Category: News

Avealto starts trademark war against Airbus subsidiary

Posted on February 14, 2023 by - News

 UK-based Internet outfit is taking legal action against a subsidiary of Airbus.

Avealto has issued a cease and desist letter against Airbus HAPS Connectivity about its infringement of Avealto’s trademarked name.

Both ‘Avealto’ and rebranded Airbus subsidiary, ‘Aalto’, are developing High Altitude Pseudo Satellites (HAPS) to offer cheaper, more reliable alternatives to point-to-point satellite services. Avealto is developing an environmentally friendly fleet of next generation 100-metre-long helium airships to ‘connect the unconnected’. These will provide internet access to some of the world’s poorest communities. Aalto, meanwhile, is pursuing its “Zephyr” high altitude flying wing design.

Employers will have to pay more for staff

Posted on February 13, 2023 by - News

While Big Tech is frantically laying off the loyal staff that made them billions, British tech firms are finding it increasingly difficult to keep them, according to one study.

Employers are expected to raise wages for their staff by the most in at least 11 years, but the five per cent pay deals for workers would still fall well below expected inflation, a survey published on Monday showed.

The Bank of England has warned that the surge in inflation could be harder to tame if pay deals keep rising, the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) said 55 per cent of recruiters planned to lift base or variable pay this year as they struggle to hire and retain staff in Britain’s tight labour market.

Skies the limit for cloud spending

Posted on February 13, 2023 by - News

According to Synergy Research Group, fourth-quarter enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services surpassed $61 billion, a rise of 21 per cent during the same period last year.

However, the increase was substantially dampened by the strong US dollar and a severely restricted Chinese market.

Synergy said that the US Q4 growth rate was 27 per cent, which compares with an average growth rate of 31 per cent in the previous four quarters.

The market tracker explained that the shrink in growth rate was partly to be expected due to the increasingly massive scale of the market, but added there is no doubt the current economic climate also had an adverse impact.

Microsoft winning the AI race

Posted on February 13, 2023 by - News

Microsoft and OpenAI have a first-move advantage in the exploding market for AI chatbots, according to Daniel Ives, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities.

Through its early and continued backing of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Microsoft is “leading so far” in the “Al arms race,” he wrote

Last week, Vole and Google held product events this week about their respective chatbot plans, Google’s event for its forthcoming Bard chatbot was “underwhelming,” according to Ives. Additionally, a Google ad for Bard, which featured an inaccurate piece of information served up by the chatbot, was “an absolute near-term gut punch to Google’s Al credibility,” Ives wrote.

Rimini Street moves to a four day work week

Posted on February 10, 2023 by - News

Rimini Street has introduced a four-day working week for all staff this month.

General manager EMEA Emma Hose claims the move will result in happier staff with no loss of productivity

The company, which provides unified software support and services, primarily for enterprise software from SAP, Oracle and Salesforce, employs 1,900 people worldwide, mostly senior engineers who mostly work from home.

Last summer the company introduced a scheme called “Fabulous Fridays” as a way of addressing the issue. Employees could take one working day off per week to do as they liked – so long as they were within reach of a phone and a laptop in case a customer had an emergency that only they could fix: Rimini Street’s SLA commits it to 24/7 support with a 10-minute response time.

Wavenet gets itself an Adept

Posted on February 10, 2023 by - News

Adept Technology Group has been bought out by private equity-backed peer Wavenet in a £50.3 million deal.

Tunbridge Wells-based Microsoft and Avaya partner Adept said that the weak macroeconomic outlook in the UK “is placing significant pressure on many smaller quoted companies”.

Wavenet wanted a company like Adept in what remains a “diverse and consolidated” UK technology managed services industry, the announcement added.

Adept turned over £68.1 million in its fiscal 2022 and employs 340 staff.

It is Wavenet’s fifth take over in less than two years and propels the Solihull-based Cisco, Microsoft and Mitel partner’s pro-forma annual revenues to over £200 million.

Adept chairman Ian Fishwick said: “Whilst we believe that the Adept platform can deliver long-term growth and profitability, we also recognise that uncertainties and risks exist in the short to medium term which impact Adept’s ability to optimise growth as a stand-alone quoted entity,”

“We acknowledge the additional commercial benefits which could be obtained as part of a larger, well-funded group, and believe the combination of Adept with Wavenet will enable the next phase of Adept’s growth to be strongly supported.”

Wavenet CEO Bill Dawson said: “I am delighted to announce the proposed combination of the Adept business with the Wavenet Group. I have huge respect for the leadership of Ian Fishwick and the significant achievements of the Adept team.

 

Atos builds supercomputer for Max Planck Society

Posted on February 10, 2023 by - News

Atos is building and installing a new high-performance computer for research outfit the Max Planck Society.

The new system will be based on Atos’ latest BullSequana XH3000 platform, which is powered by AMD EPYC CPUs and Instinct accelerators. In its final configuration, the application performance will be three times higher than the current “Cobra” system, which is also based on Atos technologies.

Civo offers SBOM based Platform-as-a-Service

Posted on February 9, 2023 by - News

Cloudy Civo has launched its “Platform” which is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering.

Run on Kubernetes, Civo Platform offers developers an affordable, flexible and scalable framework for running and developing applications in the cloud.

Civo Platform supports cloud developers wanting to build a scalable and secure infrastructure with just a few simple steps. It can switch from PaaS into a fully-fledged managed Kubernetes service. For a start-up, this would allow them to quickly get going with a simple and easy PaaS, that when they reach the right stage of growth, can transform into a fully featured Kubernetes service.

M&A activity on the rise

Posted on February 9, 2023 by - News

M&A activity in the technology, digital, media, and marketing spaces remained strong in 2022 despite global volatility.

According to a report from specialist advisory firm Ciesco there were 2,095 transactions within tech, digital, media, and marketing – a year-on-year increase of 20 per cent.

This was despite a war in Ukraine, supply chain issues linked to Covid and China’s shutdown, and an economic downturn.

Zoom more than decimates staff

Posted on February 8, 2023 by - News

The videoconferencing giant Zoom is more than decimating its staff.

CEO Eric Yuan says he is cutting 15 per cent of the staff and would reduce his salary for the coming fiscal year by 98 per cent and foregoing his FY23 corporate bonus.

While this is admirable, one wonders how you get a corporate bonus at all if your bottom line is so bad that you have to axe 15 per cent of your staff.

Printer market rebounds

Posted on February 8, 2023 by - News

The printer market has bounced back after being gutted by the pandemic.

The latest quarterly analysis of the printer market across Western Europe in the fourth quarter, from Context, shows that printer sales had a good ending in 2022 as marketing campaigns drove higher-end products.

Context said that revenues and volumes of sales exceeded expectations.

The analyst found there was a 12.3 per cent year-on-year increase in unit sales and a 27.8 per cent increase in revenue during the period for printer hardware. There were also efforts on the consumer side to get entry-level stock shifting through distie warehouses more quickly.

Check Point deepens relationship with e92plus

Posted on February 8, 2023 by - News

Israel Checkpoint

Israeli-based Security outfit Check Point is furthering its partnership with e92plus to enhance its presence within the UK SMB market.

In a statement, Check Point said that the increased volume of threats, use of cloud applications and the number of employees working from home make SMBs more vulnerable, with 61 per cent of cyberattacks aimed at small businesses in 2022. While many increase investment in cybersecurity solutions, most still need more protection.

e92plus is a cybersecurity VAD, with more than 33 years’ experience in the sector and over 1,200 partners, from enterprise value-added resellers to managed service providers.

Babble snaps up more companies

Posted on February 7, 2023 by - News

Babble has picked up Gateshead-based mobile services provider Corporate Wardair (CWL) and Chester-based telecoms and IT service provider Avandda in a double buy out.

The outfit has bought 27 companies since 2019, with 12 of those coming in the past year.  The company said it wanted CWL and Avandda to bolster the mobile and comms.

Axeman cometh to Dell

Posted on February 7, 2023 by - News

Dell Technologies plans to slash its global workforce by 6,650 jobs which represents five per cent of its entire employee base.

For those who came in late, Big Tech has been making the short-term decision to improve their bottom lines by laying off staff as recession looms. This gives them the excellent opportunity to complain about not having skilled, loyal staff in two years or have their bottom lines handed to them by more agile companies staffed by the people they laid off.

In January SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Sophos, Amazon and Salesforce revealed that significant cuts were on the horizon, blaming the “economic downturn” with managers trotting out cliches like “economic headwinds.”

Shields exits Dell

Posted on February 7, 2023 by - News

Sarah Shields is leaving Dell to join Computacenter in the spring.

The popular channel leader will join the reseller and IT services giant in April as group alliance director.

Shields change of offices was mentioned at the Computacenter’s annual sales shin-dig in Manchester this weekend.

She is joining Computacenter as part of a wider revamp of its top team, with John Beard and Lieven Bergmans being promoted. Beard gets the role of western Europe MD and and Lieven is CCO.

Shields has worked for Dell for 15 years and was vice president of Central and North Europe Channel for the last three. She ran the UK channel for a good stretch of that time.