Industry news

London's Tower Hamlets Council has signed a £70 million deal with services firm Agilsys in an effort to enable ICT to deliver its share of the savings - and create new local jobs.

The seven-year strategic partnership deal with Agilisys is expected to generate more than £29 million in ICT cost savings. Agilsys will implement the council's new finance and HR systems, as well as support its transformation programme.

The deal comes as part of efforts to combat the need to make £100 million of cuts over four years.

The council insisted that the IT team's employment terms and conditions will be fully protected, and that they will also have a no compulsory redundancy guarantee.

BT Global Services has won a $220m outsourcing deal with mining giant Anglo American.

The IT services contract covers all of the company's networking requirements in numerous locations 9many of them remote), across 15 countries, for the next five years.

The entirety of Anglo American's voice services will be moved to BT's One Voice converged communications platform, which will enable collaborative services such as IP telephony and videoconferencing to be deployed. BT will also become Anglo American's "global supplier of choice" for networking hardware equipment.

The deal follows on from a 2007 outsourcing contract with BT in alliance with HP, which also covered IT hardware supplied by HP.

Hacktivist group Anonymous has targeted the home Office, Number 10 and Ministry of Justice websites in protest of the extradition of alleged UK hackers to the US.

Anonymous claimed responsibility for the Denial-of-Service attacks this weekend, rendering the sites useless for over an hour. Twitter accounts affiliated with Anonymous hinted that the attacks came as a protest against the extradition Gary MacKinnon, who stands accused of hacking into the Pentagon's IT systems, and Richard O'Dwyer, who allegedly operated an illegal download link directory site, to the US.

The success of the attacks raises questions as to why the sites were so susceptible to hacking.

The largest maker of business-management software, SAP AG, plans to spend approximately $500 million to encourage customers to its Hana data-processing product, and ramp up the competition against Oracle Corp.

$337 million has been budgeted by SAP to provide new clients of its Hana database platform with consulting services and an 18-month refund policy. The Walldorf, Germany-based company is also starting a $155 million venture fund to spur development of applications compatible with Hana.

Vishal Sikka, an SAP board member in charge of technology and innovation, said yesterday “with Hana, we have an opportunity to really transform the database and rethink applications.”

Sophos has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Dialogs Software, a mobile device management vendor based in Germany.

This is not the first partnership between the companies; Dortmund-based Dialogs' smartMan mobile device management technology is already powering Sophos' Mobile Control product.

The management of mobile devices, particularly those owned by employees and used in corporate environments, was a key topic for discussion at this year's RSA security conference in San Francisco.

Sophos plans to merge Dialogs' smartMan technology, which supports all types of mobile devices and operating systems including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian, into a Unified Threat Management suite which will also include its own mobile security and encryption products.

In a bid to slash on-going costs of £30 million London's councils are considering pooling their administration for pensions.

Some 32 boroughs, alongside the City of London Corporation and the London Pensions Fund Authority, could see their processing costs fall "sharply", it has been proposed.

London Councils, an umbrella group pushing for the changes, said “there was a commitment to explore further the proposals for the creation of a London Pensions Mutual, as a pan-London investment fund."

The councils have also estimated that by combining the funds invested, they will be able to better co-ordinate and direct up to £2.25 billion funds into local infrastructure projects.

"Each scheme has separate advisers, administrators, fund managers with their performance fees – if councils work together that cost can be steeply cut," said Sir Merrick Cockell, chair of the Local Government Association.

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. has annouced the evacuation of staff from two of its software development centers around Chennai in southern India, after authorities issued a tsunami warning following a massive earthquake off the coast of Sumatra.

"As a measure of extreme caution, we have evacuated all our employees from two of our large facilities around Chennai," India's largest software exporter by sales said in a statement.

It wasn't immediately known how many employees it has in the two facilities.

Hewlett Packard is set to move in to the cloud computing market. The new tool will put HP in competition with Amazon as well as other businesses.

HP planned to launch the public cloud service May 10th and will incorporate a variety of computing tasks. The service will also include software tools that businesses and other companies can use to build and run programs, and even transfer programs from to HP's data centres.

The move is part of CEO Meg Whitman’s strategy to take advantage of the cloud computing trend, as businesses and consumers are increasingly storing and accessing data and services over the Internet.

“The market for public cloud is large and will continue to grow,” Hewlett-Packard Chief Strategy Officer Bill Veghte said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg.

Maxwell, Director of ICT Futures at the Cabinet Office, will take up the role following the departure of Bill McCluggage last November.

Maxwell will continue in his current role while reporting to government CIO Andy Nelson with his new responsibilities.

Nelson said: "I am delighted that Liam Maxwell will be taking on the role of deputy government chief information officer, this is an important step in delivering ICT services that are fit for a modern civil service. Liam has a strong track record of delivering success in government ICT and he also brings significant experience of turning the theory into practice."

An Oxford University graduate, Maxwell joined the Cabinet Office in July 2011. Previously, he was head of computing at Eton College for nearly seven years, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Facebook is set to acquire popular photo app Instagram for around $1 billion (£630 million). The purchase will be made using both cash and stock and Facebook has said it will allow Instagram to grow independently.

The Instagram app is free and allows users to apply different special effects to their photos before they are uploaded. Proving hugely popular, the firm says that it has more than 30 million users uploading more than 5 million new pictures every day.

Announcing the deal on his Facebook Timeline, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook."

He added: "This is an important milestone for Facebook because it's the first time we've ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don't plan on doing many more of these, if any at all."