Industry news

According to recent research from the BSC, the Chartered Institute for IT shows that the number of women employed in the UK tech sector has risen slightly over the last couple of years compared to other industries.

As shown in our recent Women in Sourcing event, women are experiencing increasing pressure during the pandemic as they are more likely to be furloughed and more likely to leave their jobs as domestic pressures like home schooling are increasing. 

Read the full report here 

LinkedIn are set to launch a new platform for freelancers called “Marketplaces” in Septembers. They will be competing against rivals already in the industry such as Upwork and Fiverr. 

This move would help LinkedIn to generate more revenue from users already on their site.

Read the full article here 

Uber has lost a Supreme Court ruling regarding employment rights. 

Uber regards their employees are independent contractors, however, this court ruling will mean that employees are entitled to employment rights including sick pay, holiday pay and minimum wage.

This will have a rippling effect on the gig economy as the EU are looking at improving employee rights for gig workers.

Read the full article here

According to Forbes, tech companies in London have attracted $10.5billion in venture capital over the last year. 

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London believes that “London is the global tech capital of Europe” as the billion dollar venture capital hits records in both the UK and Europe.

Half of the $10.5billion funding arose from non-Europeans and 36% of it from North America. Many companies in Silicon Valley have been expanding their presence in the UK over the last year. 

Read the full article here 

The Financial Times have put together a global survey dedicated to mental health during the pandemic that reflects the results from the GSA’s Wellness Survey.

The majority of the delegates that participated in this survey came from white collar backgrounds saying that the pandemic has negatively affected their mental health. 

After the launch of our Festival of Sourcing with our employee engagement and mental health sessions, the GSA have felt truly inspired by the work that we can do to help our community. Expect a lot more from the GSA on mental health this year!

If you are interested in our Festival of Sourcing mental health webinar please click here, or our employee engagement webinar please click here.

To ready the full article from the Financial Times, please click here.

Limitless, an AI driven gig consumer experience company has announced that they’ve raised $10million in Series B funding. This was led by Redline Capital and features a new investment from Genesys alongside continuing investments from AlbionVC and Unilever Ventures.

This funding will play a crucial role in the companies growth in the US.

For more information, please click here

Atos, a French multinational IT services and consultancy firm has bid $10 billion to acquire DXC, an American that provides B2B IT services. 

This deal will allow Atos to grow there presence in America and give them access to more clients and B2B services like Cloud and analytics. 

Read the full article here

Bitcoin has reached a new record level around $20,000.

The cryptocurrency has gained around 170% this with with increasing demand and large investments. 

As the pandemic has changed lives and business permanently, governments worldwide have responded with a monetary stimulus to try and grow confidence in the economy. However, this has built concerns that the $ currency will lose its purchasing power.

This has lead to an increase in demand for digital currencies such as Bitcoin.

Read the full article here

Twitter have signed a long-term contract with Amazon to use their AWS.

They will be relying on AWS to help them run their core timelines. 

AWS are set to implement new features to improve the app. They are also working to improve Twitters capability, storage, security and the quality of delivery. 

The chief technology offer at Twitter, Parag Agrawal said “The collaboration with AWS will improve performance for people who use Twitter by enabling us to serve Tweets from data centers closer to our customers at the same time as we leverage the Arm-based architecture of AWS Gravition2 instances. In addition to helping us scale our infrastructure, this work with AWS enables us to ship features faster as we apply AWS’s diverse and growing portfolio of services.”

Read the full article here

The Department for Work and Pensions have completed their two year mission to migrate their applications onto hybrid cloud. 

It was set up as an insourcing mission, moving applications from third part data centres to services built through the Crown Commercial service Framework. 

This initiative is set out to gain more control of the business in order to be more efficient in terms of cost and performance. 

Read the full article here