Industry news

BAE Systems have warned that the failure of a merger between Airbus owners EADS and BAE would result in mass job cuts.

The warning comes from privately released reports which looked at the jobs that could be saved from the merger and the creation of a globally competitive company that would potentially secure work for both groups.

BAE has reduced its workforce in recent years as defence spending falls in a time of recession, with multiple layoffs within the UK.

The warning of job cuts will place increased pressure on the UK government to green-light the merger.

Alliance Boots are to invest £56 million in 12 percent of Nanjing Pharmaceutical, one of the largest pharmaceutical giants in the country.

The planned investment comes after Boots entered into a joint venture with Chinese pharmaceutical company Guangzhou in 2008.

Stefano Pessina, the executive chairman of Alliance Boots, said: ”In 10 years, I hope we will be one of the major players in China or we will be, together with other companies, part of one of the major players in China."

A report released by corporate financial advisors Catalyst predicted that the private health care sector can expect to see £20 billion worth of business in the next few years.

The high level of potential business comes from government efforts to reduce public sector spending and the introduction of alternate health care models.

Catalyst used examples of recent health care contracts with Virgin Care and Serco to show the direction of government policy.

The Catalyst report detailed that: "The introduction of GP commissioning and interest in healthcare models offering alternatives to hospital care will require a higher proportion of services to be delivered by the private sector. The markets for these services are estimated to be worth around £20bn."

Thai billionaire Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi, has made an offer of $7.2 billion for Singapore based consumer group Fraser and Neave (F&N).

The move to buy out the other shareholders could end Heineken’s bid to buy a 40 percent stake in F&N’s beer industry.

Charoen already controls a 30 percent stake of the business and the Heineken deal could only now succeeded if the company was able to persuade shareholders to stick by the bid.

A successful buy-out of shareholders by Charoen may see a renegotiated deal with Heineken in the future.

O2 have entered into discussions with regulator Ofcom to try and bring the auction of spectrums for 4G services forward.

The discussion with Ofcom comes after the announcement of the iPhone 5, which will only support 4G services on the EE network.

The auction for spectrums in the 2.5GHz and 800MHz would allow other phone operators to deliver 4G services in line with EE, who have employed their 1800MHz spectrum to deliver the service, ahead of O2 and other rivals.

John Lewis has reported pre-tax growth of 59.8 percent, with a half year revenue report of £3.9billion.

The profits were driven by a 40 percent increase in online sales, with e-commerce now accounting for 24 percent of all John Lewis sales.

In an interim report statement, John Lewis said: “Our multi-channel operation continues to go from strength-to-strength, with customers appreciating the ease of shopping across a variety of channels from smartphones to in-store internet kiosks.”

At the opening of Amazon’s Digital Media Development Centre in London, the company announced that 100 new technology positions would be created from the development.

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, said of the new center and job creation, “Boosting London’s tech and media workforce is key to driving the capital’s economy and helping to create jobs and growth.”

The digital center will develop multiple digital projects including services for a range of devices including mobiles, PC’s, TV’s and consoles.

The announcement of a £29.8 billion merger between BAE and EADS has raised concerns regarding potential job cuts.

Both trade unions and business analysts have raised concerns that a merger between defence giant BAE Systems and Aerobus manufacturer EADS, could result in job cuts.

Britain’s largest union, Unite, have already said that it will seek a urgent meeting with business secretary Vince Cable, in order to prevent job cuts.

Mike Clancy, the general secretary designate of Prospect said: "Whether the news of this merger brings reassurance or not for the workers depends on whatever plans for consolidation or growth the merged company will provide.

In my last Blog – Finding value in the Big Data Mine, I spoke about putting big data analytics to work, the power of embracing technology and the data explosion to identify and extract maximum value from the vast amounts of information, particularly where it is unstructured.

Now, I want to look at some of the risks associated with Big Data and ways in which to ameliorate them.

Many companies are now looking to understand what is on their file servers, so that they can assess the risks and opportunities that may lurk within that data. Unmanaged file servers can pose legal and compliance risks and may cause vast disruption if a company is asked to produce documents to a court or for an internal enquiry and this is an essential starting point.

Unmanaged information represents a risk because it makes it hard to find information – particularly when much of that information is unstructured. When litigation occurs, if information cannot be found, organisations may ultimately face court sanctions.. In situations where an organisation does not have a company-wide litigation readiness strategy that involves properly indexed information, the risk is that they may have to settle cases they could otherwise win and do so on punitive terms. Alternatively, the organisation risks losing cases because they cannot find the evidence that they are otherwise certain exists.

Another form of risk which ultimately develops from unmanaged information is compliance risk. For example, sensitive client information that may reside on servers that are not managed may be misused, lost or even destroyed.

So, what about the risk inherent in having to produce documents during a discovery process? In the early days of eDiscovery a few years ago, organisations mainly took a reactive approach to the process of identifying relevant. As companies started to see the impact of this approach, in terms of cost, disruption and legal risk of not being able to easily recall information they began to move towards a more proactive approach. Such an approach involves insuring that information is properly indexed and either retained in the right place or destroyed. This involves what we call an index-once, use-many approach; the idea that if you have a single index of all corporate information it makes finding information considerably easier and it can be used for many reasons, beyond legal ones. That is because not only are all the key repositories connected to the index but also the users can use a single query to find what they are actually looking for, so they don’t have to learn the quirks of numerous search engines.

In my days as an analyst I saw numerous end user customers – mainly financial services companies, as they tend to be the ones leading the charge – that didn’t think it was cost-effective to proactively manage information in this way. Now many of these same companies are realising that such an approach represented a false economy and it creates too many risks to not have such information policies in place. They are now looking to implement technology that enables them to quickly identify what information resides where, what it is and therefore whether it needed to be retained or destroyed. The latter approach is seen as controversial by some, but organisations are embracing the idea that information deletion is a legally-sound policy as long the deletion is defensible; if it can be shown that information was deleted defensibly, there’s nothing to fear from such a policy. It’s a case of having both the right technology and the right policies in place

The rewards of analysing Big Data can be great and the risks of retaining what you need and getting rid of what you don’t are manageable. Welcome to the new reality of information management.

Welcome to the first in a series of Sourcing Specialist blog posts – where Alun Morris, Sourcing Consultant at Wax Digital, outlines the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the major indirect spend categories that are common to most organisations but often overlooked in terms of driving best value.

IT Consumables is often considered best bundled into office supplies as a category. But my view is that for best value to be achieved by any spender of note it is best approached as a category on its own. The market has many individual traits that can only really be leveraged when dealt with in isolation. The big one of these is the amount of continual price fluctuation that takes place on these global commodities, a result of constantly changing demand, manufacturing capacity and input prices.

Seemingly endless choices and options in the category means organisations must take care in boiling down to a tight shortlist and carefully vetted suppliers. I focus particularly on eSourcing tools, for example eAuctions, which helps to simplify this refining process across many variables to be explored. These include thing like the effect of splitting core and non-core items, as well as comparison of taking a single and multiple supplier approach across different product sets.

The level of variance in the category can be illustrated using printer consumables as an example. This sub-category alone offers options of OEM, compatible or remanufactured products. Beyond this the impact of how well different ink or toner products will work alongside selected IT hardware options is an important but difficult equation to determine total price per page and the value that different solutions offer.

Alongside the consumables market there is scope within most organisations to standardise their printer hardware at the same time. It can be highly effective to review these two categories side by side to consolidate budgets and drive the most desirable combined result from both. This cause and effect consideration is also important when evaluating remanufactured products – what does the recycling value of spent cartridges add to the picture?

Contrasting approaches must be considered for other IT consumables sub categories. Memory devices and storage media for example lend themselves to careful use of a range of tactics, such as standardising to a limited range, tendering bulk orders, ensuring demand management and considering grouping linked products.

In terms of frequency and regularity of review, the turbulence of price fluctuation in these markets means that regular careful review should be under way. What is a good deal one day might not be the next. Always keep a keen eye on market forces and use this knowledge as an ongoing negotiation tool.

Next week – IT hardware