Industry news

The Cabinet Office has launched a ‘Digital Inclusion Strategy’ in a bid to increase the number of people who have access to internet services.

The strategy is expected to reduce the numbers of people who are offline by 25 per cent by 2016, with further reductions of 25 per cent after every two years.

The strategy is designed to bring 2.7 million people online over the next two years and coincides with the government’s digital strategy which is designed to increase efficiencies and reduce costs.

The Digital Inclusion Strategy also includes the creation of a common definition of civil service digital skills and sets out to create a common language for digital capabilities across the public sector.

Civil society minister Nick Hurd said: “A more digitally-skilled nation will help us to boost our economy and strengthen communities. This new partnership is about making it easier for people to build their digital skills and confidence, with the aim of reducing the number of people offline, so that by 2020 everyone who can be online, will be.”

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IT services and solutions provider Kelway has announced that it is been awarded a contract by RM Education to provide ICT supplier's service desk and warranty operations for RM Education branded hardware.

The agreement builds on an existing two year relationship, during which time Kelway has provided field engineering support on behalf of RM Education to schools and institutions across the UK.

RM Education provides an extensive range products and services for UK education institutions. The agreement over a seven year period, deepens an existing relationship within which Kelway delivers field engineering support for RM Education.

Kelway will provide full management of RM Education's hardware service desk - encompassing inbound customer call management, case management, allocation of field resources and the ongoing provision of on-site engineers. RM Education will continue to hold overall responsibility to customers, however educational institutions will benefit from the support offered by Kelway's extensive UK operations.

Penny Williams, sales director, public sector at Kelway said: "Our team is delighted to build on two years of excellent work with RM Education, providing the support and services they need to help advance their corporate strategy."

Oxford NHS Trust has revealed that it expects to save more than £1 million over five years from a communications upgrade.

The deal will see the trusts existing phone systems replaced by a cloud-based communications services provided by Vodafone.

The new communications system which will simplify, increase flexibility and standardise services, will be rolled out to 140 sites, throughout Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Somerset and Wiltshire.

Dominic McKenny, director of informatics at Oxford Health, described how the new communications system would: “reduce our telecommunications spend, redirect these resources to more productive activities and simplify the service for our users and those supporting our telephones”.

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A new report has revealed that public sector staff believe that reforms are not being carried out effectively due to skill shortages.

The report from totaljobs.com and Dods Research revealed that IT skill shortages were seen as a key contributor to reform inefficiency.

82 per cent of public sector staff survey said that staffing cuts had created pressure on reforms, 45 per cent said that the public sector workforce did not have the skills needed to carry out reforms effectively while one in six said that cuts will result in the failure of reforms.

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The National Audit Office (NAO) has recommended greater convergence to improve public sector shared services in the latest report on the cabinet office’s next generational programme.

The NAO, while saying that the shared services programme was “broadly on track’, it detailed that the value for money from the shared services programme was still to be established.

The report identified that only two out of the seven recommendations made by the Public Accounts Committee in 2012 had been fulfilled.

The report said that the Cabinet Office needed to work with departments to make them ‘intelligent customers’ of shared services and ensure that the government is gaining full value from the programme.

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Car and bike retailer Halfords have signed a three-year contract with Fujitsu to provide IT maintenance and support.

Fujitsu will replace incumbent supplier Barron McCann, providing maintenance services for a range of services at the retailer, with the new contract designed to reduce overall IT costs while delivering increased capability.

Fujitsu will also provide support for laptops and tablet devices which have been recently introduced to Halfords stores.

The Fujitsu contract comes as Halfords pursues an overall IT redesign programme including a SAP upgrade and the creation of a virtualisation programme.

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Analytics firm Gartner has revealed that Oracle has overtaken IBM as the second largest software vendor, as increased cloud uptake drives the technology firm’s growth.

Oracle posted $29.6 billion in revenue for 2013 compared to IBM’s $29.1 billion, with increased profits coming from greater cloud uptake and the rising perception of big data analytics. Microsoft continued to hold on to the number 1 spot with $65.7 billion in revenue.

Gartner research vice president Chad Eschinger said: “Global trends around big data and analytics with business investment in database and cloud-based applications helped to drive Oracle's top-line growth".

The report by Gartner revealed that global spending software increased by 4.8 per cent in total over 2013, with SaaS representing a major new player in the technology market.

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Chinese based Alibaba Group, which specialises in e-commerce goods, has moved to invest $692 million to Hong Kong-listed Intime Retail Group.

The investment in retail infrastructure comes as the e-commerce group moves to develop nline-to-offline, bringing online services to retail infrastructure.

The investment comes as part of a series of recent acquisitions and purchases, with over $2.7 billion spent in recent months in a variety of markets, including media, communication and technology services.

The spree of large purchases come as the Alibaba Group prepares for an IPO in the U.S. which is set to be the largest technology listing ever, beating Facebook previous record from 2012.

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Outsourcing services group Serco has had its contract with the London Borough of Enfield extended.

The contract to deliver ICT services has been extended for a further four year period until September 2019 and is valued at £20 million.

The renewed contract has been renegotiated to include transformative innovation projects, with much of the ICT work expected to go to Serco partner Sungard, which specialises in IT services.

Andrew Stafford, Enfield council’s cabinet member for finance and property, said: “This contract means that our ICT systems will continue to be fully integrated across all our sites and ensure we can continue to offer our residents the best service possible, as well as deliver significant savings to benefit the local council tax payer”.

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The Houses of Parliament have been hit by renewed IT issues following assurances that past IT problems had been resolved.

A report by Exaronews.com revealed that workers in Parliament were unable to access systems and had limited internet connectivity.

The IT failures came 90 minutes after a memo was posted assuring that past IT problems had been resolved. The blame for the previous IT disruptions had been laid on unnamed IT contractors.

In 2013, Joan Miller, the head of IT at the houses of Parliament said: “The services we have are secure, they add resilience. We have small applications that sit in the cloud, and it reduces my worry that the services are going to break.”

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