Industry news

At this year’s Air Transport Summit in Brussels, Jim Peters, CTO at SITA predicted that Apple would promote near filed communications (NFC) heavily this year.

Mr Peters said that he expected NFC to become commonplace by the end of the year, with the technologies employment in transmitting data to payment terminals.

Peters commented that: “By the end of the year the majority of smartphones that you go and buy will have NFC on them.”

A €16 investment programme from the European Commission aims to give SMEs access to supercomputers based on cloud platforms, allowing small and medium businesses to employ technologies and resources currently only available to big corporations.

The EU funded project is designed to build a super computing-cloud throughout Europe as part of an effort to improve the performance of SMEs in Europe and boost the struggling economy while providing expertise from throughout the EU. Similar projects have existed in France, Germany and Scotland.

As part of the project, SMEs will receive advice from the European commission on how they can employ cloud based supercomputers to improve their business models and overcome obstacles.

29 NHS trusts are tending a joint contract to provide clinical information across the different trusts.

The contract worth £300 million, will include integration, maintenance, management and hosting. Suppliers will need to provide hosting and reporting and will be able to bid for the contract through a supplier framework.

The trusts focused in the south of England are being led by Camden Primary Care Trust. The new system will be used in child, community and mental health services.

Research in Motion has started to cut jobs as part of a move to save $1 billion thorough cost cutting by 2013. The company has suffered in a competitive market in keeping pace with companies such as Apple and Google.

A statement from RIM released on Wednesday did not specify the numbers of positions to be cut or from which locations. RIM is set to release first-quarter earnings from this year on June 28.

The company reported $123 million net loss from the fourth-quarter of 2012. Recent news has seen RIM ex-executives Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie receiving $12 million in exit payments.

Oracle has agreed to waiver all damages pay-outs from a copyright infringement against Google's use of Java in order to move on to appeal larger claims.

The case revolved around Google’s use of Java in Android, Google was cleared of much of Oracle’s infringement claims last month with any damages pay-outs likely to range at hundreds of thousands rather than the $6.1 billion that Oracle had sought.

In moving on with the case Oracle is seeking to appeal to court against larger claims in the case regarding whether certain programmes can be copyrighted.

Analyst firm Forrester have reported that the economic downturn and the uncertainty surrounding the Euro will likely see IT growth halt in Europe this year.

IT spending will revolve around the fate of the Euro, seeing no increase in growth for spending if Europe avoids a downfall triggered by the collapse of the Euro, to a rapid reduction in spend should the Euro collapse.

Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels commented: “The most likely result is either near-zero growth or economic recession in 2012, depending on the country."

David Taylor-Smith, UK chief of global security firm G4S, has predicted that private security services will have an increased role in the coming years, as police services increase privatisation.

David said that he expected to see an increased number of deals similar to the planned programs of West Midlands and Surrey services, which would see police services carried out by private contractors such as G4S.

In an interview published today with the Guardian, David Taylor-Smith said “we would never try to take away core policing functions from the police but for a number of years it has been absolutely clear as day to us– that the configuration of the police in the UK is just simply not as effective and as efficient as it could be."

Airbus is considering moving energy intensive high performance computing centres from France and Germany to Northern Europe.

Airbus CIO Guus Dekkers has commented that increasing energy costs in France and Germany have made the prospects of moving supercomputer sites to colder European sites attractive and would be able to provide savings of 20 percent.

In other news Airbus completed a deal with Russian airline Transaero for the purchase of four Airbus A380, worth $1.7 billion at list prices. The aircraft will operate on European, Central American and Asian routes.

The latest Gartner research shows that businesses spend $120 billion worldwide on enterprise application software this year.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) represented the largest source of investment at $24.9 billion, the total spend was a rise 4.5 percent on 2011.

Tom Eid, research vice-president at Gartner, predicted that: "Spending in 2012 is anticipated to focus on industry-specific applications; upgrades to established, mission-critical software; integrating and securing established systems and infrastructure”, and that businesses were looking at cost-effective software as a way to counter economic downturns.

Wells Fargo & Co are looking at reducing cost through offshoring as part of continued cost-cutting measures. A spokeswomen from the company said that the bank is considering moving technology, retirement divisions and other departments to India and the Philippines.

The announcement comes as the fourth-largest US bank looks to increase savings by $1.7 billion through a variety of cost-saving measures.

Wells Fargo already has workers in India and China and the move would, according to the company allow for a global approach and provide for the demands of a worldwide client list at all times.