Small business confidence low

Posted on March 21, 2016 by - News

1-pike-schermer-quits-30sweb1Small businesses confidence has fallen to its lowest level in three years.

According to the small business index compiled by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) which measures firms’ prospects for the next three months gave a reading of 8.6 for the first quarter, down from 21.7 in the fourth quarter and its lowest level since the first quarter of 2013.

Small firms also saw the first decline in job creation nationwide since the second quarter of 2013, .

The FSB said the fall in confidence was partly due to fears over the strength of the UK and global economy while Government policies such as the national living wage and pensions auto-enrolment had also contributed.

It pointed out that the last time confidence was lower at the start of 2013 was “a time when there were still huge doubts over the strength of the UK economy and many were discussing the prospect of a ‘triple dip’ recession”.

FSB vice-chairman Sandra Dexter said: “Small business confidence has clearly faltered, which is why the welcome small business focus in the Budget is so important.

“We need a renewed push for growth and productivity – with policy makers delivering a sustained package of support for ambitious small firms.”

Blackstone to buy HPE’s Indian outsourcing business

Posted on March 18, 2016 by - News

India_flagPrivate equity outfit Blackstone is close to a deal to buying Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s controlling stake in Indian IT outsourcing services provider MphasiS.

The deal is worth about $940 million. HPE owns roughly 60.5 percent stake in MphasiS, and now wants out from the Indian outfit to shore up its capital.

Bids for MphasiS were submitted earlier this month and Blackstone is the front-runner for taking majority ownership of the mid-sized Indian IT services exporter.

Financial details of the possible deal were not immediately known. Based on MphasiS’ stock price on Thursday, the HPE stake in the Bengaluru-headquartered company is valued at about $940 million. The company’s total market value is about $1.6 billion.

MphasiS is a rival for Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys but is not likely to command a very high valuation as a major part of its business depends on subcontracting by HPE.

MphasiS used to generate half of its cash by providing services to HPE’s clients. This is now only 24 percent of the firm’s total revenue.

The MphasiS deal, if closed, will be one of the biggest M&A transactions in India’s $150 billion outsourcing sector and indicates that the outsourcing market may still have life in it.

MphasiS was formed in 2000 and six years later Electronics Data Systems Corp acquired a majority holding in the company. In 2008, EDS was acquired by Hewlett Packard, which resulted in the transfer of the shareholding to the computer maker.

Microsoft’s cloud partners make a killing

Posted on March 17, 2016 by - News

cloud (264 x 264)Beancounters at IDC have been adding up some numbers and reached the conclusion that Microsoft’s cloud  partners are making a killing.

IDC and Microsoft released a report with the catchy title “The Booming Cloud Opportunity” which appears to be the first in a series. Book two will probably take place a few years after book one and feature some of the original characters.

It is based on detailed interviews with 25 partners with solid credentials, like Christopher Hertz of New Signature, Mark Seeley of Intellinet and Geeman Yip of BitTitan.

Basically it says that Microsoft’s cloud Partners have double the growth of those who are less-cloudy. IDC defines cloud partners as companies that get at least half of their revenues from the cloud. Of the 750 Microsoft partners they surveyed, about a fifth of them hit that mark. That top tier of cloud partners reported overall company revenue growth of 24 percent on average, while the rest saw growth of 12 percent.

Next it says that Cloud Partners have 1.5 the gross profit  of the less-cloudy . The figure for the cloud partner group is 41 percent gross profit, while the rest had 27 percent.

Apparently Cloud Partners have 1.8x the recurring revenue of the others. The cloud partners reported that 52 percent of their overall revenues, not just cloud revenues, came from recurring revenue sources. That compares to about 29 percent of revenues coming from recurring sources for the rest of the partners in the survey.

Other findings are that Cloud Partners sell $5.87 of their own offerings for every dollar of Microsoft Cloud Solutions. The rest of the surveyed partners sold $3.71 of their own offerings for every $1 of Microsoft cloud solutions. Importantly on this one, only a little over 400 partners answered.

The IDC report does warn that the surveys don’t always reveal causation.”There’s a lot going on inside all of these partner businesses that could account for the differences other than how much Microsoft cloud services the companies sell.

The report goes against the  popular channel opinion on cloud — that selling cloud services is a recipe for lower margins and lower profitability.

Microsoft solves EU cloud problem

Posted on March 16, 2016 by - News

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudMicrosoft announced a number of new cloud offerings today including one which will solve the company’s European cloud problesm.

The problem is that Microsoft is US company and its country delights in spying on its allies.  The EU fears that the NSA could get a court order and force Microsoft to hand over data from its European clouds and force it not to tell anyone.

Microsoft has come up with a wizard wheeze by creating a product called Azure Deutschland — a German cloud region that will offer Azure services that come not directly from Microsoft, but from the German data trustee Deutsche Telekom.

It not only makes sure that data remains in Germany, but also means that Microsoft can’t actually get to the data itself.  By operating under a German company, the NSA can’t force Vole to do squat.

In fact, while the region offers redundancy and backup, it does so through a private network to ensure that none of the bits being backed up even go through the public Internet where they might stray onto foreign soil.

Germany has some of the strictest data privacy protection laws on the books, and Microsoft said that Deutsche Telekom will have strict protocols regarding when Microsoft is allowed access, even for support:

 

PC market blighted by inventory problems

Posted on March 15, 2016 by - News

old-pcs-100565082-primary.idgeBeancounters at IDC claim that the reason that the PC market is not picking up is because there is far too much inventory out there.

IDC said that this high inventory, falling commodity prices and foreign exchange issues meant it was reducing its outlook for the PC market for 2016.

Expectations for early 2016 were already pretty grim, but a range of factors has prompted it to reduce its 2016 outlook “by a couple of percent”. Now, it predicts the global market will decline 5.4 percent annually.

IDC predicts that by 2018 the market will “effectively stabilise” but will not avoid some small declines in certain quarters before then.

The analyst pointed to the SMB and education sectors were star performers when it comes to PCs.

Jay Chou, IDC’s research manager said that in addition to specific devices, the SMB and education segments are expected to do better than the overall market.

“There have been indications of faster commercial adoption of Windows 10 than of past operating systems, and that should support some growth in the medium term. Similarly, IT access for students remains a priority, and will drive projects across regions – even though constrained government spending may limit some projects.”

Aecom boss says that cloud is overhyped

Posted on March 14, 2016 by - News

originalA top Fortune 500 CIO says he is lukewarm about the cloud claiming that it is overhyped.

Tom Peck, chief information officer of Los Angeles-based Aecom said that Partners clinging to upfront payment models and a lack of understanding of the difference between true cloud and “as-a-service” has left him thinking the cloud is just a facade to appease Wall Street.

Speaking during the XChange Solution Provider 2016 keynote Peck said that his biggest beef with the cloud is that he sees too many product companies attempting to sell cloud like it’s on-premise hardware and demanding upfront payments.

Aecom would prefer to see cloud delivered as a subscription service with a true pay-as-you-go option, but Peck said such a model has remained elusive.

“This doesn’t make us happy, because all I’m doing is paying you a markup for something branded ‘cloud,’ when, in reality, it’s on-premise. It’s just in somebody else’s premise,” Peck said.

Part of the challenge is on the buyer side, with many end users failing to understand the difference between true cloud and Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service or Software-as-a-Service offerings, he said.

While Aecom sees a benefit in being able to spin up compute cycles on demand and having someone else manage its infrastructure, Peck said the elasticity of cloud is often overstated.

“The cloud is only as elastic as you’re willing to pay, because you still need to predict hardware and compute cycles and all that stuff,” Peck said.

Eastern ODMs take bite out of server market

Posted on March 11, 2016 by - News

hp_serversUnless you are HPE, everyone appears to be doing well out of the global server market,  but it seems that the Asian ODMs such as Quanta and Wistron are continuing to bite out a larger share of the global server market.

According to beancounters at Gartner’s the global server market grew 8.2 percent in shipments and 9.2 percent in revenues in the fourth quarter on an annual comparison.

Those outside the top five saw revenues beef up 18.9 percent to $4.75 billion and shipments increase 16 percent to 1.26 million in Q4.

Between them they have between 31.4 and 42.5 percent of the market in revenue and shipment terms, respectively.

Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner said that this demonstrates that the growth of hyperscale datacentres, like those of Facebook, Google and Microsoft, continues to be the leading contributor to physical server increases globally.

Meanwhile Market leader HPE’s shipments were hit by global weakness in Windows-based x86 servers, while its revenues were affected by a drop in RISC/Itanium Unix server sales.

HPE’s share of server revenues dropped from 27.9 to 25.2 percent however it is still  10 points ahead of closest rival Dell, which grew revenues 4.5 percent. IBM grew revenues 10.3 percent, Lenovo 2.9 percent and Cisco 20.2 percent.

 

 

IT security market worth $170 billion by 2020

Posted on March 10, 2016 by - News

BouncerFoxFeatureThe IT security market will be worth $170 billion by 2020, which means growing by $100 billion from now.

India-based firm MarketsandMarkets says the 2020 total includes security technologies like data leak prevention, denial of service attack mitigation, and compliance, along with security services.

“MarketsandMarkets expects the global cyber security market to grow from US$106.32 billion in 2015 to US$170.21 billion by 2020, at a compound annual growth rate of 9.8 percent,” MarketsandMarkets said.

Gartner  said something similar its latest November figures predicted security spend pegged at $75 billion are reckoned be worth $91 billion by the end of the year. Big G said the security industry will be worth some $116 billion by 2019 with security services including consulting, hardware support, and outsourcing adding a further $73 billion by 2019.

Most of the cash appears to be being spend in North America  while significant revenue growth is expected from Latin America and Asia-Pacific regions. The most popular is expected to be managed security services.

 

Accenture arrests the Metropolitan Police

Posted on March 9, 2016 by - News

658db2d1a04d1d2a3bf5feb0b88e91f7The Metropolitan Police have signed an £86m deal with Accenture to manage its applications for the next three years.

The London coppers want to save £200m from its IT budget by carving up its Capgemini contract. The deal will last for five years, with the option of a three year extension. It will mean that 113 staff will be transferred to Accenture’s Newcastle base.

Accenture beat HCL, IBM, Lockheed Martin and Unisys to win the deal.

The Met has been busy lately. Last month it awarded £250m in contracts to CSC and Atos. CSC one a contract for user computing and hosting towers and Atos scored contracts to integrate the various IT components as part of its Total Technology Programme Infrastructure strategy.

A separate £216m contract to outsource the Met’s back office IT to Steria’s shared services centre, will see hundreds of back office IT roles made redundant the Met said last year.

As are result the Met will slash the number of its in-house staff from 800 to 100.

What is rather odd is that the move to outsource to lots of different large suppliers is no longer government policy. The Ministry of Justice having reportedly hit major problems doing that sort of thing.

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.”