Industry news

Northumberland County Council has signed a 5 year deal with BT Global Services which will see the extension of the provision of NorthNet, a shared services platform for IT public sector services.

The service is expected to provide schools in the catchment area with increased internet speeds. The council has commented that the partnership with BT has already generated upwards of £860,000 in savings.

Networks and data manager at Northumberland County Council, David McDonnell, commented: “We are ensuring our rural locations in the county have access to fast internet speeds, Wooler library has just gone live with more areas to follow.”

Telefónica who owns O2 have secured a deal with companies including Google, Microsoft, RIM and Facebook which will provide customers with the ability to use their mobile devices to make digital payments.

The new system will allow users to carry out digital transactions including the purchasing of apps and charging payments directly to customers phone bill and effectively removing the need for a debit card.

The service is already being employed with over 400,000 customers in Germany already employing the Direct to Bill feature per month.

The global healthcare cloud computing market is expected to be worth over $5.4 billion by 2017 according to a report published by MarketsandMarkets.

This report comes as cloud computing and other forms of ICT are adopted at an increasing rate in healthcare.

Cloud software was currently deployed within 4 percent of all healthcare areas in 2011 and this number is expected to rise as more funds are deployed to develop cloud platforms as a means to deliver cost-savings.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) have been hit by a second outage within a month raising concern and the ire of users.

The latest outage came on the 14th June and customers affected by the outage were reportedly unable to get a response from the Amazon support team.

One user of AWS said: "One hundred per cent uptime is a required SLA for anyone providing cloud computing services. Amazon's inability to provide such service levels is the main reason we have decided to quit using Amazon Web Services EC2 altogether."

Vodafone’s purchase of Cable & Wireless Worldwide for £1.04 billion has been approved by the European Commission.

The acquisition did not break competition guidelines despite the move creating the second largest domestic telecoms company in the UK. The purchase of Cable & Wireless will add a company specialised in fixed telecoms to Vodafone’s focus on mobile services.

Cable & Wireless also is the owner of the largest fiber-optic network in the UK for business uses as well as an extensive European network which will provide Vodafone with greater market flexibility.

Yiru Zhong, senior industry analyst for the ICT group at Frost & Sullivan, commented: “we believe Vodafone is signalling its ambitions to capture all related digitalisation services around enterprises”.

Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has the potential to leave taxpayers footing a bill of over £300 billion.

The news comes from the analysis of a series of contracts sanctioned by the Treasury office. PFI contracts currently total 717 and provide funding for hospitals, schools and other forms of public facilities.

PFI provides funding totalling £54.7 billion for public infrastructure, however the expected final repayments are to total near £300 billion. The scheme has come under criticism for failing to be cost effective, with running costs making the scheme inefficient when compared with direct loans.

The losses caused by the purchase of aQuantive by Microsoft and the failure of the advertising specialist to develop may cause Microsoft to publish a loss for the first time in over a decade.

Analysts had previously reported that the failure of the online advertising company to grow would only cost $5.3 billion however the figure has now been revised to nearly $6.3 billion.

AQuantive commented that: “While the Online Services Division business has been improving, the company’s expectations for future growth and profitability are lower than previous estimates."

A warning that the UK faces an increased risk of cyber-attacks during the London 2012 Olympics has been issued by the Home Office.

The warning comes on the back of a series of repeated comments from Whitehall warning of the threat of cyber-attacks.

Richard Clarke, director of Counter-Terrorism, said: "The current threat level is at substantial and we recognise threat levels may change rapidly”.

Ofcom has proposed new caps to the charges that BT can bring for the use of its telecoms infrastructure by other communication providers.

The propose cap would only allow for a reduction of between 0-6.5 percent for traditional interface technology and 8-16 percent for newer telecom lines.

These new caps would see the expected price of customer communication charges fall, with companies including Vodafone, O2 and Plusnet all currently using BT infrastructure.

There has been much gloom in the channel about the cloud. Whether we are talking about IT service providers or value added resellers (VARs), many players in this sector have admitted to feeling under threat as small and medium sized customers begin to adopt cloud services. There is concern that vendors will simply start selling direct to businesses and cut their channel partner out of the loop entirely. Resellers worry about how to keep up to date with all the different cloud offerings and whether it will be possible to make a reasonable margin when billing monthly for a service instead of charging up front?

Yet a great opportunity exists for the channel. Everything hinges on the relationship between a trusted IT provider and its client. Most small businesses will have neither the time nor the resources to deal with more than one IT company, and moving independently to a cloud model can be complex and confusing. Businesses have their own set of questions about making the move. Who will sort out the setup of new users? How do we go about choosing the right set of solutions for our business? What if the business needs more than just Microsoft 365? While the giants of the software world may be targeting their off-the-shelf cloud products at the SME market, they are unable to provide the personal touch that a channel provider can bring.

Small businesses, from accountants and lawyers to recruitment agents or charities, need to focus on the job in hand and want their IT programmes to “just work.” The majority do not even have the luxury of an IT team; if they have an IT manager at all then this person will be spending much of his or her time trying to smooth out the problems of individual staff so that everyone can get on with their jobs with a minimum of fuss. Many find themselves “making-do” with technology that just about works, which is frustrating and can slow down productivity drastically. This is where a good IT services company can step in.

With the right technology, the reseller can offer cloud services to customers smoothly, easily, and with the right margins. New platforms, such as AppLayer’s White Label Box, are forging the final link in the chain that brings cloud services to smaller businesses via the channel. Such platforms allow resellers to bundle together whatever selection of cloud services a customer desires, from hosted desktop and email to specialist accounting software or database applications. In this way it becomes easy for the reseller, or the customer themselves, to simply switch user access on and off as required and to add and remove services on demand.

The benefits to the end user are enormous. Not only can a business dispense with the cost and hassle of maintaining an on-premise service, but it can enjoy far greater control over employee access to both data and applications. When an employee leaves, for example, their ID can be deactivated from a single point, removing the need for lengthy password searches and checking of lists. If the business is using an entirely hosted desktop model, access to data can be removed at the same time.

For the IT partner, the result is an enhanced role as the manager of the system, offering advice on applications and managing or delegating the central dashboard. Rather than being called in only when things go wrong, or as a supplier of new computers, the opportunity now exists for resellers to develop a longer-term relationship in which real value is added for the customer.

Small businesses will inevitably move to cloud solutions. In any company where IT is a tool and not a key part of the business, the more it can be treated as utility like any other, the better. The opportunity for the channel is to offer the services that make this possible, to take the burden from the already over-laden shoulders of small business managers, and to become indispensable.