Industry news

IT solutions consultancy ramsac has announced that it has been appointed to provide network support for V Festival 2008 at Hylands Park. For the fifth year in succession, ramsac has been chosen by event promoters Maztec Ltd to support the backstage network that provides Internet and email access to temporary on-site offices for the production teams and performers.

The V Festival takes place on the 16th – 17th August 2008, Hylands Park in Chelmsford, Essex and Weston Park in Staffordshire and is expected to attract over 160,000 people each day. Each of the acts billed to appear over the weekend have individual production teams that require backstage access to Internet and email. Bob Angus, Director of the V Festival explains, “It is very important that the production teams of the headline and supporting acts have Internet access and as the festival promoters, we must have access to our company network to co-ordinate all event logistics.”

Throughout the two-day Hylands Park event, ramsac will provide backstage network support and will be available for consultancy, advice and on-site support, ensuring that any technical problems are dealt with immediately.

Technical Director at ramsac, Paul Mew, comments, “We have a dedicated support team on hand throughout the weekend to ensure that all technical problems are rectified as soon as possible. Some of the supporting acts only have limited time in their dressing rooms, so it is essential that they are able to access the Internet and their emails instantly.”

Bob Angus from the V Festival adds, “ramsac has provided excellent backstage IT support for the past four years and we are very happy that they have decided to accept the challenge for the fifth year running.”

The security division of value-added distributor Bell Micro today announced findings from a new independent research report which suggests that UK businesses are still failing to address the protection of data assets on the network from staff abuse, misuse or direct theft.

Nearly half (47%) of the respondents questioned at InfoSecurity Europe 2008 believed their companies were yet to implement real-time systems that would inform IT departments if security levels were breached.

This latest research follows similar reports in recent weeks suggesting that more than one third of IT directors say that their organisations have suffered either data loss or data theft internally – not to mention, of course, the latest in a spate of public sector security lapses, from confidential documents being left on commuter trains to laptop thefts from the Home Office and Ministry of Defence.

Most respondents in IT based roles (74%) recognise, and work to protect, against the danger of rogue connections such as customer or contractor laptops, and yet almost half (43%) were failing to enforce a policy of encrypting data on portable devices - such as personal laptops, PDAs and removable media. Worse still, 62% of respondents indicated that IT departments would be unable to detect if an employee copied data off a server onto a PC, laptop, USB stick or a disk.

This is further clear evidence of the unexpected knock-on effects of increased mobility and teleworking: consumer devices, together with business laptops, Blackberrys, mobiles and PDAs are increasingly falling into a grey area of unsupported devices, or computers that serve functions both in the office, at home, and on the journey in between.

This is the logical extension of the famous incident of the IT CEO who left his laptop unattended while speaking at a security conference – when it went missing, he realised that he had essentially allowed the entire company to be stolen by a passing stranger.

Despite the latest report, It's clear that policy, governance and good management are the only viable solutions here, rather than more technology. However, the problem for CIOs, especially those dealing with networks of outsourcing partners, is balancing the increased productivity and flexibility offered by teleworking, homeshoring and homeworking (which some studies put as high as 20-25%) with the increased security risk and potential for data or equipment loss and theft.

“What these findings show is that there is still a paramount need to increase attention to data management and protection in an organisation,” said Steve Browell, general manager of the Security Division at Bell Micro. “How data is encrypted, moved and stored must move up the business agenda, otherwise we are just leaving the gates wide open for the horse to bolt. The tools are already available but vendors, distributors and resellers alike must come together to deliver better education to customers and create a total service that can deliver true data loss prevention.”

While security remains a key investment for UK businesses, this latest research suggests that critical network security services are either yet to be broadly adopted or have been purchased but incorrectly implemented.

Sterling continued to struggle against the dollar and euro on Wednesday after minutes from the Bank of England's last policy meeting showed a 8-to-1 vote in favour of leaving interest rates on hold. (Reuters)

Casual observers could be forgiven for thinking that the construction industry is not doing too badly. The London Olympics, the Government’s housing scheme and infrastructure development such as CrossRail have had huge news coverage and paint a fairly rosy picture of the industry.

However, dig a little deeper and you find that the London Olympics is facing a shortage of over 180,000 skilled construction and building workers, let alone the spiralling costs and deadline extensions. The Government’s housing targets look likely to be missed and industry bodies are making worrying noises about a decreasing number of graduates coming through the system.

Furthermore, the construction industry is always vulnerable to take the initial impact from an economic downturn. Looking back at the dips during the 80s and 90s this certainly rings true. The recent credit crunch has therefore put even greater pressure on an industry which has been dealing with pressures on capacity.

Evidence of the effects of the crunch is now being covered on an almost daily basis in the media. One of Britain’s biggest building firms, Persimmon Homes, based in York, recently confirmed that it was to stop certain construction projects. The effect of the economy on new house sales was given as the reason for this decision. Just over the Pennines, Liverpool Football Club has postponed its new stadium project as owner Tom Hicks stated that the current economic situation was "the most difficult... I've seen in the last 20 years.”

The issue for the construction industry is that past experience has shown us that it usually suffers first in a slump. This inevitably dominos onto other sectors. Business investment could well be the next domino to fall which would have substantial repercussions on construction forecasts. In such uncertain times it is absolutely vital that firms plan for the long term so they are as prepared as possible to weather the storm.

With choppy waters ahead, all companies have to look at their available resources to make sure that they can be flexible and adaptable to keep their head above water. This means that firms will have to run a tight ship and manage their resources incredibly efficiently.

In a recent white paper conducted by the MCA (the Management Consultancies Association) it was reported that over 66 per cent of companies surveyed felt that resource management was the most important or second most important process in the company. However 55 per cent of businesses were only able to plan their resources for three months at a time- and the presence of a dedicated resource planning IT system was worryingly absent.

The importance of having a resource planning system can not be understated. It can provide substantial savings on infrastructure overheads, as well as improving management efficiencies dramatically - essentially it enables a company to align its processes better so that it operates more efficiently.

Admittedly, it can sometimes be a fairly daunting task for staff - but it will make the overall running of the business much easier if you need to restructure or plan for increases, or decreases in capacity and demand.

In order to get the benefits as quickly as possible you need to keep things simple, yes this is an IT system that will change the processes of your business, but it must not stop people from talking. Project managers will see the benefit of having a comprehensive capacity report for current and future projects so that they have a better foundation from which to make important decisions.

Project managers can maximise the resources they have at their disposal, reducing the risk of project overruns and lost time due to poor staffing deployment. Planning and organising the resources available means any project can meet the agreed targets successfully.

Every business must look to the future - there is conflicting opinions on the scale of the impact of the crunch, but in such uncertain times no one can afford to gamble. What is vital for businesses to consider is that the investment sector is vulnerable and this could dramatically change the landscape. With a planning system in place a firm is in a much better position to navigate the forthcoming peaks and troughs successfully.

A new report from the Management Consultancies Association (MCA) based on a survey of British Bankers’ Association (BBA) members, has found that the credit crunch will drive a new wave of outsourcing and offshoring in financial services. However, only 54 per cent of respondents felt that their organisation understood how to get good value from outsourcing and only 24 per cent thought they adequately understood the offshoring industry.

Countering some of the negative publicity typically associated with outsourcing and offshoring, the MCA report also found that the majority of respondents (89 per cent) do not think that many jobs in their organisations have been lost as a result of either outsourcing or offshoring and almost two thirds (58 per cent) also think that outsourcing has made the organisation more competitive.

The survey, conducted across over 70 organisations in the financial services sectors, also found that over 90 per cent of financial services’ organisations had outsourced and almost a third had offshored some part of the business and 41 per cent planned to expand their involvement in outsourcing in the near future.

Fiona Czerniawska, author of the report and Director of the MCA Think Tank, commented: “While innovation and creativity is exciting, the credit crunch has also created something of a wake-up call to the financial services sector. Many institutions which have so far ignored the benefits of outsourcing are being forced to revisit it because of financial constraints and liquidity problems. Often they have failed to integrate and are still lumbering under a weight of legacy systems and processes and carrying both unnecessary variable cost and balance sheet assets.”

Apart from a small number of banks that outsource ‘religiously’ and have succeeded in building common platforms for functions like IT and finance, the report found that insurance and investment are ahead of retail banking in their use of outsourcing, with many banks still yet to achieve the standardisation and economies of scale that their size would suggest.

Another source of difference across the financial services sector is the extent to which different functions within the organisation have been outsourced. The survey suggests that finance and HR outsourcing are not growing any faster than IT outsourcing despite the marketing activity by outsourcing suppliers.

Lesley McLeod, Communications Director at the BBA, said: “Outsourcing is an accepted part of financial services today but this report demonstrates there are still important lessons to be learned in terms of getting the best possible value from such an arrangement. We need to ensure the buying side is more informed and better at building more collaborative relationships.”

TelecityGroup, the pan European provider of network independent data centres and value added services, today announces that the International Institute of Information Technology, also called “SUPINFO”, France’s leading international ICT school, has extended its relationship with the company by taking additional hosting space and value added services to cater for the rapid growth of its server housing, network and storage requirements.

Founded in 1965, the Ecole Supérieure d’Informatique, recently renamed as the International Institute of Information Technology and more commonly known as SUPINFO, is an international school that has become the leading higher education establishment in France for the tuition of Information and Communication Technologies. Today, the school has more than 5,000 students at 41 sites across the world, including 28 in France.

With a seven-fold increase in the number of students in the last five years, and an ever-expanding number of commercial services on offer, SUPINFO's in-house solution could no longer meet the hosting and bandwidth requirements of its critical server infrastructure, nor provide the appropriate level of physical security required.

Already a TelecityGroup customer, SUPINFO is now expanded its partnership by outsourcing the entire hosting of its IT systems to the TelecityGroup facility in Aubervilliers, Paris. TelecityGroup's IP-Transit services will assure SUPINFO resilient, scaleable connectivity.

François Fanuel, Systems and Networks Director at SUPINFO, explains: "SUPNIFO has hosted some of its IT systems’ infrastructure with TelecityGroup for a number of years and our experience has been very positive. The staff are highly professional and attentive to our requirements day and night and the technical standards of its data centre infrastructure are excellent. We particularly appreciate its strict cabling standards – quite a departure from what you find in most other data centre companies - and the access to connectivity and peering points.”

"By hosting our entire IT systems’ infrastructure with TelecityGroup, we have cut our Internet connection costs in half while multiplying available bandwidth by an order of magnitude.”

Stephane Duproz, TelecityGroup France Managing Director comments: “I am very pleased that we have extended our agreement with SUPINFO. That such a well-informed organisation should continue to show confidence in our people and services is a clear demonstration of our strengths in this sector, and the level of support we can offer.”

TelecityGroup has recently announced it will build its third data centre in Paris. The data centre is to be launched in phases from the second half of 2009 through to the second quarter of 2011 providing over 3000 square metres of net customer space. Overall data centre power will be approximately 14 megawatts (MW) and total customer power will be approximately 5 MW, with the ability to support high power density requirements of up to 20 kilowatts per rack. Subject to final planning permission for the site, which is expected towards the end of 2008, the Group will invest a total of €48 million in the project,

IBM announced enterprise additions to its Project Big Green this week, a week after HP announced its Sustainability Laboratory. Both vendors have a history of interest in this area, but HP has achieved a higher profile for its efforts.

The HP announcement included long-term datacentre issues while IBM concentrated on new product releases to help in this area. However, there were large areas of agreement and overlap in the two presentations, and both said that energy use has become a high-level concern for enterprises, which will grow in importance.

Both see an immediate opportunity for savings in energy use with a strong financial investment case through monitoring and intelligent control systems. IBM talks of the payback period from investments in this area being less than two years. Both back these claims with case studies, although at this early stage these are thin on the ground at present. The environmental payback period may be longer where this involves hardware replacement.

• Both initiatives contrast with recent research published on sourcingfocus.com, which suggested that many clients – in fact, a majority of organisations – are not able to make their datacentre usage more efficient or environmentally friendly as they lack either the skills or the will to tackle the issue, to deactivate so-called ghost servers, or even to make use of the energy efficiency controls on servers within the datacentre.

• The issue is a pressing one, as IT systems usage worldwide now matches the carbon footprint of the global airline industry – each contributing roughly two percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

The datacentre energy problem

The demands on information processing systems are growing exponentially. For example IBM expects server usage to grow six-fold and the volume of stored data to grow 70-fold over the decade, and these figures are consistent with Ovum's research.

Technology is delivering efficiency improvements, but these tend to be linear in nature. Consequently energy use by datacentres is still rising rapidly. In the longer term we need changes in business processes, data retention practice and law, and a change in expectations. In particular the desire for richer presentation media is placing exponential demands on datacentres, such as replacing pictures with movies.

We need to question how much processing we do, and how much data we hold, and for how long. The present tendency to hold everything that it is technologically possible to hold will have to be challenged. We need systems that can store a single copy of a document and not replicate it multiple times across the organisation, without this placing complexity on users. If a practice is worth doing we will need to justify it by identifying balancing savings outside the realm of the datacentre.

HP's long-term vision

HP has demonstrated its commitment to long-term improvement in this area by designating sustainable computing as one of the five areas that HP Labs will focus on, and by including a project in its initial agenda to develop optical computing. This is an important element in its long-term objective of cutting datacentre energy use by 75%.

The replacement of copper by fibre optic cable carrying laser signals will deliver major energy savings in data centre communications, and eventually in the processor chip. It will allow much greater density of processing within a single chip. HP has set itself a target of five years for delivering on this vision, which we regard as being at the optimistic end of the spectrum.

The medium term: monitoring and intelligent control

HP claims it has achieved a 40% energy saving at a new datacentre it has recently built in Bangalore by deploying its smart cooling technology. IBM claims similar savings in the short term by deploying its current technology including its new monitoring systems. Tivoli monitoring software has been extended from processor monitoring to include all aspects of the data centre facility. It monitors kilowatts of power consumption, and not just processor utilisation. It provides connections into several important business activities to make it an attractive proposition for business:

• Green business services: for example detecting 'brownout' situations and invoking business continuity services.

• Intelligent chargeback: bringing business accountability into the picture

• Optimising asset usage

• Energy-aware provisioning, so that servers can be selected for each workload based on their ability to meet required service levels and minimise cost.

HP has shown a commendable attention to lifetime issues in its green IT agenda. This is continuing in the current announcement. It points out that the energy required to smelt bauxite into aluminium to make a server is equivalent to the energy the server will use in two years of its life. It is now embarking on a project to build up a database of lifecycle energy consumption to create a comprehensive database from which lifecycle issues can be more accurately evaluated. It promises to put the results in the public domain, and is appealing for partners to help populate this.

The immediate future

IBM is using this platform to attract attention to technical advances in some areas of its IT infrastructure products, such as improved storage products and its partnership with VMware to deliver virtualisation to its customers. Virtualisation can reduce hardware requirements by a factor of six, cutting hardware and operating costs in half. Energy costs can be reduced by between 10% and 40%. Of course this also plays to IBM's strengths in providing suitable servers for virtualised environments.

• Despite these very welcome initiatives by two large vendors, the onus rests equally on education, management and enforcement of green initiatives within customer companies to minimise the environmental impact of their data systems and assets. This would be a key area of differentiation between the newly merged HP/EDS and their main rival, IBM: not just greener products, services and policies, but a down-the-line education programme to ensure all the facilities are both understood and used.

The security division of value-added distributor Bell Micro today announced findings from a new independent research report which suggests that UK businesses are still failing to address the protection of data assets on the network from staff abuse, misuse or direct theft.

Nearly half (47%) of the respondents questioned at InfoSecurity Europe 2008 believed their companies were yet to implement real-time systems that would inform IT departments if security levels were breached.

This latest research follows similar reports in recent weeks suggesting that more than one third of IT directors say that their organisations have suffered either data loss or data theft internally – not to mention, of course, the latest in a spate of public sector security lapses, from confidential documents being left on commuter trains to laptop thefts from the Home Office and Ministry of Defence.

Most respondents in IT based roles (74%) recognise, and work to protect, against the danger of rogue connections such as customer or contractor laptops, and yet almost half (43%) were failing to enforce a policy of encrypting data on portable devices - such as personal laptops, PDAs and removable media. Worse still, 62% of respondents indicated that IT departments would be unable to detect if an employee copied data off a server onto a PC, laptop, USB stick or a disk.

This is further clear evidence of the unexpected knock-on effects of increased mobility and teleworking: consumer devices, together with business laptops, Blackberrys, mobiles and PDAs are increasingly falling into a grey area of unsupported devices, or computers that serve functions both in the office, at home, and on the journey in between.

This is the logical extension of the famous incident of the IT CEO who left his laptop unattended while speaking at a security conference – when it went missing, he realised that he had essentially allowed the entire company to be stolen by a passing stranger.

Despite the latest report, It's clear that policy, governance and good management are the only viable solutions here, rather than more technology. However, the problem for CIOs, especially those dealing with networks of outsourcing partners, is balancing the increased productivity and flexibility offered by teleworking, homeshoring and homeworking (which some studies put as high as 20-25%) with the increased security risk and potential for data or equipment loss and theft.

“What these findings show is that there is still a paramount need to increase attention to data management and protection in an organisation,” said Steve Browell, general manager of the Security Division at Bell Micro. “How data is encrypted, moved and stored must move up the business agenda, otherwise we are just leaving the gates wide open for the horse to bolt. The tools are already available but vendors, distributors and resellers alike must come together to deliver better education to customers and create a total service that can deliver true data loss prevention.”

While security remains a key investment for UK businesses, this latest research suggests that critical network security services are either yet to be broadly adopted or have been purchased but incorrectly implemented.

As companies continue to move to using multiple providers for their outsourcing services, the number of reported "megadeals" (those worth over $1bn) awarded to a single service provider has declined, according to a new report by Gartner. In 2007, 10 outsourcing megadeals were awarded, a decline from 12 in 2006.

“The decline in reported outsourcing contracts can be partially explained by the fact that outsourcing is now ‘business as usual’ for many enterprises,” said Kurt Potter, research director at Gartner. “There is more outsourcing activity, but fewer deals on average are reported and this creates the false impression that outsourcing is decreasing.”

In terms of megadeal total contact value (TCV), the total for the 10 megadeals in 2007 was $12 billion, the lowest level reported during the last eight years, with the closest level being that of $20.3 billion in 2001. Average contract value (ACV) of megadeals also continued to decrease, from an average of $2.6 billion in 2006 to $1.2 billion in 2007.

“While further TCV erosion may be driven by the irreversible trends of global delivery and IT services industrialisation as many leading-edge organisations move into their second and third generations of IT outsourcing, they may be looking at deal expansion to include wider application or business initiatives,” said Mr. Potter. “Although these opportunities are likely to evolve from a single-provider to a multiple-provider engagement, in some cases, historical ties between provider and recipient may retain the potential for megadeals.”

Of the TCV of all outsourcing deals reported in 2007, Gartner said megadeals represented 39.4 percent of the contract value and represented only 6.8 percent of the number of total contracts in 2007, down from 7.4 percent in 2006. Although deals with less than $50 million in TCV continued to increase and reached 39.5 percent of the total number of contracts, they only represented 3.3 percent of TCV for 2007.

“Many providers are pursuing smaller contract strategies as a consequence of the new market realities, new competition and natural market pressures toward commoditisation, which reduces per-unit pricing. These strategies are often in the form of pursuit of smaller contracts from larger clients, or larger contracts from smaller companies,” said Mr. Potter. “Many clients want to test providers’ contracting practices, capabilities and cultures before moving favored providers into larger contracts, or organisations are using smaller doses of outsourcing to delay larger outsourcing adventures. Many providers are forced to pursue larger contracts to meet growth expectations. Despite this pressure, providers should continue to evaluate different or at least accommodate go-to-market and product portfolio strategies for smaller clients.”

Calsoft, a growing ITO provider, has expanded its reach in the European market by opening a new delivery centre in the UK.

From the new centre, based in Hampshire, Calsoft aims to provide a range of services from product development and testing to engineering and consultancy for businesses across the UK and mainland Europe. 

Simon Ellis, Manager of the new facility, said: “Calsoft sees a positive opportunity during a global credit crunch to deliver more for less on behalf of its clients. We’re bringing a successful global model to the European market and feel confident that we can provide clients with quality solutions and access to highly skilled product development resources.”

The move should create a number of new jobs for the UK market.