Industry news

FCC, one of the world's top services, infrastructures and renewable energy companies, has signed a 50 million Euros agreement with BT, one of the world’s leading providers of communications services and solutions, for the delivery of global data network and fixed communications services for a period of five years.

This agreement covers more than 50 countries in four continents - from Egypt to France, from the UAE to Russia, from Peru to Singapore and the United States. It includes wide and local area networking services, fixed voice services, video conferencing and remote access for more than 12,000 users located in approximately 850 sites.

The Government has published its new Cyber Security Strategy, setting out how the UK will support economic prosperity, protect national security and safeguard the public’s way of life by building a more trusted and resilient digital environment. It heralds a new era of unprecedented cooperation between the Government and the private sector on cyber security, working hand in hand to make the UK one of the most secure places in the world to do business.

The Government has already ranked cyber security as a tier 1 national security priority and committed £650m over the next four years to bolster its cyber defences. The UK is also leading the way on the world stage, earlier this month hosting the London Conference on Cyberspace to drive forward international dialogue on building a secure digital world.

Prime Minister David Cameron said: “While the internet is undoubtedly a force for social and political good, as well as crucial to the growth of our economy, we need to protect against the threats to our security. This strategy not only deals with the threat from terrorists to our national security, but also with the criminals who threaten our prosperity as well as blight the lives of many ordinary people through cyber crime."

The European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee has approved a report written by Labour MEP Michael Cashman which seeks to open EU institutions to public scrutiny and extend the rights of European citizens to access EU documents.

The committee backed Cashman’s amendments to draft public access legislation by 33 votes to 17. The changes seek to improve transparency, accountability and democracy within EU institutions and they will now be considered at next month’s Strasbourg Plenary, when the Parliament will vote on the proposed legislation.

Michael, who has spent the last ten years fighting to open up EU institutions, said: “What we are talking about is a right that allows citizens to make sure that we are accountable; parliamentarians accountable for what we do in their name, the Commission for what it does in their name, and, equally, the Council of Ministers."

University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) has announced plans to save more than £1.2 million on its office printing costs by using Xerox managed print services.

The seven-year Enterprise Print Services agreement will enable the Trust to take control of its printing processes and costs, and forms part of a wider project by Logica to create an intelligent back-office infrastructure for the Trust.

UK contact centre industry expects close to doubling of speech analytics usage by the end of 2012.

New research published by ContactBabel, the contact centre industry analysts, reveals that UK businesses expect the use of speech analytics solutions to jump from a current penetration rate of 14% to 26% within 12 months.

Although 57% of respondents - the majority of these in sub-100 seat contact centres - do not have any plans to implement speech analytics, the installed base industry-wide is expected by contact centre managers and directors to be close to doubling within 12 months.

Microsoft Corp, the largest software company, has signed an agreement that lets it take a closer look at Yahoo! Inc.’s financial information to help it consider financing a bid.

Yahoo’s advisers asked that bids be submitted next week. Bidders are likely to offer to buy only a minority stake in Yahoo, as they haven’t arranged financing for a full takeover. It is possible Microsoft may help finance a bid and not try to buy Yahoo outright, two people said.

The South African government is considering reforming public procurement procedures, including simplifying purchasing laws.

Proposals developed by the National Planning Commission said public procurement laws have become increasingly complicated over the past decade.

The National Development Plan: Vision for 2030 states “When even honest and competent bureaucrats find it difficult to understand what their legal obligations are and how to comply with them, the law requires simplificatio."

Multi-national process technology firm standardises and streamlines IT with Agilisys Cloud Services

Multi-national process technology company PDX, has awarded Agilisys Cloud Services a three-year contract to provide a fully managed IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) worth approximately £1 million. The service will standardise and streamline PDX’s IT infrastructure in an end-to-end managed service covering: hosting, storage, provision of Microsoft technologies, backup and desktop support.

PDX provides technologies that enable companies in a wide range of markets to make their industrial processes more efficient by optimising processing cycles and reducing the use of resources and energy. For PDX’s ambitious growth plans it sought a cloud services partner to simplify IT systems management, increase visibility and control of IT processes, and ensure that all data is backed up, secure and fully auditable. Additionally, PDX wanted to improve incident reporting and how IT support calls are raised, tracked and handled.

Jarek Gorecki Head of IT, PDX, commented on the agreement: “We had reached a point where we either invested in additional infrastructure and grew our in-house technical team or found a provider to supply an end-to-end managed cloud service. We wanted to benefit from increased reliability and availability of scalable IT Infrastructure, and decided to make a major step-change in our IT provision by moving to the cloud. Our partnership with Agilisys Cloud Services will standardise our systems and infrastructure and transform the way IT is supported, managed and deployed. We see our IT infrastructure moving to a reliable, scalable and robust platform going forward.”

TPI, an Information Services Group company and the leading independent sourcing data and advisory firm in the world, today announced the European launch of its managed service for outsourcing governance, TPI Governance Services™.

TPI research has found companies lose up to 30 percent of the expected value of their outsourcing transactions through poor governance. TPI Governance Services offers a combination of management expertise, processes and tools to help companies reduce value leakage from their outsourcing agreements and third-party contracts.

“With the success and continued growth of TPI Governance Services in the Americas and Asia Pacific, we have seen increasing client demand for it in the European market,” said Claude Marais, Partner and Managing Director, Governance Services. “We’re looking forward to helping both large and medium-sized companies, which are often reliant on multi-sourcing, to maximise the value from their outsourcing relationships.

The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) has renewed its communications framework with Cable & Wireless for the national communications network PNN3.

PNN3 is a service that allows the secure transmission of data between all UK police forces, criminal justice organisations and related agencies. The agency said that it negotiated a reduced cost for the two year extension, which was initially a five year deal.