Short takes from this week's news
Outsourcing growth predicted at 5.9% a
year
IT job exports are forecast to increase by a compound annual growth
rate of 5.9% between 2002 and the end of 2004, said Frost &
Sullivan. The analyst firm looked at the global outsourcing of IT
jobs across 14 countries. It estimated that this year, 826,540 IT
jobs will be transferred abroad by the UK and the US, France,
Germany, Hong Kong and Japan, amounting a value of £26.7bn.
HP-UX system will not include Tru64
features
Hewlett-Packard has abandoned plans to integrate two features into
its HP-UX operating system from the Tru64 operating system it
acquired in its 2002 purchase of Compaq. Instead, HP has partnered
with Veritas to add file system and clustering capabilities to
HP-UX in 2005.
Number of web users has passed 100
million
The number of users in Europe accessing the web has passed 100
million, and more than half have a home high-speed broadband
connection. By October, 54.5 million Europeans had visited the web
using broadband, up 60% from 34.1 million a year earlier, said
market research firm Nielsen/NetRatings.
Ikea loyalty card firm moves systems to
Linux
One of Germany's biggest financial services companies has shifted
its core web services infrastructure to Linux. Plus Finanzservice,
which provides customer loyalty cards to H&M and Ikea, has
migrated from Sun's Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, saving 30%
in costs.
Microsoft releases SQL management tool
Microsoft has released SQL Server 2005 Express Manager, a free
database management tool which can simplify, automate and reduce
the complexity of database support and administration. It can be
used to manage SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine and
SQL Server 2005 Developer and Express Edition databases.
Cisco upgrades Ethernet on Catalyst engines
Cisco has released a series of enhancements to its
Catalyst range to offer Gigabit Ethernet capability, power over
Ethernet, and better security. The company has added extra security
features to the Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 4500 Series supervisor
engines, including the ability to prevent denial of service
attacks.
Business starts to count the cost of
IDcards
Plans for a national ID card could tie businesses up in red tape,
the government's Better Regulation Taskforce warned last week.
Companies are likely to come under pressure to install card readers
to perform identity checks and to pay to access the central ID card
database. David Arculus, chairman of the group, said he would be
calling for a thorough analysis of the costs and benefits.
Bmi pays web hoster on transaction-only
basis
Attenda, the enterprise and internet applications management
company, has signed a three-year deal with UK airline bmi. Attenda
will manage bmi's two websites but be paid purely according to the
number of flight reservations made through the sites.
VoIP to underpin BT's giant virtual call
centre
BT is to migrate its UK call centres to VoIP over the next two
years so that 9,700 call centre agents across 124 sites can work as
one team in a single, virtual customer centre. BT will spend about
£2.6m on kit from Nortel, according to the network supplier.
Global deal puts Dell on the desktop at
Philips
Dell has signed a five-year £361m deal with Philips to provide the
electronics group with desktop management. Dell said system
integrators Atos Origin and Getronics would help it roll out
standard desktop systems across 60 countries.
Skulls worm burrows into Symbian
phones
A new version of the Cabir.B worm is infecting phones running the
Symbian operating system. Called Skulls.B, it spreads using
Bluetooth, the short-range radio technology built into handsets.
Security specialist F-Secure advised users to switch Bluetooth
operation on their phones to "hidden" mode.
Size no object to rapid CRM response
A 10,000-seat contact centre running Epiphany CRM software has
shown sub-second response times while handling more than a million
transactions an hour. Epiphany, BEA and HP ran the enterprise
scalability benchmark on the system, which consists ofEpiphany
Service 6.5, BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1 and HP Integrity servers
with Itanium 2 processors running Windows Server 2003 and HP-UX
11i.
