Industry news

Pressure from the Financial Services Authority has forced the Royal Bank of Scotland to look into selling on its American retail arm, called Citizens.

Expectations are on the Rhodes based lender being placed on the market by next week, with an announcement coming this Thursday alongside RBS’ 2012 results, as the FSA puts pressure on the bank to refocus on UK operations.

The 2012 results announced on Thursday, with the expected announcement of Citizens selling, are expected to show losses of between £4 billion and £5 billion.

Northern Ireland’s department of health has spent around £130 million over the last three years in order to decrease patient waiting times and meet government targets.

Private healthcare is also excelling in providing specialist care, providing care in fields including ophthalmology, urology, dermatology and orthopaedics, with such clinics receiving over £14.5 million between 20120 and 2011 from the Belfast health trust.

The Health and Social Care Board have said that the private sector has contributed to achieving a significant reduction in waiting times and improved performance.

Samsung have now overtaken Apple as the world’s leading supplier of "smart connected devices", according to a new report released by IDC.

Samsung saw a market share jump to 20.8 percent from 12.3 percent over 2011 to 2012, compared to Apple’s increase from 16.3 percent to 18.2 percent, over the same period.

Samsung has seen significant success with its table and smartphone products, with Samsung’s Galaxy S3 becoming the world's bestselling smartphone in 2012.

Overall ‘smart connected devices’ which include PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones, shipped at a increase of 30 percent, compared to figures from 2011.

A new service called Incensu has been launched with the help of head teachers from around the country.

The service is designed to provide head teachers, schools bursars and school business managers with objective information, allowing for more informed decisions on procuring services and helping schools to differentiate between hundreds of supplier applications.

Incensu would separate the best suppliers from the rest, with the service only allowing suppliers to register if they came recommended by a school.

In allowing schools to come together to develop a shared procurement service, Incensu allows the education sector to source suppliers who have displayed a strong track record in procurement.

For the first time since 1978 the UK has lost its AAA credit rating, with growth predicted to be slow over the next few years.

The drop to Aa1 came from ratings agency Moody’s, citing significant ‘challenges’ ahead for the UK government’s debt reduction programme.

Moody’s did clarify that it did not predict any further downgrades in credit rating in the future, due to the UK’s economic stability.

Chancellor George Osborne responded to the downgrade by saying: “Far from weakening our resolve to deliver our economic recovery plan, this decision redoubles it".

Shadow chancellor Ed Balls said the downgrade represented a, “"humiliating blow to a prime minister and chancellor who said keeping our AAA rating was the test of their economic and political credibility".

News International (NI) is looking to consolidate services and generate significant cost-savings from a migration to Amazons cloud services.

The planned transition will see NI transfer three quarters of its servers over the following three years, increasing flexibility and scaling capacity.

Currently NI has 17 main data centres, the move to Amazon cloud will bring this number down. Ian McDonald, head of infrastructure and cloud at NI, said the Amazon service: “will mean two in the UK, two in the US, and two in Australia."

McDonald added that: “"We are talking about potentially 75 percent of our servers migrating to Amazon over the next three years. That is on 13,500 servers across News Corp publishing. It is a big, big change."

The Department for Work and Pensions has been criticised for failing to meet targets relating to its Work Programme.

The back to work initiative which is designed to get unemployed people back into long-term work, only managed to get 3.6 percent of the people on the scheme back into work in the first 14 months, between June 2011 and July 2012, compared to the target of 11.9 percent.

Opposition Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chaired a committee which attacked the DWP, said: “"It is shocking that, of the 9,500 former incapacity benefit claimants referred to providers, only 20 people have been placed in a job that has lasted three months”.

The Work Programme uses private firms to bring individuals into work on a payment by results basis to increase cost savings. Trades Union Congress general secretary Frances O'Grad also agreed with the committee’s report.

In response to the criticism, a DWP spokesman said: “"This report paints a skewed picture. More than 200,000 people have moved off benefits and into a job thanks to the Work Programme.” The spokesman added that: "The Work Programme gives support to claimants for two years and it hasn't even been running that long yet, so it's still early days. We know the performance of our providers is improving."

More than 900 amendments to data protection laws have been approved by the European Parliament's industry committee.

The amendments are designed to benefit trading and boost economic development, allowing increased European trade, particularly with countries such as the US.

While the amendments have been welcomed by industry groups, some consumer organisations have raised fears over the safety of data in overseas locations, and the influence of industry lobby groups over the new data protection laws.

HP reported a 16 percent drop in profits for the last quarter as PC and printer sales are hit by slowing consumer demand.

Total revenue fell by 6 percent to $28.4 billion, with the last quarter representing the sixth quarter of consecutive declines in revenue.

HP has moved to undertake cost-cutting measures, with earnings for the next quarter up on analyst expectations.

CEO Meg Whitman said: “"While there's still a lot of work to do to generate the kind of growth we want to see, our turnaround is starting to gain traction as a result of the actions we took in 2012 to lay the foundation for HP's future".

Professional services firm Ernst & Young’s director of information, Mark Brown, has said today that the success of UK IT Offshoring in the late 90’s, allowed a domestic skill gap to open.

The success of Offshore IT service providers allowed UK based businesses to neglect the UK skill market.

IT businesses are now seeking to help train the next generation of UK IT employees, this includes the development of the national IT curriculum, which in the past has been criticised for failing to teach core skills that the IT industry desires.

Mr Brown said: “We have to look at how we address what we're teaching our kids at school today.”

Companies that delivered these past Offshored services, such as major corporations in India, are now helping to establish UK student skills, in order to develop the UK IT marketplace.

Mr Brown commented that the UK had already created a strong IT security industry set for future growth.