Industry news

Businesses and other organisations running websites in the UK must ‘wake up’ to the fact that EU legislation, which will require them to get consent in order to store or access information on consumers’ computers, is coming into force soon, Information Commissioner Christopher Graham will say today in a speech at the ICO’s annual Data Protection Officer conference in Manchester.

The new law, which will come into force on 25 May 2011, is an amendment to the EU’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive. It will require UK businesses and other organisations to obtain consent from visitors to their websites in order to store on and retrieve usage information from users’ computers.

One common technique of storing information is widely known as a cookie. This is a small file that a website puts on a user’s computer so that it can remember something, for example the user’s preferences, at a later time. The majority of businesses and organisations in the UK currently use cookies for a wide variety of reasons – from analysing consumer browsing habits to remembering a user’s payment details when buying products online.

Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, said: “While the roll out of this new law will be a challenge, it will have positive benefits as it will give people more choice and control over what information businesses and other organisations can store on and access from consumers’ own computers.

“The Directive will come into force in less than two months time and businesses and organisations running websites in the UK must wake up to the fact that this is happening. We are proactively working with the government, businesses and the public sector to find a workable solution. We recognise that the internet as we know it today depends on the widespread use of cookies and there are of course legitimate business reasons for using them. So we are clear that these changes must not have a detrimental impact on consumers nor cause an unnecessary burden on UK businesses. One option being considered is to allow consent to the use of cookies to be given via browser settings.

“Once the new regulations are published there will be a major job of education and guidance to be undertaken. In the meantime, both the business community and public sector organisations need to start thinking clearly about how they will meet the requirements of the new Directive.”

Glasgow has annouced that it has become the first UK city to win a grant from the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge initiative.

The grant provides Glasgow with access to IBM's top experts to analyse and recommend ways the city can become an even better place in which to live, work and play.

The IBM Smarter Cities Challenge is a competitive grant program in which IBM is awarding a total of $50 million worth of technology and services to 100 municipalities worldwide over the next three years.

Teams of specially selected IBM experts will provide city leaders with analysis and recommendations to support successful growth, better delivery of city services, more citizen engagement, and improved efficiency.

Gordon Matheson, Leader of Glasgow City Council, said: “This is fantastic news and will help Glasgow as we move forward with our aim to become a European leader in environmental, social and economic sustainability.

“Through IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative we hope to maximise the tremendous opportunities for Glasgow to develop low-carbon energy technologies, efficient homes, the provision of affordable heat and the creation of sustainable communities. By reducing energy costs and helping to tackle fuel poverty for poorer sections of our community we hope to have a real impact on improving people’s health and quality of life.

HP has announced a multimillion-dollar investment to build and lease a next-generation data center to be located in the Waikato district.

The data center is designed to enable organisations to quickly respond to market demands and new revenue opportunities and will provide IT resources to help organisations simplify applications and improve business process.

“Enterprises need the agility to adjust to dynamic market and community demands for fast, innovative services,” said Gavin Greaves, country manager, Enterprise Services, HP New Zealand. “Having a sustainable infrastructure that combines a modern platform with the services capability of HP Enterprise Services means customers can concentrate more on their business and less on managing their IT.”

The Waikato data center investment is part of HP’s $1 billion transformation to retire legacy assets and build new, modernised facilities.

The facility will provide the infrastructure organisations need for cloud computing services, application modernisation and data center transformation, enabling clients to devote more resources to innovation and increase productivity.

Leading independent hotel and hospitality group, De Vere Group, has announced that it has chosen long-term network provider, Claranet, to implement a cost-effective private cloud system. De Vere will rely on Claranet’s private cloud solution to host and manage its range of mission-critical applications and websites. The platform will provide the foundations to support the Group’s recently launched online and e-commerce strategy aimed at driving traffic to its websites and boosting revenue.

“Our online strategy is a major focus for us,” said Group IT director, Jo Stanford. “We regularly reach out to over a million people through online campaigns and as such it’s absolutely critical that we manage the varying volumes of traffic we generate each time. Loss of uptime could lead to dissatisfied customers and compromised revenue, and this simply isn’t acceptable. We’ve upped the ante significantly online and in doing so it has become clear that we need a new hosting platform that can provide the built-in flexibility and resiliency we need to cope with peaks and troughs in capacity demand.”

The new platform from Claranet will provide much greater levels of scalability for De Vere as the dedicated virtual hosting (DVH) solution allows server resource to be dynamically allocated according to the changing demands of De Vere’s different applications and websites. Varying capacity levels when running online campaigns can therefore be met with ease with server resource becoming available when needed. As a result, De Vere will no longer need to pay for under-utilised machines or adversely risk overloading servers in the event of unpredicted demand.

“By choosing Claranet’s private cloud, we are confident that the solution’s inherent flexibility will provide a solid platform to help us realise our forecasted growth. And with our longstanding working relationship, we have no doubt that Claranet will continue to support De Vere as our business demands change,” remarked Stanford.

Claranet UK’s managing director, Michel Robert, commented: “Having worked with De Vere for a number of years managing the Group’s wide area network, we’re very excited to be building on this relationship by helping the Group to realise its online ambitions with a highly scalable and resilient virtual hosting solution. We’re as committed as ever to deliver the best service possible to De Vere. Our people, infrastructure and processes will ensure the move from a physical to virtual environment will be seamless, providing the foundations to support De Vere’s online strategy.”

KPMG has awarded DHL Supply Chain a £9.1m (10.6m euro) contract to track and consolidate almost 25 million aircraft parts and their associated trace documents scattered over 100 locations.

KPMG is the administrator for Aero Inventory, which up until November 2009 offered airlines and MROs such as Qantas, All Nippon Airways, Air Canada and Haeco, a service involving buying, storing, leasing and maintaining an inventory of various consumables and expendables for aircraft components such as airframe structures, engines, wheels, brakes, electronics and interiors.

Aero Inventory purchased stocks of components from customer airlines and as part of a unique service offering in the industry, sold them back to the airline at the point in time when they were needed.

The parts are worth some £257m (300m euros) and DHL deal gives KPMG the option of managing Aero Inventory out of administration rather than resorting to a fire sale which is likely to net considerably less cash.

Loughborough University is to deploy Logicalis’ Cooperative Cloud to cost-effectively meet the long-term capacity demands of its growing research, teaching and enterprise services.

As part of a strategic IT partnership, Logicalis will design and build an on-site, bespoke private cloud fully integrated with an off-site, cooperative hosted cloud. This single, scalable architecture will provide unlimited scope for future capacity provisioning and is set to save the University over 640 metric tonnes of CO² per annum and significant cost-savings.

Dr Phil Richards, Director of IT at Loughborough University, comments, “Our data centre was built and designed 40 years ago. It has served us well, but is showing its age through a poor PUE (Power Utilisation Efficiency) rating and limited capacity. We were open to innovation from the IT sector to bring us the most cost-effective and creative ways to build a more holistic and scalable IT architecture that would grow with us for the long-term.

‘Precise capacity planning more than a couple of years in advance is nigh-on impossible in our sector. While other education establishments are investing millions in new data centre builds to increase capacity and efficiency, it became clear during the tender process that a cloud model would provide the most strategic option for Loughborough both now, and into the future.”

According to Richards, in assessing a range of private and hybrid cloud services, Logicalis stood out for its compelling credentials in developing public sector services coupled with a uniquely tangible cloud; “I was able to visit the data centre and see the Logicalis Cooperative Cloud in action. No other provider was able to make the cloud real in this way, which was an important ingredient for us to assess the service capability and risk to our business. Logicalis’ connection to JANET was also a key differentiator - it was clear they had made significant commercial investment into their cloud infrastructure so we wouldn’t have to.”

Loughborough’s on-site cloud is built on enterprise class technology from Cisco, NetApp and CA to create a self-contained, highly virtualised and extremely compact environment. This provides enough compute, storage and network capacity to meet immediate local demand, while long-term future capacity, on-demand burst capacity and disaster recovery capability is provided by the Logicalis Hosted Cloud.

Simon Daykin, CTO of Logicalis UK, explains, “We have been able to leverage the innovation of our private cloud design and hosted cloud services to transform the future of server and storage provisioning at the University. The Logicalis Virtual Container technology allows Loughborough to move real IT services back and forth between on-site dedicated and off-site shared hosted clouds rapidly, reliably and without application or infrastructure changes.

Indian software company HCL Technologies (HCL) and BPO training institute Orion Edutech jointly announced the launch of a diploma course to train the youth for entry in the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry.

Under the agreement Orion will customize its Diploma in BPO Management (DIBM) to suit HCL's industry specific talent requirement. This program will be called the `Orion Diploma in BPO Management 'Powered by HCL'.

Subrat Chakravarty, HR Head – Business Services, HCL Technologies, said: "Keeping in mind the growing demand for outsourcing across industries there is the need to nurture skilled professionals who are keen to pursue stable careers in the ITeS industry."

According to the terms of the partnership, selected candidates from the `Orion Diploma in BPO Management ' Powered by HCL' will be absorbed into HCL as project trainees.

The UK Marketing Company of AstraZeneca, one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, has appointed arvato to design and manage a new support and information service for healthcare professionals. From the beginning of March, the TeleReach programme will enable AstraZeneca to offer healthcare professionals the opportunity to engage in telephone dialogue about AZ’s medicines and value-added services.

The programme will focus on building strong relationships by enabling healthcare professionals across the NHS to access information about AstraZeneca’s medicines and services at a time and in a format that best suits them, in order to enhance patient care.

arvato will employ and manage a team of ABPI (Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry) accredited Customer Service Agents, based on-site at AstraZeneca’s UK Marketing Company headquarters in Luton.

“We appreciate the changing environment in which healthcare professionals are working. Our research into what, how and when they want to engage with us, helped inform the development of TeleReach,” explained Tarja Stenvall, Vice President, Specialist Care, AstraZeneca UK. “arvato’s experience, combined with the company’s flexibility and innovation in project delivery have enabled us to go from contract agreement to the go-live of this new approach in just six weeks.”

“AstraZeneca has taken an innovative approach to responding to the NHS’ changing needs and we’re delighted to be a part of that,” said Mark Brown, Managing Director, Contact Centres & Loyalty, arvato UK. “We are looking forward to helping AstraZeneca retain, support and grow its existing relationships, as well as develop new relationships, with healthcare professionals.”

Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. and Cisco today announced the signing of a comprehensive Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) under which the parties intend to collaborate on go-to-market strategies in areas that include smart cities, virtual dealership, sports and entertainment, and cloud services. The multifaceted strategic interlock brings together Cisco’s technology prowess and Mahindra & Mahindra’s leadership and expertise across diverse industries and market segments in India.

Mr. Anand Mahindra, Vice-chairman & Managing Director, Mahindra Group, said, “By collaborating with Cisco to build smarter, connected communities, virtual dealerships and other projects, we are empowering our stakeholders – dealers, customers, partners and others to use technology for the greater good, thereby enabling them to Rise. I am absolutely delighted that the first project under this initiative is intended to be the Mahindra Innovation Park, which will create new benchmarks through its smart solutions.”

“The Internet of Things and the power of network are transforming the way we live, work, learn and play. Cisco envisages that all future successful communities will run on networked information. Using Cisco’s Smart+Connected Communities framework, we have led several projects that drive social, economic and environmental sustainability, using technology as the key enabler, said Mr. Wim Elfrink, Executive Vice President, Emerging Solutions & Chief Globalisation Officer for Cisco.

“The collaboration with the Mahindra Group will be a game-changing one and I really look forward to working closely with M&M to transform cities and communities and to innovate new ways of offering services, using network as the platform.”

"This announcement with Cisco demonstrates the solution-centric approach of our IT sector companies - Mahindra Satyam and Tech Mahindra. The four key areas of Smart Cities, Virtual Dealership, Sports & Entertainment and Cloud services, are critical in our ICT vision and we look forward to working with Cisco to achieve it faster and better,” said Mr. Ulhas Yargop, President, IT Sector, Group CTO and Member, Group Executive Board, Mahindra Group.

“We have a long standing relationship with Mahindra and we have complete confidence in Mahindra’s differentiating capabilities to create new markets and we look forward to working together on these initiatives globally,” said Mr. Naresh Wadhwa, President and Country Manager, Cisco Systems – India & SAARC.

Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) and Mahindra have initiated collaboration on a pioneering virtual sales experience as a complementary channel to Mahindra dealerships. The innovative sales experience will aim to expand M&M’s customer touch points, enhance brand visibility and provide customers with a superior experience.

Embracing Cloud Computing can affect the existing Network and IT Support infrastructure in many ways. Adrian Polley, Technical Services Director at Plan-Net explains the possible impact on the existing system, support roles and end users.

As organisations look to embrace the cost-efficiency opportunities deriving from new technologies and services, there is a lot of talk about the benefits, risks and possible ROI of the blanket concept of ‘Cloud computing’. However, it is still unclear how using Cloud services will affect the existing network infrastructure and what impact it can have on IT support roles and the way end users deal with incidents.

The effect on an organisation’s infrastructure depends on the Cloud model adopted, which may vary based on company size. For example, small organisations which are less worried about owning IT and have simpler, more generic IT needs might want to buy a large part of their infrastructure as a shared service, purchasing on-demand software from different vendors.

Buying into the Software as a Service model has the benefit of simplicity and cheapness, as it cuts out much of the responsibility and costs involved, which is a great advantage for SMEs. This solution also allows 24/7 service availability, something that small firms might not be able to afford otherwise. The lack of flexibility of this service, due to the impossibility to customise software, is less of a problem for these types of organisations. But there are still risks related to performance, and vendor lock-in.

Using this model, a small company’s retained IT infrastructure can be relatively simple, and therefore there might be little need for specialist technical skills within the IT department. A new skill set is required, however: IT personnel will need to be able to manage all the different relationships with the various vendors, checking that the service purchased is performing as agreed and that they are getting the quality they are paying for. The IT Service Desk will therefore require a smaller number of engineers, less technical but more commercially savvy. More specialist skills will shift towards the provider and 1st line analysts will have to escalate more calls to the various vendors.

Larger organisations, on the other hand, may well be keen on retaining more control over their infrastructure and purchasing IT resources on-demand. With this model, the organisation still manages much of its infrastructure but at a virtual level – the vendor might provide them with hardware resources on-demand, for instance.

The main advantage of this model is that it allows the existing infrastructure to be incredibly flexible and scalable, able to adapt to changing business needs. For example, building a data centre is lengthy and expensive, therefore not convenient for expansion. But by using a “virtual datacentre” provider, capacity can be increased in the space of an online card transaction, with great financial benefits – in the Cloud model only the necessary resources are paid for without investment in hardware or its maintenance.

With this second model, the change in the roles within the IT department will mainly regard an increased need, as in the other model, for vendor management skills. Monitoring KPIs, SLAs and billing will be a day-to-day task although there will still be the need for engineers to deal with the real and virtual infrastructure.

Both models generally have very little impact on the end user if the IT Service Desk has been running efficiently, as this does not disappear as a first point of contact. However, in certain cases the change might be more visible, for instance if desk-side support is eliminated - a cultural change that may need some adapting to.

All in all, change is not to be feared - with the necessary awareness, embracing Cloud services can improve IT efficiency significantly, and align it to the business. By leaving some IT support and management issues to expert providers an organisation can gain major strategic advantage, saving money and time that they can ultimately use in their search for business success.