Industry news

Yahoo has announced that it is buying data-driven advertising network Interclick for around $270 million.

Interclick is a technology company providing data targeted solutions and optimization technologies.

"This investment underscores our focus on enhancing the performance of both our guaranteed and non-guaranteed display business across Yahoo and our partner sites and, combined with Yahoo's reach and advertising leadership, will deliver a powerful solution for marketers," said Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo's executive vice president for the Americas region.

Accenture has signed five-year outsourcing agreements with both Banco Popolare Group and Alba Leasing under which Accenture will provide application management and infrastructure services to support the two companies’ leasing operations. Banco Popolare is Italy's fourth largest bank by assets and Alba Leasing is among the country's top 10 leasing companies by new contracts.

“Banco Popolare and Alba are valued clients of Accenture and we look forward to working even more closely with them”

.In addition, under a separate agreement, Accenture will acquire Itaca Service from Banco Popolare Group’s subsidiary, Banca Italease. Itaca Service provides IT services to the Group’s leasing companies and to Alba Leasing. Thirty-three employees are expected to transfer to Accenture and will continue to provide IT services to Banco Popolare’s leasing companies and to Alba. Financial details were not disclosed.

Accenture will develop, maintain and support Banco Popolare’s and Alba’s entire leasing applications portfolio, including leasing products management and regulatory reporting applications. Accenture will also manage the IT infrastructure for these companies’ leasing operations, including remote management and support, data center operations, network and deskside support services.

As part of the Government's commitment to delivering world-class digital products, the Minister for Cabinet Office Francis Maude has announced the Identity Assurance programme would be receiving an extra £10 million in funding.

The Identity Assurance programme deals with the way a service provider can be assured that the customer or user is who they say they are as they access Government services.

CSC and Educational Testing Service Announce Five-and-a-half Year, $200+ Million Contract Renewal and Expansion for IT Services

ETS to Leverage CSC’s Industry-Leading Cloud Services Including CloudCompute Infrastructure as a Service

CSC has announced that it has signed a five-and-a-half year information technology (IT) operations outsourcing contract renewal and expansion with Educational Testing Service (ETS), the leader in advancing quality and equity in education for people worldwide. The agreement was signed in the second quarter of CSC fiscal year 2012, and has an estimated value of more than $200 million assuming all options are exercised.

As part of the agreement, CSC will continue to bring new and innovative approaches to the way ETS leverages IT. CSC will provide its industry-leading cloud services to ETS including CloudCompute, the new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) architecture deployed in the CSC Trusted Cloud Datacenters. CloudCompute, a VMware vCloud Datacenter Service, delivers compute, storage and network resources “as a service” to support any application and is especially suited for hosting mission-critical and business-critical workloads.

“CSC has provided IT solutions for ETS since 2001. We are pleased to continue our long time relationship with CSC and are confident their IT solutions will have a positive effect on ETS business,” said Daniel Wakeman, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at ETS.

IT Services provider Plan-Net plc have agreed a 5-year IT outsourcing contract with the west end law firm Davenport Lyons.

Plan-Net will provide Davenport Lyons with a new virtual infrastructure and 24/7 support delivered from an onsite team and dedicated legal IT support centre based in central London.

Plan-Net Director Adrian Polley commented: ‘We are extremely pleased to be adding Davenport Lyons to our growing list of legal clients and look forward to delivering the high levels service required in this sector’

A Government investment of £950 million will help create and safeguard more than 200,000 jobs across England, the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has annouced.

The second round of the Government’s £1.4 billion Regional Growth Fund (RGF) will support 119 bids from businesses and local partnerships with projects to expand their operations, create new jobs and attract private investment. Discussions are ongoing with a further 10 bidders about their projects.

Of the 201,000 jobs created or protected, around 37,000 will be directly created jobs, and more than 164,000 will be in the supply chain. The Government investment will support nearly £6 billion of private investment secured by the successful projects.

Expressions of interest are sought for commercial partner/s to provide a managed wide-area network referred to as the LINK, for a range of public sector organisations in East Sussex, Brighton and Hove, West Sussex and the immediate proximity.

The contract is worth up to £100m and should last up to 10 years.

"The provider will maintain and implement operational procedures and standards to fulfil and satisfy the demands of the public sector and in response to public-sector policy demands," reads the tender.

Serco, which runs outsourcing operations ranging from overseas air traffic control centres to school inspections in UK, is buying Excelior, an Australian contact centre firm, for A$13.2m (€10m).

Chief Executive Officer of Serco Asia Pacific, David Campbell, said the company would be managed and run as part of the Serco Australia business. It will also leverage Serco's global capability by forming part of the wider Serco Global BPO capability.

G4S, the security group, has confirmed that it had abandoned its £5.2bn bid to buy ISS, the Danish cleaning company, after belatedly realising the depth of shareholder opposition to such a move.

It also said that it would incur costs of about £50m related to the abortive deal, which had been announced in mid-October. An associated £2bn rights issue has also been called off.

The search for operational cost savings and increased effectiveness is common to public sector organisations across the globe. With that, demand for cloud services within the global public sector has never been more acute as challenging economic conditions bring the benefits of the cloud to the fore.

It could be argued that it would make little sense for most public sector bodies to run their own IT infrastructure when they can work with companies that have advanced systems, skills and scale that can guarantee economies of scale and reliability that might be unachievable for even the largest public bodies due to the complexity and expertise required.

Despite a strong culture of outsourcing, progress in delivering the G-cloud, which will replace the current myriad of department hosted IT systems with dedicated government secure data centres in the UK, has been hampered by the high costs and complexity around meeting government information assurance policy.

The good news is that there has been a notable acceleration in the acceptance that these concerns can be addressed within a well-designed, secure and managed infrastructure. In fact, in a report issued by the Cabinet Office on March 2011, shared IT infrastructure, open-source software and a stripped-back IT estate are at the very heart of the UK government's ICT strategy.

On this note, Savvis launched the Government Wide Services (GWS) (accredited IL2/IL3) shared service platform earlier this year. The platform is now available to all government departments and third-party government suppliers in the UK. GWS is having a positive impact on the uptake of hosted IT operations and services within the UK government, which in turn provides the potential for a more agile and efficient public sector.

GWS offers government departments and public sector bodies flexible procurement of data centre infrastructure that includes converged connectivity to secure government networks.

Working in partnership with Savvis enables the public sector the ability to leverage cloud capabilities. This further paves the way for a new wave of smart services and lays the groundwork for government application stores, which will further drive down the cost of IT for the country.

Utilising the pre-built, accredited platform virtually eliminates upfront capital costs for new public sector projects, whilst decreasing the deployment time of IT projects dramatically. Government IT departments and suppliers in turn benefit from immediate access to infrastructure and only pay for the consumption of their IT services on a pay-as-you-go basis, rather than the costly procurement, maintenance and management of hardware seen in the past.

With government analysis indicating there is potential for annual savings by 2020 of between £1.9bn and £3.8bn from moving public sector IT infrastructure to the cloud (Cabinet office G-cloud Programme outline), there is an obvious monetary advantage to the G-cloud project. However, what must not be forgotten amidst the headline billions of pounds saved is the myriad of other added benefits that migrating to hosted services will bring.

Increased collaboration and sharing of good practice have been shown to improve innovation and cut costs in the private sector and these benefits will be mirrored in the public sector. As more and more public sector bodies share information and ideas and begin to use similar systems with a common purpose, there is likely to be a shift away from the traditional public sector procurement models that often proved expensive and time consuming in the past.

In addition to the cost saving, it allows in-house IT teams to concentrate the majority of their effort by supporting the business through development of business critical systems rather than focusing on maintenance of the infrastructure elements of the system.

The benefits of cloud computing are being experienced throughout the private sector, from multinational corporations to SMEs and the introduction of the G-cloud programme is a signal that the public sector will not be left trailing behind. In the end, a potential £3.8bn saved is not the only silver lining in the cloud.