Industry news

Capita has been revealed to be Barnet Council’s preferred bidder for the delivery of back-office services as part of the One Barnet outsourcing project.

The outsourced 10 year back-office contract, estimated to be worth £32 million a year including HR services, IT and payroll, would see the transferal of council staff to the service providers.

The One Barnet plan has stirred controversy and opposition from council members over the failure to deliver savings during the three year running.

Mersey Care NHS Trust has signed a five-year contract with SCC to provide cloud hosting infrastructure in a deal worth £3 million.

The Mersey NHS will transfer ICT infrastructure and data to SCC’s OptimiseCloud platform. The deal is expected to reduce the work hours needed to run the service and generate £1.5 million in savings.

Neil Smith, director of finance at Mersey Care Trust, said: “The move will provide a more flexible infrastructure capable of responding to the organisation’s changing IT needs, freeing up the technical services IT resource to work on application developments and other service delivery projects,"

Cloud provider Rackspace offer £12,000 worth of cloud computing resources to emerging start-ups.

The scheme called the Rackspace Startup Programme is expected to be offered from 2013 and will be aimed at companies that have been identified as having the potential to receive great benefit from cloud funding.

The cloud funding program has already been rolled out within the US and Australia, with Rackspace noting that London now represented a strong market for upcoming start-ups.

Rackspace company chairman Graham Weston said: "Whenever I come to London I feel tremendously energised and excited by the amazing start-up scene here".

Network Rail has seen its debt rise by nearly £1 billion within 6 months, raising the railway giant’s total debt to over £28 billion.

Borrowing for the company increased from a £2.06 billion station and line investment programme including the modernisation of Reading station.

Network Rail's finance director, Patrick Butcher, said that such debt levels were fairly typical for a utility company of such size: “Providing our asset values keep going up – and they are, because they are driven by growing income streams from more passengers – then high debt levels are perfectly acceptable."

IBM has announced plans to build a new software testing centre situated at the University of Ballarat in Australia.

The announcement comes as part of IBM’s move to increase development and market share in the Asia Pacific region.

The centre will specialise in areas including software application development, application support, application management and consultation.

Predictions from research firm Gartner place IT giant Lenovo at the top of the China’s smartphone market by 2013.

Lenovo has rapidly expanded into the smartphone market, overreaching Gartner’s expectations and achieving a 1.7 percent share in the Chinese market in less than two years from entering.

Lenovo is now ranked second with the marketplace with a 14.8 percent share compared to leaders Samsung with 16.7 percent.

Gartner analyst Sandy Shen said: “We think Lenovo will depend on the low-end market to sell handsets, so it will allow Lenovo to obtain a much larger share."

Local UK authorities may face a bill of £1 billion for the roll-out of super-fast broadband across the country (BDUK).

The approval by the European Commission will provide a £530 million fund for the installation of broadband infrastructure however the estimated cost for the rollout of broadband is £1.5 billion leaving local authorities with a potential bill of £1 billion.

Further funding for BDUK is expected to be delivered through the private sector in exchange for provide broadband infrastructure delivery.

Royal Mail have revealed plans to update and replace 120,000 Personal Digital Assistant devices, the phased scheme is expected to cost £300 million.

The contract is expected to last five years with an extension option, covering both the support and provision of the PDA devices.

A release from the Royal Mail stated: “The supplier of services will be required to deliver a high level of integration and collaboration with other relevant providers of IT related services to the Royal Mail Group.”

Major US military contractor Lockheed Martin has been selected by UK government to provide IT support services for the G-Cloud 2.

The contract includes the provision of software and infrastructure in addition to the hosting and storage of public sector data.

The launch of G-Cloud 2 is expected to generate sales of £100 million with significant business heading to SMEs.

The merger between mining and commodities giants Xstrata and Glencore is expected to be approved today by the EU competition commission.

The approval is expected to be confirmed today with the stipulation that Glencore ends the sell off of Swiss based smelting company Nyrstar.

The merger is also expected to be confirmed by the South African competition commission after the regulator gave a green light to the move.