NEC has written a £475 million cheque for Northgate Public Services (NPS).

The move is aprt of NEC’s bid to spruce up its international safety business. NPS develops software and services for the British police and government sector organisations.

NPS was owned by private equity firm Cinven and employs approximately 1,400 software engineers throughout the UK and India. NEC’s uses biometrics technologies and face recognition and fingerprint recognition technologies to provide its international safety business. This side of the business has been doing rather well in Japan and wants to expand internationally.

The UK and Australian public sector markets are being seen as potential growth areas.

NPS will keep its name and leadership and will integrate some of NEC’s technologies in biometric scanning and facial recognition into its platforms.

Takashi Niino, president and CEO of NEC Corporation, said: “We are proud to have Northgate Public Services, one of the UK’s leading technology companies, joining the NEC Group.”

“With this acquisition, NEC aims to support and strengthen NPS’ technologies for police operations, establish new safety solutions based on a common business platform, and to further develop international markets largely focused on countries within the Commonwealth.”

Stephen Callaghan, CEO of Northgate Public Services, said his colleagues and leadership team have worked incredibly hard over the past two years to get the company into shape operationally and financially.

“Combined with NEC’s business, we will now be able to offer a wider suite of services and software to our existing client base, while expanding in new geographies and technology sectors,” he said.

This acquisition is expected to be done and dusted by the end of the month.

Networking giant Cisco is frantically checking its products to see if they have been hit by last week’s chip scare.

For those who came in late, last week it emerged that Chipzilla had a vulnerability for decades, with the potential to affect millions of computers across a range of operating systems.

Cisco said that the majority of its products would not be susceptible because they do not allow users to run custom code, which is required to exploit the vulnerabilities. But some may be vulnerable, and Cisco is offering updates.

In a statement, Cisco said that the only Cisco devices that are found to allow the customer to execute their customised code side by side with the Cisco code on the same microprocessor are considered vulnerable.

“A Cisco product that may be deployed as a virtual machine or a container, even while not being directly affected by any of these vulnerabilities, could be targeted by such attacks if the hosting environment is vulnerable.

“Cisco recommends customers harden their virtual environment and ensure that all security updates are installed.”

It is starting to look like  cloud and multivendor distributors will clean up this year. We never tyre of this.

A prophecy from the Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC) has emerged from its laurel scented cave at a time when people had wondered about disties’ future.

GTDC CEO Tim Curran said that it is a critical juncture in the industry’s history where distributors are at the center of increasingly widespread adoption of indirect business.

“All of the report findings essentially confirm the fast-evolving value that distributors continue to deliver – well beyond point-to-point products and services that essentially defined the industry’s earlier years”, he added.

“Comprehensive multivendor solutions are now undeniably imperative. Vendor partners ‘get this’ and are finding dynamic new ways to work with distributors in addressing increasingly complex channel and end-customer requirements. We expect 2018 to be a pivotal year”, said Curran.

The latest research from the industry lobby groupfound that more than 70 percent of vendors expected double-digit growth through distribution. That compares to 55 percent of vendors making the same statement last year.

The top areas of focus will be cloud, security, IoT and data centres. Vendors are also expecting cloud-related services to perform strongly.

As well as selling technology the other aspect of distribution that vendor’s rely on is channel recruitment and there are hopes from many that their partners  uncover some new types of solution providers.

The GTDC research places distribution in a critical place with a view of multivendor offerings that cannot be matched, giving that tier of the channel the chance to develop solutions that direct rivals could never deliver.

SME employees are happy to grass up their bosses over their use of illegal software, according to the British Software Association (BSA).

Research from the BSA revealed that more than a third of Europe’s SME employees would report illegal software use, with UK staff some of the most conscientious.

Those trying to protect the software industry have encouraged whistleblowing as an enforcement tool for decades and it seems that the message has got through.

Most quizzed by the BSA revealed they would want a reward for reporting an issue.

The BSA has a long track record of settling with businesses that have been found to have used illegal software and have settled with the organisation to prevent the case going through the courts.

Sarah Coombes, managing director compliance and enforcement at BSA EMEA, said that the figures were good news for the Channel.

The data shows that more than a third of Europe’s SME employees would report illegal or unethical IT practices in their workplace so businesses need to be quick to ensure they are fully compliant.

“Effective software and IT asset management should be the first line of defence for businesses in safeguarding against unlicensed software and, as always, this is where resellers can really help”,  she said.

“The channel can help businesses purchase legitimate software, however there’s also an opportunity to provide consultation and regular support on becoming and staying compliant”,  she added.

The channel can also provide support in other related areas of the business lifecycle such as cyber threat resilience and data regulation compliance.

“This is all particularly timely given that the new ISO ITAM standard (19770-1) has just been published and could be well used as a blueprint for the development of a robust IT management system”, said Coombes.