email to ITO staff is headlined “management update” and was written by Maurice Mattholie, ITO VP in UK and Ireland. It reads:

“I am writing to inform you of the Company’s proposal to implement a Workforce Management (WFM) programme in Q2 FY16. As announced by Meg, Hewlett Packard Enterprise needs to create a more efficient and accountable organisation to ensure a healthy long term sustainable business, with a market competitive cost structure, that will help the company transition to the new style of business.

It is important to point out that we are fully committed to continuing to use redeployment and voluntary exits to manage WFM in the UK and Ireland. It is expected that up to 780 positions within ITO will be impacted through WFM in Q2.

Whilst I appreciate that this announcement may cause concern I am committed to providing regular updates to ensure that everyone is kept informed. Thank you for your continued professionalism at this time of uncertainty.

This comes as HP Enterprise prepares to relocate all ITO roles in the UK to its offices in Cobalt, Newcastle, and Erskine in Glasgow. HPE, which employs about 240,000 people globally, has vowed to axe up to 30,000 workers worldwide over the next couple of years.”

Another  memo sent today to HPE UK staff, Jacqui Ferguson, senior VP for HP Enterprise Services in UK and Ireland, said that:

“In the UK, part of our strategy for Enterprise Services is to move more delivery services to both our Regional Delivery Centres (RDCs) in Erskine and Newcastle and to our Global Delivery Centres (GDCs). In aligning to this strategy in the UK, we have started consultation on our plan for the reduction of additional roles during Q2, with the UK trade unions and HPE employee representatives in the Enterprise Services Business Units.

We’d like to assure you that we remain committed to supporting the employability of our employees through a number of internal initiatives, including re­skilling, redeployment and support to obtain alternative employment, as appropriate.”

Needless to say that morale at HPE is gutted and the fact that the company is doing well now that it has off-loaded its profit sapping PC side means that few could understand why it is happening.

 

90 percent of ERP projects will fail

Posted on March 4, 2016 by - News

Epic_FailResearch outfit Gartner has warned that 90 percent of ERP projects will fail because of integration disorder, greater complexity and cost by 2018.

It warned that nine out of 10 ERP projects will end in failure by 2018 as end users struggle to contend with the increasing complexity of “post-modern” ERP. .

Big G has urged systems integrators to “raise their game” as postmodern ERP represents a shift away from a single-vendor “megasuite” towards a “more loosely coupled and federated ERP environment”.

Despite this shift, by 2018 some 90 percent of firms will lack the ability to integrate postmodern applications, resulting in integration disorder, greater complexity and cost, Gartner said.

Carol Hardcastle, research vice president at Gartner said that this new environment promises more business agility, but only if the increased complexity is recognised and addressed.

The systems integrator partners responsible for rolling out ERP solutions need to take at least some of the responsibility, she said.

Hardcastle said ERP projects are still often compromised in time, cost and business outcomes more than 25 years after hitting the market.

“The focus of postmodern ERP is on improved business agility and flexibility, for example through deployment of solutions and services that are better targeted at the business capabilities and address other needs such as user experience,” she said.

 

Cisco unveils DNA

Posted on March 3, 2016 by - News, Products

DNA_000046710792_640Networking outfit Cisco is launching of an extensible and software driven architecture for digital business solution, Digital Network Architecture (DNA).

Cisco DNA is part of the company’s datacentre based Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technology by extending the policy driven approach and software strategy throughout the entire network.

Cisco enterprise products and solutions senior vice-president, Rob Soderbery, said this extends it from campus to branch, wired to wireless, and core to edge.

Cisco DNA is part of the Cisco ONETM Software family which his supposed to simplify software-based licensing, and helping with investment protection and flexibility.

Soderbery said that Cisco DNA was built on the principal of virtualising everything that moves to allow organisations freedom to run any service anywhere, independent of the underlying platform – physical or virtual, on premise or in the Cloud.

DNA is designed for automation to make networks and services on those networks easy to deploy, manage and maintain, fundamentally changing the approach to network management.  It also has pervasive analytics to provide insights on the operation of the network, IT infrastructure and the business.

He said service management can be delivered from the Cloud to unify policy and orchestration across the network.

It also integrates Cisco and third party technology, open APIs, and a developer platform to support an ecosystem of network-enabled applications

Dell shuffles his leadership deck

Posted on March 2, 2016 by - Moving People, News

Dell logoTin box shifter Michael Dell has emailed his company, to talk about the organisation’s leadership team after it acquires EMC.

What is telling is that the future does not include Joe Tucci who is EMC’s president and chairman and the bloke who took the company onto the cloud route.  Tucci had indicated he wanted to clean out his desk sooner rather than later and is expected to retire.

“This new organisational structure will be effective immediately following the completion of the transaction. I want to thank Joe Tucci for his insights and assistance,” Dell said.

Meanwhile Dell said there was strong progress on our plans to combine Dell and EMC … The transaction is on schedule under the original timetable and the original terms.”

The mail goes on to name the following new leadership team:

Jeremy Burton, Chief Marketing Officer, responsible for brand, events, marketing analytics, digital and communications.

Jeff Clarke, Vice Chairman and President, Operations and Client Solutions, responsible for Global Supply Chain and End User Computing organisations.

Howard Elias and Rory Read, Co-Chief Integration Officers, for the Dell|EMC integration.

David Goulden, President, Enterprise Systems Group, responsible for global infrastructure organization including servers, storage, networking, converged infrastructure and solutions.

Bill Scannell, President, Enterprise Sales, will report to Goulden and lead the global go-to-market organisation serving Enterprise customers.

Dell added: “I am also establishing an executive group, which will include the presidents of our business units and go-to-market organizations. The executive group will include: Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware; Mike Cote, President and CEO, SecureWorks; Rob Mee, CEO, Pivotal; and Rodney Rogers, CEO, Virtustream. This group will collaborate on innovative and differentiated solutions, optimize our operations to increase the speed and agility with which we serve our customers, and find ways to work together more efficiently and effectively as an organisation.”

Rodney Rogers, CEO of Virtustream, Amit Yoran who will be president of RSA, and Rohit Ghai, who scored the gig as president of the Enterprise Content Division.

Marius Haas will be president and chief commercial officer, responsible for the global go-to-market organisation serving Commercial customers.

Steven Price will lead HR and Karen Quintos will be “chief customer officer, “responsible for leading revenue and margin-enhancing programs, ensuring a consistent customer experience across multiple channels, and driving strategies to strengthen and build profitable customer relationships. Karen will also lead Corporate Citizenship, including social responsibility, entrepreneurship and diversity. John Swainson will remain at the helm of Dell Software, and Suresh Vaswani will keep his gig at the head of Dell Services.

Tom Sweet will be CFO.

Dell adds security add-on service

Posted on March 1, 2016 by - News, Products

michael-dell-2Tin box shifter Dell has announced an add-on service to its SonicWALL firewall product.

The cloud offering, called the SonicWALL Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Service analysies files and traffic for threats using three filter engines.

These engines are the VMRay third-generation Analyzer, Lastline Breach Detection platform and the Dell SonicWALL Sonic Sandbox.

Dell thinks that, combined, they deliver better protection against the growing prevalence of zero-day attacks which are designed to evade sandboxes like badly behaved kittens.

In addition to having multiple analysis engines, the solution has hypervisor-level analysis and full-system emulation.

Dell’s system sends suspicious files to the cloud for analysis and there is no limit on the file size so it can capture a lot of malware in its net. Once a threat has been detected, Dell sends remediation signatures through its existing solutions.

Dell thinks that it can block malware at the gateway, and provide a much more effective protection of the network.

The Dell SonicWALL Capture ATP Service solution is currently available as a beta and will be available for purchase “by mid-year 2016.”

Windows 10 not helping to push PC sales

Posted on February 29, 2016 by - News

screen-shot-2015-11-02-at-81934-amThe maker of expensive printer ink, HP’s  Chief Executive Dion Weisler, said that Windows 10 was not helping push PC sales.He said that Windows 10 hasn’t delivered and there is not enough demand for Microsoft’s new OS to help HP survive in a declining PC market.HP delivered the first earnings report since its split. HP reported a 12 percent drop in revenue to $13.9 billion, and a 16 percent drop in continuing operations to $700 million. Virtually every meaningful segment of the business reported declines, including revenue and earnings in both its printer and PC businesses.

He blamed Microsoft which he said that made a  tremendous operating system platform, and universal apps and Continuum computing but failed to stimulate demand.

“We’re carefully monitoring any sort of price development that could further weaken demand,” Weisler said.

HP sold 14.2 million PCs during 2015, but still saw its market share drop by 10 percent—and it ranked second in worldwide PC sales behind Lenovo, according to IDC.  If HP can’t rely on Microsoft to provide the killer app, it might be its own PC future is limited.

Palo Alto Networks gets high with a little help from its friends

Posted on February 26, 2016 by - News

ST-605Cyber security company Palo Alto Networks reported higher than expected second quarter results thanks to its partnerships which have been getting its foot in the door with companies and governments.

Palo Alto, which went public in 2012 and provides internet security and malware analysis products, has been grabbing market share from traditional firewall suppliers. Palo Alto recently boogied with Honeywell to protect industrial facilities and also signed a deal with peer Proofpoint to jointly provide security services to customers.

Palo Alto forecast a third quarter profit of 41-42 cents per share and revenues of $335 million-$339 million. Analysts thought the figure would be about $334.6 million.

The outfit is still running at a net loss of $62.5 million from $43 million. Revenues rose to $334.7 million from $217.7 million, above analysts’ expectation of $318.3 million.

Salesforce does better than expected

Posted on February 25, 2016 by - News

Salesforce logoSalesforce reported higher than expected quarterly revenue and raised its full-year revenue forecasts.

In a statement the outfit said that customers were stepping up purchases of its web-based sales and marketing software despite economic uncertainty.

Salesforce is becoming a barometer for the cloud-computing sector. It has done well as companies wanted cheaper and easier cloud-software services.

Salesforce highlighted new or expanded deals with customers such as Charles Schwab, the financial-services company, and consumer-goods maker Unilever.

Chief Financial Officer Mark Hawkins on a call with analysts that while the papers seem to be full of doom Salesforce has not seen an economic impact.

Part of the reason, executives said on the call, was that Salesforce often skipped over the information technology department, an area where flat spending is expected this year, and sold to other departments.

Some technology companies that have flagged potential weakness this year sell infrastructure equipment or other products that typically fall under an IT budget.

The company raised its full-year revenue forecast to $8.08 billion-$8.12 billion, from $8.0 billon-$8.1 billion.

In the fourth quarter ended January 31, revenue from sales cloud – a suite of software that allows companies to track leads, forecast and collaborate around sales opportunities – rose 12.3 percent to $708.9 million.

The net loss narrowed to $25.5 million, or 4 cents per share, from $65.8 million, or 10 cents per share, a year earlier.

Revenue rose 25.3 percent to $1.81 billion, above analysts’ estimate of $1.79 billion.

UK government delays Digital Services and Outcomes framework

Posted on February 24, 2016 by - News

delayed-train-sign-web-370x229A last minute hiccup means that resellers will not be able to use the government’s Digital Services and Outcomes framework until mid-April.

For those who came in late, the framework will allow smaller resellers to compete with bigger operations for lucrative government contracts. The framework is in place, but government buyers have been hit with a delay to a landmark framework which means they will be unable to procure from it until the middle of April.

It was supposed to go live on Monday and was supposed to replace the much hated Digital Services Framework. The latter project was killed off at the end of last year after some suppliers joined forces to moan about it.

At the time they said that it procured IT in a way which only considered a provider’s individual staff skills, not what the company as a whole could offer.

So far no reason has been given for the delay but said it wants to “make sure we meet the user needs. Working on the buying journey and building the minimum viable product has been our priority since the framework opened,” it said.

Apparently the government has been testing prototypes in our weekly user research sessions and iterating in response to the feedback.

 

Tablet sales still falling

Posted on February 23, 2016 by - News

stylustabletResellers trying to peddle tablets are having a tough time of it as users have moved onto the next new shiny thing.

According to beancounters at the analyst Context Western European tablet sales “dramatically declined” in Q4 2015, as consumers looked to alternative devices such as two-in-one detachables and convertible notebooks.

But the market watcher found that the fall in sales in the PC market “softened”, driven largely by stock clearance.

Unit shipments of slate tablets for distributors in Western Europe fell by 27.5 per cent year on year for Q4 2015, dropping from more than five million to about 3.7 million in the last quarter of 2015.

Germany saw particularly poor performance for the devices, with tablet sales down 43.4 per cent.

Spain also saw a plunge in demand, with sales down 31.3 per cent and the UK was down 14.1 per cent.

Context attributed this decline to an upswing in popularity of alternatives including two-in-one detachables, which sold 300,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 31.3 per cent. The analyst also noted a big increase in convertible notebooks, with sales up 84.7 per cent year on year.

Marie-Christine Pygott, senior analyst at Context, said: “To put these figures in perspective, detachable and convertible pcs comprised 11 per cent of overall notebook unit sales in distribution at the end of last year, and an even larger share (15 per cent) in the consumer space.”

The PC market fared better, with “a strong focus on stock clearance” helping to see a respite from its recent tumbling numbers. PC distributor sales were largely flat, down only 0.1 per cent year on year for Q4 2015, and this was boosted by notebook sales up 2.7 per cent over the same period.

The UK market saw PC sales up 10 per cent as it suffered fewer currency headaches than the eurozone countries. Spain saw PC sales up 8.3 per cent, but Italy saw a decline of 3.3 per cent and France was down 9.2 per cent.

Consumer PC shipments were up 2.9 per cent but business shipments fell by 4.5 per cent year over year.

Ingram Micro bought in Chinese take away

Posted on February 22, 2016 by - News

ingram-mico-hqA Chinese outfit has written a cheque for Ingram Micro for $6 billion.

Chinese aviation and shipping conglomerate HNA Group will buy the outfit so that it will become a subsidiary of Tianjin Tianha. Its HQ will remain where it is along with the firm’s executive management team will stay in place, with Alain Monié continuing as chief executive.

All Ingram Micro lines of business and all regional and country operations are “expected to continue unaffected”.

Adam Tan, CEO of HNA Group, stated: “Ingram Micro has clearly established itself as a leading distributor and global provider of IT products and services. The company has a proven and talented team and we believe Ingram Micro is unrivalled in its ability to offer industry-leading, differentiated and easy-to-manage solutions to vendor and customer partners worldwide. We look forward to supporting Ingram Micro’s management team and strategies, including continued expansion into new geographies, while also offering their vendor and customer partners access to new and complementary offerings.

Tan said that Ingram Micro would become the largest member enterprise of HNA Group in terms of revenue, and facilitate the internationalisation process of the group. With the help of Ingram Micro, HNA Group would have access to business opportunities in emerging markets, which have higher growth rates and better profitability. Furthermore, the addition of Ingram Micro would help the logistics sector of HNA Group transform from a logistics operator to a supply chain operator, and provide one-stop services while improving efficiencies.

EU gives Dell deal the thumbs up

Posted on February 19, 2016 by - News

Happy man portrait

Happy man portrait

Tin box shifter Michael Dell is going to be given unconditional EU antitrust approval for its $67 billion bid for data storage company EMC.

Dell unveiled the deal in October last year, the largest ever in the technology industry sector, and designed to enable Dell to better challenge rivals Cisco Systems Inc, IBM and HP in cloud computing, mobility and cyber security.

European Commission spokesman Ricardo Cardoso has so far said nothing, but leaks in Brussels [shurely that should be sprouts.ed] claim that the when the Commission gives its ruling on the deal by February 29 Dell will be a happy bunny.

 

Dell founder and Chief Executive Michael Dell took the company private three years ago with the help of private equity firm Silver Lake.

The computer maker has arranged a debt package for up to $49.5 billion to help finance the EMC deal, the second-largest M&A financing on record.

 

IBM to spruce up channel

Posted on February 18, 2016 by - News

ibm-officeBiggish Blue has released details of its revamped channel programme which will start in January 2017.

Apparently the men in suits want to better define the relationship a partner has with IBM and have a common terms used across its channel programmes.

Like most things IBMish this will involve lots of business speak. For example IBM is standardising on the term “competencies” and will have 44 “competencies” in place by the beginning of 2017.

IBM will have new cloud incentives that last the entire life of the renewal process and there will be a programme that specifically rewards builders of IBM embedded systems.

Some new IBM services will only be resold by channel partner. These will be aimed at midmarket customers that the IBM direct sales force does not normally bother with.

IBM wants to put more cash into its channel and give resources to partners that develop its intellectual property.

To fund those investments, IBM is also limiting the amount of money it invests in partners that focus mainly on order fulfilment.

Partners will be assigned a platinum, gold or silver designation based on the amount of revenue being generated over a specific time period, customer satisfaction with that partner and the number of competencies attained. The actual size of the partner will be less relevant in attaining those designations.

VMware share drop hurts Dell’s EMC bid

Posted on February 17, 2016 by - News

Michael DellTin box shifter Michael Dell is warning investors that the $14 billion drop in the market capitalisation of VMware is playing havoc with his attempt to get cash for EMC.

A Dell spokesman said the total value of the blockbuster acquisition has dropped by about $10 billion from its original $67 billion, to $57 billion.

In an SEC filing, Dell noted that “the market value” of the VMware tracking stock has “declined, thereby reducing the implied value of the stock portion of the merger consideration”.

On October 9, the last business day before the Dell-EMC announcement was made, VMware, 80 percent of which is owned by EMC, had a market capitalisation of $33.2 billion and a stock price of $78.65 a share. Now, its market cap is about $19.2 billion, and its stock price is hovering around $45.54.

A Dell spokesman said the EMC acquisition price of $24.05 per share was “locked, that doesn’t move, but because VMware has moved down, the value of the portion of the merger consideration linked with the tracker is going to be in that range of decline”. Whatever that means.