Industry news

Novell has launched its Cloud Manager, which it claims will allow users to avoid vendor lock-in and securely manage cloud computing applications in private clouds.

The latest product from Novell's WorkloadIQ range, Novell Cloud Manager, simplifies and automates business processes to provide the benefits of cloud computing without the security and compliance risks of public clouds, said the firm.

"Customers want to be able to manage cloud environments securely as a seamless extension of their existing data centre, and they are looking for solutions that avoid vendor lock-in and interoperate across a broad range of technology stacks," said Jim Ebzery, senior vice-president at Novell.

Ryan Klose, CIO of Premium Wine Brands for Pernod Ricard, said the company will use Novell Cloud Manager to simplify its IT service provisioning by combining physical resources with its virtual infrastructure within a private cloud.

Novell Cloud Manager supports hypervisors and operating systems including VMware, vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

BMC Software also launched its cloud management tool, BMC Control-M 7, to automate IT workloads in real time across applications as well as physical, virtual and cloud platforms.

CGI Group Inc. and Alberta Employment and Immigration (AEI) today announced the signing of a four-year, multi-million dollar agreement. Building on a previous eight-year contract, under this new agreement, CGI will provide maintenance support to 90 of AEI’s mainframe, client server and web-based applications, as well as the development of new applications to meet AEI’s diverse business needs.

The Ministry of Employment and Immigration contributes to the long-term sustainability of the economy by ensuring Alberta has a skilled workforce, productive and safe workplaces, and by helping to improve the well-being of Albertans.

“Alberta Employment and Immigration provides vital services to Albertans and having reliable technology supporting these services needs to be a given,” said Doug McCuaig, President, CGI, Canada. “Building on our long-term partnership, we’re thrilled to have been selected to continue to support AEI moving forward.”

A company that makes a cloud management system is getting a $14 million investment from Intel and others, which it will use to hire new employees. Adaptive Computing intends to use this money to add "dozens" of people to its staff, which now number around 75 employees, said Michael Jackson, COO and president of the firm.

The nine-year-old, privately held company began as Cluster Resources (before changing its name last year to Adaptive Computing), focusing on high performance computing systems, but has since adapted its Moab workload technologies to manage cloud environments.

"This is a space everybody wants to be in right now," said Glenn O'Donnell, an analyst at Forrester Research. He said a variety of firms "are all trying to bring solutions to the market that can help enterprises build their own cloud."

The promise is to enable enterprises to build their own infrastructure as a service cloud internally - something akin to an internal Amazon "EC2 type service," O'Donnell said. Where Adaptive differs is in its ability to provide application automation, as well as infrastructure automation, all in a cloud environment. "[Adaptive] is taking this whole discussion up a level," O'Donnell said.

Jackson said the company's tools work as a manager of management systems, and intended to interface with variety of provisioning management technologies, as well as connecting storage, network and virtualisation management. The system can also look into the future to link performance to service level agreement agreements, or a desire for green computing and other requirements.

Adaptive has been profitable since its founding. Its growth has been entirely from customer revenue, said Jackson. But he said the demand for its products was outstripping its ability to grow the company with "organic revenues." The investment will be used to hire people who help deliver its services, Jackson said.

Paul Burns, an analyst at Neovise, said the overall cloud management tool space is fairly immature and experiencing a lot of new firms, "but I think we're going to start to see some acquisitions." Investors in Adaptive include Intel Capital, Tudor Ventures and Epic Ventures. Intel Capital says it has invested more than $9.5 billion in over 1,000 companies in the last two decades.

Intel's reach continues to expand, most recently with the purchase of McAfee for $7.86 billion. Cloud environments tend to built in mostly x86 environments, which may explain Intel's interest in investing in a company developing of the tools market for this platform.

GROHE, the leading international manufacturer of sanitary fittings, and Capgemini, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, have signed an agreement for IT infrastructure outsourcing. The multi-million Euro contract between GROHE AG and Capgemini Outsourcing Services GmbH spans a period of five years, and means that some 20 employees of GROHE will transfer to Capgemini. The future services will cover GROHE sites in Brazil, Canada, Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Portugal, Singapore and Thailand, for which Capgemini will leverage its global Rightshore® network consisting of onshore, nearshore and offshore centres.

“With its Remote Infrastructure Management capabilities and strong presence in Germany, Capgemini is the ideal partner for a cost optimised IT process management,” says Chief Process Officer Michael Staade of GROHE. Oliver Schwarz, Head of Outsourcing Services Capgemini in the region Germany, Austria and Switzerland, also underlines this aspect in establishing a solid basis for the future collaboration: “For GROHE, we will be able to leverage our global Infrastructure Transformation Services to sustainably optimise the company’s IT services processes. We look forward to taking over this assignment for our new client.”

With a market share of about 8%, GROHE AG is Europe’s largest and one of the worldwide leading manufacturer of sanitary fittings. As a global brand for sanitary products and systems, GROHE is setting benchmarks in this segment in terms of quality, technology and design. The company has some 5,000 employees and generated annual revenues of about EUR 826m in 2009. GROHE maintains three production sites in Germany (Hemer, Lahr, Porta Westfalica) as well as in Canada, Portugal, and Thailand. The company is represented in more than 130 countries.

HP and ArcSight Inc. today announced that they have signed a definitive agreement for HP to acquire ArcSight, a leading security and compliance management company, for $43.50 per share, or an enterprise value of $1.5 billion.

The combination of HP and ArcSight will improve security, reduce risk and facilitate compliance at a lower cost for customers. ArcSight’s superior technology is highly complementary to HP’s existing security portfolio of hardware, software and services.

Today’s successful enterprises must provide their employees, partners and customers with more access to applications, services and information. This access and connectivity exposes enterprises to escalating threats, increasing complexity and regulatory challenges. Together, HP and ArcSight will be well-positioned to secure even the most demanding environments by delivering:

Broader visibility: A comprehensive view of all events across IT operations, security and compliance

Deeper context: The ability to detect threats and risks by correlating both activity and state changes in real time

Better continuity: A constant feedback loop between build, manage and monitor to ensure that enterprises remain secure

“From a security perspective, the perimeter of today’s enterprise is porous, putting enormous pressure on clients’ risk and compliance systems,” said Bill Veghte, executive vice president, Software and Solutions, HP. “The combination of HP and ArcSight will provide clients with the ability to fortify their applications, proactively monitor events and respond to threats.”

“HP’s acquisition of ArcSight will enable the creation of a new type of security solution, one that serves the modern enterprise,” said Tom Reilly, president and chief executive officer, ArcSight. “By combining ArcSight’s Enterprise Threat and Risk Management Platform with HP’s breadth of application development and operations management solutions, HP will be able to offer an integrated security platform that delivers broader visibility, deeper context and faster remediation of enterprise-wide security and risk-related events. In a world where perimeter security is no longer enough, businesses need this holistic approach to securing their networks, applications and sensitive data.”

The acquisition will be conducted by means of a cash tender offer for all of ArcSight’s outstanding shares of common stock. The closing of the acquisition, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to occur by the end of the calendar year.

Investor and analyst conference call

HP will host a conference call for financial analysts and stockholders today at 5:30 a.m. PT to discuss its proposal to acquire ArcSight.

The call, hosted by Bill Veghte, will be accessible at www.hp.com/investor/home.

Supermarket chain Morrisons is looking at investing in online retail after deciding the internet offers "attractive opportunities".

It is the last of the UK's biggest four supermarkets to start trading on the internet but will look into it in 2011.

Its half-year results statement showed pre-tax profits of £412m in the six months to 1 August, and sales of £8.1bn, up 9.1% on this time last year.

The company has also started a £310m programme of IT investment.

The programme will see the company's core systems and technology infrastructure being replaced. So far, payroll, HR and financial systems have been replaced, a wide area network installed, the majority of store hardware renewed and voice-picking technology implemented in grocery and frozen distribution centres.

A new electronic point of sale system is being rolled out, due for completion in 2012. The software needed to run distribution centres and food production facilities is currently being piloted in one depot and one produce plant, and the company said it has been successful so far. Other depots will get the software through 2011 and 2012.

The company's half-year results statement said, "The success of these activities, and our proven ability to implement changes with no impact on the business, gives us great confidence for the remainder of the programme."

The government's decision to allow local health care providers greater freedom of choice in IT systems may open the door to firms like Microsoft and Google, both of which are eager to sell their electronic patient record-keeping systems.

The department of health's director general of informatics Christine Connelly said on Thursday the government wanted to create an environment in which a number of different systems can integrate well.

"The department will leave it to the people who will use those systems to decide for themselves if they want to use Microsoft's products (HealthVault), Google's products (Google Health), or somebody else's," Christine Connelly said. "We will look forward and say this is what we think of these systems and give people advice, rather than as before, this is a system that you will use."

Connelly said that she did talk regularly to firms like Microsoft, but that the department did not have an active programme investigating the Redmond software house's health care software.

"We're looking at lots of different systems, but we are not particularly looking at Microsoft and Google in an evaluation kind of way," Connelly said. She said this was important because it allowed the department to influence the development of the product in such as way it could benefit the department.

Connelly's comments are a sequel to earlier reports that health care records could be transferred to Microsoft or Google under a Conservative government.

At the time, The Times questioned Tory links to Google. It said Steve Hilton, an advisor to then Opposition leader David Cameron, was married to Rachel Whetstone, Google's vice-president of global communications and public affairs. In 2007 Cameron addressed a Google Zeitgeist conference in San Francisco, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt was joining a Conservative business forum to advise on economic policy.

Google declined to comment, and Microsoft did not respond by press time.

Atos Origin has become the first IT supplier to sign a memorandum of understanding with the government under its new "single-client" approach to IT procurement.

The move follows negotiations led by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude in July with CEOs of the government's top IT suppliers to discuss ways of cutting costs. The new approach means the government will procure for IT projects as a single customer, rather than as separate departments.

"We set ourselves a difficult challenge," said Maude.

"Renegotiating contracts in this way had never been done by government before. But the current financial situation meant there was simply no time to waste and we are delighted that Atos Origin are the first to sign today," he said.

"Over the next few weeks as the agreements are signed, I expect to see immediate and big savings for taxpayers. We are not talking about small numbers here, but a total running into hundreds of millions of pounds."

Keith Wilman, UK CEO at Atos Origin, said the move marks a new era for the company.

Atos Origin said it will continue to deliver all its existing IT contracts to UK government, and will look for further business opportunities, building on an agreed centralised approach.

Nineteen IT suppliers were called in by Maude and told to find ways of cutting costs. The 19 companies are:

HP

BT

Capgemini

Fujitsu

Capita

IBM

Telereal Trillium

Atos Origin

CSC

Logica

Steria

Oracle

Siemens IS

Cable & Wireless

Microsoft

Accenture

Serco

G4S

Vodafone

European organisations are losing more than £500,000 per year because of the poor performance of cloud-based apps.

According to a survey of 300 IT directors across Europe by Compuware, 57% of businesses are slowing or shutting down cloud applications, such as e-commerce sites, due to performance management issues.

Richard Stone, cloud computing solutions manager at Compuware, said security will always be an issue but now there is growing concern that third-party providers are causing businesses to lose control of cloud application performance.

Stone claimed IT departments are "in the dark" when faced with managing cloud applications within an organisation. "Existing tools and legacy systems inside the enterprise to monitor applications don't work for cloud apps. The tools enterprises are using are not giving end-to-end visibility," he said.

"IT managers have got to start leading inside organisations by embracing [cloud computing] and not leave end-users to do their own thing. Put the right tools in place to make sure users get what they want but provide performance management," he added.

The research also showed 84% of IT directors expect service level agreements to go beyond simple availability metrics if these are used for business-critical cloud apps.

The study surveyed 300 European IT directors in enterprise organisations with more than 1,000 employees.

In June, LoveFilm DVD decided to take its work elsewhere leaving 41 call centre agents without work. The firm has been able to find work for 16 employees but the rest of the workers are still left without a role.

Hero TSC admitted that time is running out to find new work for the employees prior to the end of the consultation, this week.

The company said: “I am pleased to say that we have managed to cut the number of jobs at risk in Rothesay by bringing in additional work for Office Depot - another client we handle in our Bute centre [in Scotland].

“Unfortunately, it was not enough work to cover all those at risk by LoveFilm’s decision to take their work elsewhere - and that is desperately disappointing.

“We will, of course, continue to work tirelessly to try and bring more business into the centre in the future in the hope that we can restore staff numbers to their previous levels.”