Europe’s technology industry deals slow

Posted on November 22, 2019 by - News

Big snail in Old TaipeiEurope’s technology industry saw a drop of 0.3 percent in overall deal activity during the third quarter of 2019 when compared to the four-quarter average, according to GlobalData’s deals database.

A total of 1023 deals worth $21.18 billion were announced for the region during the third quarter of 2019, against the last four-quarter average of 1020 deals.

Of all the deal types, venture financing saw the most activity in the third quarter of 2019 with 465, representing a 45.5 percent share for the region.

Magma Digital expands management consultancy arm

Posted on November 22, 2019 by - News

Magma Digital is expanding its management consultancy service.

The outfit has always offered consultancy services but is now expanding that offer, with an expert team providing organisations with a range of support in team development, technical change, strategy design, service design and transformation programmes.

Salvation Army plays Strawberry Fields forever with Cybertill

Posted on November 22, 2019 by - News

The Salvation Army has opened Strawberry Fields in Liverpool, with a new fully integrated software suite provided by retail tech firm, Cybertill.

A suite of technology will assist in the running of the charity’s operation, including a visitor exhibition with omnichannel ticketing, and EPoS for the gift shop and cafe, simplifying processes by using one integrated software package to manage the site, from beginning to end.

Fujitsu de-risks move to services for partners

Posted on November 21, 2019 by - News

Fujitsu has taken further steps to de-risk its solutions for those partners that are still adapting their business models.

The firm has been adapting its managed service partner support levels over the last 18 months and says its channel , which has been traditionally been based around selling hardware through a CAPEX model, needed a bit of a hand.

The latest innovation from the vendor is to team up with Cyxtera to provide Nutanix Enterprise Cloud on PRIMERGY as a service, making it possible for a partner to offer collocation services without having to invest in the hardware upfront.

MSPs can’t make customers understand security

Posted on November 21, 2019 by - News

More than half of MSPs in Europe have problems trying to persuade customers to adopt the best-fit solutions they recommend, despite a lack of IT security expertise continuing to drive outsource services.

According to Kaspersky Labs’ Maintaining MSP Momentum report, which delves into the challenges and opportunities faced across the evolving IT landscape.

Over the last few years, the MSP market has grown rapidly, with research firm Gartner tipping the global public services market to grow by 17.5 percent in 2019 alone. Reflecting this trend, Kaspersky’s report found that 31 percent of surveyed businesses already outsource cybersecurity – while 21 percent are planning to follow suit over the coming year.

Around a third of companies with 500 employees or less said they do so because they lack the required IT knowledge and expertise within their business.

Getronics CEO exits the building

Posted on November 21, 2019 by - News

Getronics’ CEO Nana Baffour (pictured) has cleaned out his desk after a global restructure within the Dutch IT services giant.

Baffour entered the Getronics CEO role in August 2017 after his investment firm, Bottega InvestCo, acquired the company from Aurelius.

The CEO departs as Getronics announces that it has reached an agreement with its stakeholders to take on new capital investment and undergo “a recapitalisation of the business”.

DDoS attacks up 241 percent

Posted on November 20, 2019 by - News

The growth in both large- and small-scale distributed denial-of-service attacks continues its upward trajectory, according to a report  by Neustar’s Security Operations Center (SOC).

The third quarter of 2019 Cyber Threats and Trends report reveals that the number of DDoS attacks was up 241 percent in the third quarter of 2019, compared to the same period last year.

The report also confirmed the continued increase in small-scale attacks and the use of multiple threat vectors, as new vectors continue to expand the attack surface that organisations must defend.

SNOMED partners with Digital China Health

Posted on November 20, 2019 by - News

London-based SNOMED has partnered with DCHealth as an approved delivery agent of its CT education product throughout China.

DCHealth and SNOMED have struck an agreement to deliver mutually agreed upon SNOMED CT educational content including the organisation’s clinically and “technically curated” Foundation and Implementation courses, with the potential to offer the organisations suite of Authoring courses for delivery.  

AWS deepens Salesforce partnership

Posted on November 20, 2019 by - News

AWS has announced Salesforce will be offering AWS telephony and call transcription services with Amazon Connect as part of its Service Cloud call centre solution.

Patrick Beyries, VP of product management for Service Cloud said: “We have a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services, which will allow customers to purchase Amazon Connect from us, and then it will be pre-integrated and out of the box to provide a full transcription of the call, and of course that’s alongside an actual call recording of the call.”

HPE announces new container platform product

Posted on November 19, 2019 by - News

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced its  Container Platform – an enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based container platform designed for both cloud-native applications and monolithic applications with persistent storage.

The big idea is that enterprise customers can accelerate application development for new and existing apps – running on bare-metal or virtualized infrastructure, on any public cloud, and at the edge.

Onecom partners with Highlight

Posted on November 19, 2019 by - News

Onecom has signed up with cloud-based network monitoring and reporting outfit Highlight to give customers full visibility into the performance of its network and application services.

Based in Hampshire, Onecom has a UK-wide network of regional offices with over 400 staff, serving more than 100,000 customers across the UK and internationally. 

Sophos warns of security risk awareness gap

Posted on November 19, 2019 by - News

There is a significant risk awareness gap between IT leaders like CIOs and CISOs who are charged with protecting the UK’s public sector organisations and their frontline IT teams.

A survey from Sophos said that some of these gaps have a direct impact on IT security. Among the most critical differences, a worrying 55 percent of public sector IT leaders believe their organisation’s digital data is less valuable than that of the private sector, despite the fact that they handle highly sensitive, confidential, personal, and government information.

Mimecast snaps up DMARC Analyzer

Posted on November 18, 2019 by - News

Mimecast swallowed the email security provider DMARC Analyzer to help customers tackle the threat of domain spoofing attacks.

The acquisition will enable customers to address threats at the email perimeter, inside the email network and beyond their immediate purview, ultimately reducing the time, effort and cost effects of domain spoofing, Mimecast said.

DMARC Analyzer offers Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) setup, management and analysis. By combining the solution with Mimecast’s defences, the firm says customers can now further strengthen their cyber resilience with robust visibility into attacks that defraud customers, suppliers and partners.

HP says no to Xerox

Posted on November 18, 2019 by - News

HP board of directors has unanimously rejected Xerox’s takeover offer but is leaving open the possibility of a merger with Xerox under different terms.

In a letter to Xerox CEO John Visentin made public by HP on Sunday, HP’s board said that it has reviewed the “unsolicited” takeover proposal from 5 November and “has unanimously concluded that it significantly undervalues HP and is not in the best interests of HP shareholders.”

“We have great confidence in our strategy and our ability to execute to continue driving sustainable long-term value at HP,” the company said.

Pure Technology has record revenue

Posted on November 18, 2019 by - News

Pure Technology has scored a record revenue of £33 million.

COO Cliff Fox said that its entry onto the Yorkshire Purchasing Organisation’s cloud and hardware frameworks and success on other frameworks as a key driver for growth.

“Historically, we’ve always had some public sector customers but we’ve never had any dedicated effort towards the public sector, and part of the strategy refresh in April was that we thought that it was time now for us to approach that with more emphasis”, Fox said.