Industry news

Fashion retail chain O’Neill have carried out wide ranging IT consolidation, in order to reduce 50 different enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) to 5 through a single ERP system.

The ERP system was procured from Lawson M3 and Liaison Technologies in 2011 for €6 million.

Richard Van der Hoek, integrations manager for O’Neill Europe, said “The big benefit is centralised data, so we are now able to inform countries quickly about cancelled colours, etc. The other benefit is all sales orders are also in one system,

The use of mobile optimised online services and applications has seen online growth for Sainsbury’s grow by 20 percent.

The improved mobile website allows customers to easily view Sainsbury’s website for groceries which offers over 20,000 products for purchase.

Sainsbury’s released the mobile optimise site last month, making the website available for Apple iPhones, Android operating systems and other smart phone systems. The first quarter trading results demonstrated a 3.6 percent increase in sales.

Private equity companies Apax Partners and Bain Capital, are reportedly looking at investing in a 41 percent stake in BPO giant Genpact.

If the deal is successful, it would rank as one of the largest in business process outsourcing history, with a potential value of $1.4 billion.

The 41 percent stake would come from Oak Hill Capital and General Atlantic Partners who are to sell their take according to the Times of India.

The government is considering creating a third framework to complement the existing G-Cloud and G-Hosting frameworks. Government CIO, Andy Nelson, revealed the potential for a new framework to help the public sector move to modern systems and software along with promoting the adoption of cloud based services.

The success of the G-Cloud framework in sourcing suppliers for public sector projects as well as promoting SMEs to offer competitive services has led to Whitehall contemplating a new framework to meet demand.

Andy Nelson said, “we could use more standard cloud services further down the track. Now is the time to think through how we do that, so we might end up with three different frameworks.”

Paul Boyns, head of IT Strategy and Policy at the BBC, warned businesses of the lack of development and maturity surrounding cloud contracts and services.

Paul speaking at the London Cloud Computing World Forum, warned of the problems facing cloud procurement due to the lack of best practice and standardisation surrounding the service, as well as the dangers of becoming locked into particular services.

Paul described how, “If you look at some of the key facets of cloud computing standards, they are not particularly mature. They are behind the times.”

Reports from KPMG and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) show that the IT job market continues to outperform against the overall jobs market.

The demand for staff in IT services has continued to rise in comparison to the difficulties facing the rest of the market.

Chief executive of REC, Kevin Green, commented that; “niche areas that are seeing much stronger growth than the national average. In every month this year the engineering and IT and computing sectors have seen solid increases in the number of workers.”

The new ICT curriculum due to begin in September 2014 will be innovative and flexible while being much shorter in order to focus core skills.

The new ICT curriculum will replace the defunct ICT programme which is to be discontinued from this September.

Dr Vanessa Pittard at the Department for Education said: “There will be a programme of study from September 2014. It will be much shorter to allow for innovation.”

Global outsourcing firm Wipro plans to extend infrastructure as a service (IaaS) capabilities as the firm looks to meet the specific requirements of enterprise-class clients.

The new global utility computing platform called Wipro iStructure will use the existing global Wipro data center and will offer infrastructure and application services.

Michael Wilczak, senior vice president of datacentre services, Wipro, commented: “Last year we began offering multi-tenant, virtual server hosting to our existing clients as part of large, integrated infrastructure management engagements. Clients have quickly adopted the service.”

The National Business Awards have given an extension to its deadline on application entries to Wednesday 27th June.

The Awards, partnered with Orange, are designed with showcasing the best in innovation, ethics and excellence within UK businesses both within the public and private sector.

Organisations from all regions across the UK, from SMEs to FTSE 100s, are invited to register for award categories ranging from the Orange Innovation Award, to the Sustainability Award, through to Entrepreneur of the Year and Online Business of the Year.

Viglen an ICT company which Alan Sugar holds majority shares in, have secured a contract with the Thetford Academy worth £1.6 million. The contract will see Viglen provide ICT equipment and services over the next 5 years.

The contract is designed to cover the Thetford Academy’s plan to embed ICT resources within teaching rather than the traditional model of dedicated ICT facilities.

Thetford Academy principal, Cathy Spillane, says, “We are delighted to have entered into this partnership with Viglen who have an excellent track record in delivery of ICT to the education sector.

.