Industry news

IT services company Atos has announced today that it has secured a five year contract valued at £140 million to the Shared Services Alliance (SSA). The contract will see Atos supplying IT services to the SSA, part of a procurement initiative with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).

The contract will cover IT services with all four members of the SSA, covering networking, desktop applications, hosting-services and service integration. The contract will see the consolidation and modernisation of the existing IT infrastructure of the SSA as well as improving services to over 18,000 users, in order deliver 30 percent savings at the end of the five years.

SSA Award Project Manager, Keith Gibson, said: “It will reduce costs by simplifying IT support arrangements and provides a solid platform for future developments.”

Cloud.IQ have won £2 million in funding from ventures capital company, Bridges Ventures. Cloud.IQ located close to Silicon Roundabout provides services allowing companies to use text, phone, social media and email to manage their marketing.

The secured funding will allow Cloud.IQ to expand personal as well as supporting customer recruitment.

Cloud.IQ was only created in February this year but the platform has been deployed since 2002 and has provided services to over 12,000 campaigns and 40 million B2C interactions.

Facebook has floated 400 million shares on the Nasdaq at €38 each which could provide as much as $16 billion in revenue and the third-largest IPO in US history.

A report by the Wall Street Journal has reported that the planned share price will see the validation of Facebook between $93 billion and $104 billion.

Facebook has also been hit by setbacks including the announcement by General Motors last week that the company was withdrawing $10 million in revue from advertising on Facebook after claiming that the site advertising failed to warrant the investment.

Mike Lawrie the new CEO of CSC has directly taken control of protracted negotiations with the NHS in a bid to draw the line under the failed patent records contract.

Mike Lawrie took over as chief executive of CSC in March and has rapidly moved to turn around the company after publishing heavy losses, in part stemming from $1.5 billion in losses from tendering the NHS contract.

Mr Lawrie commented that “"There's no question both parties want to get to an agreement. Now on a weekly basis the head of the NHS and myself are getting together. We are hopeful the NHS agreement will get completed in the not too distant future".

HP is planning to cut their workforce by as many as 25,000-30,000 in the coming months attributed to a source close to the company according to the Financial Times.

The move would rank as one of the biggest mass lay-offs from a US company in the last decade and would take the form in part from an early retirement offer focused within service divisions.

The cuts would represent one of the largest measures by the company to achieve savings and reverse the companies falling value from increased competition.

International companies are failing to gain the full potential from social media and exploit the business opportunities presented. Research carried out by software maker Satmetrix pointed at the B2B sector as being particularly poor in identifying the advantages of social media as well as the risks in using the medium.

The research showed that over half of B2B businesses had no means of identifying conservations about their business on social media while 75 percent did not analyse social media activity surrounding their brand. B2C performed only slightly better with 55 percent failing to respond back to customer feedback on social platforms.

Richard Owen, CEO at Satmetrix, said “companies running the risk of losing customers by not addressing their issues shared online, but they are also walking past the opportunity to capitalise on positive comments made on the social web.”

UK SMEs are looking to Cloud services and software because of the flexibility that the platforms offer rather than cost-savings, according to YouGov research.The low cost application of the Cloud is no longer the major reason for the adoption of Cloud services by SMEs, the focus has shifted to increasing strategic value.

The research showed that Cloud services were being adopted at a rapid rate with 67 percent of UK SMEs having already employed cloud services or plan to do so in the future.

Simon Porter, vice president for mid market sales at IBM, said “Businesses are beginning to realise that the full potential of cloud goes far beyond a cost-focused ROI model.”

Female talent in the IT industry has continued to stay at low levels with male dominance of top positions remaining at the same high levels seen five years ago.

The Harvey Nash CIO survey found that more than 30 percent of respondents had no women in either technology or leadership roles within their company, while 81 percent responded that women held less than a quarter of management roles.

Chief executive officer of Harvey Nash Group, Albert Ellis, said “In the past, female graduates have not aspired to be tech geeks and a career in IT has not been seen as attractive. Technology companies and groups will miss out in the future and this makes the skills shortage even more acute.”

Reductions in Cisco’s growth plans have impacted through the Cloud services market as the technology sector reacts to comments from CEO John Chambers. Chambers downgraded revenue growth expectations to between two and five percent , this comes after Cisco had previously revised growth expectations from 12 to 17 percent to 5 and 7.

Cisco is a major provider of the key components of Cloud services and the announcement saw concern from Cloud businesses as more than 70 percent of Cloud providers currently use Cisco technology in providing services.

Chambers commented “We continue to see the impact of the areas of concern we have discussed for the last few quarters,-Those were Europe and the global economy, public sector, India and conservative IT spend as reflected in the commentary of our peers. Each of these areas has proven to be a challenge as we anticipated, and several, Europe and customer conservatism, have gotten worse."

CSC has released a statement pointing to losses from NHS write-offs as being partly due for a full year-revenue of $15.88 billion, down from $16.04 billion last year.

CSC announced in December of 2011 that the Lorenzo patient record system was expected to cost the company $1.5 billion. The company has announced over 1,000 job cuts in Britian earlier this year, with about half coming from within the NHS team in order to provide cost-savings.

CSC chief executive Mike Lawrie, said "We consider these results to be very poor as the company is executing well below an acceptable level for CSC and its investors,"