ASM launches SME Access Service for channel

Posted on October 15, 2013 by - News

poundsASM Technologies has announced a new service designed to help the channel gain lucrative public sector contracts my sticking to strict government guidelines, which require that 25 to 50 percent of all IT contracts flow through SMEs.

The new SME Access Service aims to allow big IT resellers to add hundreds of SMEs to their books, allowing them to navigate through the public sector. It provides system integrators and value added resellers with direct access to ASM’s agile distribution network of SMEs, which should allow them to meet government requirements.

The government currently mandates that public sector organisations must award at least a quarter of all contracts to SMEs by 2015. SMEs are defined as enterprises with a turnover of less than €50 million or fewer than 250 employees. As the euro sign indicates, this is the EU-wide definition.

The requirement means that the channel has to establish new supplier relationships and tap more SMEs in order to bid for government contracts. While it is a clever way of supporting SMEs, it also tends to drive costs up and reduce revenue, as multiple SMEs sometimes must be brought in to bid for a contract.

ASM’s goal is to cut costs and save time by establishing distribution agreements with multiple suppliers, which would make it possible for SIs and VARs to bid for government contracts they otherwise wouldn’t be eligible for. In addition, it allows them to get access to products and services are more competitive prices.

“A number of large resellers have considered adding SMEs to their supply chains in order to meet government requirements, however with contracts to draw up, terms agreed, credit lines to be established and distribution infrastructures to put in place, they are finding this to be a slow, painful and expensive process – especially when they’re trying to sign up a few hundred SMEs in one go,” said Iain Tomkinson, Sales Director at ASM Technologies. “By taking advantage of our existing supplier relationships and agile channel infrastructure, the SME Access Service provides greater efficiencies for the IT channel through immediate access to over 1200 SMEs through just one supplier relationship, so they can continue to bid successfully for government contracts.”

ASM argues that its new programme is a win-win for all involved, as it helps SMEs get more business and build relationships within the channel, while at the same allowing big SIs and VARs to bid for contracts that would be out of their reach without some SMEs on board.

Argos takes on Tesco with tablet

Posted on October 14, 2013 by - News, Products

Argos MyTabletRetail outlet and online firm Argos has launched the MyTablet for less than £100 – in a bid to challenge Tesco’s recent tablet introduction, the Hudl.

The seven inch unit comes with pre-loaded games and apps and also includes an Argos app so you can shop for items including, er, tablets.

The unit has a 1024×600 LCD, and 8GB of memory – but you can expand the memory to 32GB using a Micro SD card. The processor is a 1.6GHz dual core chip, while the OS is Google’s Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2.

Argos said the unit is aimed at teenagers and has built in parental controls. It comes in pink or silver colours. The unit has two megapix camera and a front facing camera. It supports wi fi and Bluetooth and apps pre-loaded include the BBC iPlayer, Angry Birds, an e-book reader, Facebook and Twitter.

The unit goes for sale tomorrow from argos.co.uk and argos.ie, as well as the 700 shops it has in the UK and Ireland.

Nermin Hadjarbegovic, our Bosnian reported:: “This is just a publicity stunt.”

SMT becomes first ExtraHop certified partner in Benelux

Posted on October 14, 2013 by - News

ExtraHop-logoExtraHop has selected SMT as its first certified partner for the Benelux region. SMT is a specialist in IT management with offices in Belgium and the Netherlands, with more than 100 large clients. 

Several technical teams from SMT have completed extensive training and are no certified to offer consultancy, sales and implementation services across the region. SMT will also demonstrate the ExtraHop platform at the Splunk Live! Event in Amsterdam on Tuesday.

“ExtraHop provides a perfect fit within our portfolio. It’s the first platform that effectively mines wire data in real-time, delivering business-critical operational intelligence across increasingly dynamic IT environments,” Michiel Toes, co-founder and Sales and Marketing Director at SMT said. “Moreover, ExtraHop’s wire data analytics are a perfect complement to Splunk, supplementing machine log data to provide total visibility into application and service delivery.”

ExtraHop is currently the global leader in real time wire data analytics for operational IT intelligence. Its latest products and services include the Persistent Monitoring Architecture, the EH8000 appliance for real time L2-L2 application transaction analysis and a new agentless Citrix VDI monitoring solution.

“IT environments are becoming more complex as virtualisation, cloud, and mobility take hold, and traditional sources of visibility, including log and agent data, are no longer sufficient to deliver crucial intelligence on their own,” said Owen Cole, VP of EMEA Sales for ExtraHop. “Wire data is a key source of insight into the performance, availability, and security of IT applications and services.”

Distribution is a balloon

Posted on October 14, 2013 by - News, Products

MongolfierA maker of jewellery is showing a 90 percent picking improvements at its pan-European distribution centre using warehouse management software, it claims.

That’s according to BalloonOne, which integrated its warehouse management system with gem firm Pandora’s Microsoft Dynamics AX planning software.

BalloonOne says that 80 percent of orders Pandora received use pick and pass for a high volume of product lines in each pick.

Pandora is also using BalloonOne’s Accellos to automate its invoicing process.

Kristian Willumsen, VP of supply chain development at Pandora, says: “By comparing year on year performance, we are seeing picking improvements as high as 80 per cent.”

Smart watches are a surreal notion

Posted on October 14, 2013 by - News, Opinions

Salvador DaliThere’s not that many youngsters I know who wear wrist watches these days, apart from as a fashion accessory, maybe sometimes.

After all, the majority of kids have a smart phone on them, which is really a supercomputer that tells you everything you need to know, including the time.

So a report from Digitimes Research has me wondering whether the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.

The report suggests the entry of the Apple iWatch will boost the smartphone market, which, in the developed countries at least, has reached saturation.

Average selling prices of smartphones are falling but Digitimes Research seems to believe that if Apple releases its iWatch in the second half of next year, the brand power alone will boost the ASPs.

The research reckons that smart watch shipments will amount to 5.92 million units next year, 22.79 million in 2015 and 75.66 million in 2016, but that’s only if Apple gets its watch out.

Older people tend to wear watches and our eyesight isn’t as keen as youngsters’ – so the development of larger display smartphones has been something of a boon.

You can read more, if you can see the screen on your smart watch, here.

Every silver lining has its cloud

Posted on October 11, 2013 by - News

datacentrebatteriesThe outlook for west London is green with increasing cloud cover, thanks in no small part to a brand spanking new data centre being built not far from Hayes and Harlington railway station.

Called LONDON2, and being built by Virtus, the data centre is due for completion in the summer of 2014. Located just 17 minutes by train from Paddington and less than a mile from Junction 3 of the M4, the site will deliver 11.4MW of IT power, and 65,000 square feet of net customer data centre space.

Virtus says that 100% of LONDON2’s power – all 20MW of it – will come from renewable energy, just like the company’s other data centre, LONDON1 (yes, really).

We checked, so you don’t have to, and we were told that LONDON1’s power sources are as follows:

  • Biomass – 11.299%
  • Off-shore wind – 27.712%
  • Landfill gas – 4.685%
  • Municipal and industrial waste – 8.049%
  • On-shore wind – 48.254%
  • Photovoltaic – 0.001%

We were also told that’s a good indication for LONDON2’s power consumption and that by using “the most advanced, fresh-air evaporative cooling technology, solar panels, ground water from its own well, chimney racks for heat extraction, and efficient UPS systems,” Virtus hopes LONDON2 will be the most energy efficient data centre in London.

In addition to being the physical embodiment of cloud computing, the site will also have extensive office space, board rooms and meeting facilities for hire.

Neil Cresswell, Virtus’ CEO, said: “With the range of energy-saving technologies we are putting in place we will now lead in being able to deliver the most cost-efficient and environmentally friendly data centre solutions, offering significant TCO reductions to our clients in power, cooling, connectivity and services charges.”

LONDON2 will be made up of six data halls, all capable of being subdivided allowing clients to have anything from a cabinet in a shared space to their own suite or data hall with dedicated power and cooling.

Scotland takes Windows 8.1 tablet plunge

Posted on October 11, 2013 by - News

Scottish flagMicrosoft said the Scottish government is to adopt Windows 8 tablet PCs.

The government will take delivery of Samsung Series 7 Slates, Dell Latitude 10s and Samsung ATIVs running Win8.

Trustmarque, an MS Gold Partner, created a proof of concept.  Mark Garrity, head of the UK public sector at Trustmarque, said that the success of the move underlines a strong partnership between his company and Scotland.

The deployment will include MS User Experience Virtualisaion which lets users log in to any computer on the same network.

Staff in the pilot project included 20 top government execs and 20 techniques.

No details were given of the value of the deal.

BYOD: security, it’s heard of it

Posted on October 11, 2013 by - News

byodA survey by Context said that despite the prevalence of BYOD (bring your own device) in the work place, security cannot be guaranteed.

Context says there’s a clear trade off between convenience and security. It examined three products: Airwatch, Blackberry Universal Device Service and Good for Enterprise, in conjunction with IOS and Android devices.

While these products all provide good levels of BYOD security, Context found the underlying operating systems limits what they can achieve.

Alex Chapman, senior consultant at Context, said: “There is no realistic way to guarantee the security of a workable BYOD environment, but organisations can take significant steps towards mitigation of security risks if they combine technical security controls with clearly defined acceptable use policies. MDM…can only lock down mobile devices to the extent that underlying operating systems will permit and BYOD implementations can only lock down devices to a level that users are willing to accept.”

IBM claims cloud performance breakthrough

Posted on October 11, 2013 by - News

IBM logoBoffins at Big Blue said they’ve developed a way to manage network bandwidth inside a cloud.

That, IBM said, could lead to improvements in system performance, and make clouds more efficient and cheaper.

The invention allows to automatically choose the best way for people to access the cloud depending on the network bandwidth.

IBM suggests the method will suit online applications that are subject to peaks and troughs in demand for services.

Those might include online retailers, auction sites, search engines, news media sites, and crisis and disaster management applications.

Big Blue explains that in a cloud computing environment, each person is given access to a virtual machine which delivers host  OS and physical resources. Multiple VMs are assigned inside the cloud and if demands for resources dramatically fluctuate, apps will become clogged up. IBM says its method lets systems automatically and dynamically re-assign work based on networking bandwidth requirements and availability.

Big Blue’s Big Data Lab reveals the Big Unknowns

Posted on October 10, 2013 by - News

ibm-officeEver had the feeling there were things afoot that were unknown to you? You’re not alone. But fear not, for the good folk of IBM have pulled a Big Blue Rabbit out of the Big Data Hat for you.

The world’s favourite international business machines have opened a new lab called the Accelerated Discovery Lab. One of the most remarkable things about it might even be its name, which – unlike so much of what goes on in the technology sector – seems related to what it does.

The lab will offer “diverse data sources, unique research capabilities for analytics such as domain models, text analytics and natural language processing capabilities derived from Watson, a powerful hardware and software infrastructure, and broad domain expertise including biology, medicine, finance, weather modeling, mathematics, computer science and information technology,” said IBM, presumably just before it passed out. Don’t forget to breath, dear.

By making it possible for organisations to take their data and mix it with these vast and disparate data sources, the Accelerated Discovery Lab will make it possible to start to identify hitherto unknown relationships among the data.

That could be to find seasonal patterns in purchasing behaviour that go beyond the obvious, such as people buy ice cream and shorts in summer. Or it could be combining social media insights with psychology data in an attempt to create meaningful customer profiling. Or it might be finding statistically robust segmentation that takes you further than ‘our target market is men in the 35-50 age bracket.’

At the moment, analysing Big Data can mean relying on a fairly manual approach to the massive amounts of data, gathered from a broad variety of channels. Whether you’re a business or a researcher, this is a testing and expensive process with precious little in the way of meaning or value waiting for you at the end.

There is obvious appeal in being able to accelerate that process.

“If we think about Big Data today, we mostly use it to find answers and correlations to ideas that are already known. Increasingly what we need to do is figure out ways to find things that aren’t known within that data,” said Jeff Welser, Director, Strategy and Program Development, IBM Research Accelerated Discovery Lab.

And to think how people laughed at Donald Rumsfeld when he said something not too dissimilar.

Sassy developments and cloudy outcomes emerge

Posted on October 10, 2013 by - News

clouds3Businesses needing to implement new processes and procedures across different sites may well be thanking their lucky stars today, after German software colossus Software AG unveiled something called Process Live.

Process Live is described as “a cloud based service integrating social collaboration with process improvement”, which loosely means that you can put things like your HR services (contracts, hiring and firing) in the cloud and make them available across different territories – rather than locking them away in separate systems where no one can find what they need.

Being software-as-a-service (SaaS), Process Live is intended to offer Software AG’s customers all the usual benefits of scaling up as well as down, instant switching on and off, and so on.

Singapore-based management consultancy firm, the Litmus Group, is using Process Live and Fabian Erbach, Partner at Litmus quoted by Software AG thus: “Process Live gives us the opportunity to start process improvement projects immediately and to dynamically scale them based on demand and maturity.”

“We are giving access to the speed and accuracy of a process driven business to departments and organisations of any size”, said Software AG CTO Wolfram Jost. “With a fully scalable investment model, business users have direct access to powerful process improvement tools when and for how long they need them – without having to involve the IT department.”

The launch of Process Live took place at Software AG’s user conference, Innovation World, which was held in San Francisco.

PC market continues to be weak

Posted on October 10, 2013 by - News, Products

IDC graphIDC released figures estimating that worldwide PC shipments accounted for 81.6 million units in Q3 of 2013 – that’s a drop of 7.6 percent, compared to the previous year.

But IDC said it had expected a decline of 9.5 percent for the quarter.  It said that shipments were weak in the early part of the quarter but business buys and channel intake of Windows 8.1 based systems happened in September.

IDC said emerging markets continued to be weak, while the channel and vendors were stock heavy on Ivy Bridge systems and eroded by lower priced smartphones and tablets.

Upgrades from Windows XP boosted shipments in the enterprise desktop section.

Rajani Singh, senior research analyst at IDC, said that the US market hasn’t changed that much. There may be a small increase in the fourth quarter, he said. But that will be followed “by a challenging 2014”.

In EMEA the PC market continued to decline with weak consumer demand a shift to tablets.  The channel maintained lean inventories during the period.

The only bright light were “pockets of investments” despite companies still being reluctant to spend any money.

Lenovo is the top vendor and is expanding into the channel, while HP and Dell were numbers two and three.  Acer and Asus both were weakened by lack of spend by consumers. Asus doesn’t have a significant corporate user base.

Trust me. I’m a cloud

Posted on October 9, 2013 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeCompanies worried about the dangers of cloud computing can set their minds at ease, if a recent survey from Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) is to be credited.

Based on questions asked of 250 senior IT business decision makers, it shows 69 percent of firms already use cloud based services.

But it’s all a bit of a mix because 86 percent of the respondents said they had a hybrid mix including cloud, servers on their premises and hosted services.

Piers Linney, CEO of Outsourcery reckons that a gradual move to the cloud happens because companies don’t want to replace their entire systems or only use cloud for some aspects of their businesses.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Outsourcery offers cloud services and no doubt Outsourcery is happy to learn that the survey shows 91 percent of those surveyed are happy with providers.

Companies start taking their tablets

Posted on October 9, 2013 by - News, Products

Keep taking the tabletsMore and more tablets are being used in companies with large numbers now being used to access corporate data and apps.

That’s according to a survey from Ovum, which points out that using tablets is changing the way people work.

The survey, conducted in the second quarter of this year, showed that 17.6 percent of people had been given tablets by their employers, compared to 12.5 percent in 2012.

And the number of personal tablet owners grew from 28.4 percent in 2012 to 44.5 percent in 2013, meaning that more personally owned tablets find their way into the workplace.

Richard Absalom, analyst at Ovum, said: “The primary route for tablets into the enterprise is through the consumer/employee channel. Over 66 percent of employees who personally own a tablet use them for work.”

Absalom said that employees use many different devices to get to corporate data and content – tablet or BYOD strategies should be put into that context. “Tablet deployments have the potential to change the way that businesses operate,” he said. “The primary challenge ofr the enterprise is to turn tablet usage into a genuinely transformative deployment.”

Big Data is underused

Posted on October 9, 2013 by - News

Big dataCompanies aren’t using Big Data for their own competitive advantage.

That’s according to a survey by Stibo Systems, which surveyed 200 “senior business decision makers” looking after IT.

And despite companies having zillions of bytes of data, 34 percent said they didn’t know what their firm does with the information.  Another 15 percent said their organisations keep too much data.

But there’s another problem. Stibo’s survey revealed that pan-European businesses have trouble managing their data. Some get third parties to look after it while some don’t make any use of it at all.

Companies managing their own data centrally can use it better than firms which have “siloes” all over the place.

Simon Walker, a director at Stibo, said: “With so much of a company’s data being used for marketing purposes to inform financial decisions, it begs the question of why it’s largely owned by IT departments and not those departments that are using it. There is a large number of enterprises being left behind in big data adoption simply due  to the lack of effective data management processes.”