Recent Blog Posts
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Inside Outsourcing
Satyam Timeline: From tragedy to fairytale.
I interviewed Mahindra Satyam last week and for the first time since it was hit by a $1bn internal fraud in 2008 it was confident enough to say it has now recovered and will push for growth. I spoke to Roger Newman, who heads up a UK business unit, at Mahindra Satyam.He said the company is ready to draw a ...
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WITsend
Finding the right woman for the job
In this guest blog Lesley Cowley OBE, chief executive of Nominet, discusses how the UK needs to encourage more girls into the IT sector in order to foster the next generation of IT talent. It's a sad yet common misconception that the UK IT industry is a "man's world". Unfortunately, the statistics a...
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Open Source Insider
How to keep sexism out of open source
Any number of surveys will give you broad brush summary stats detailing the dearth of women in professional IT roles. Computer Weekly has long sought to champion the wider redress of this imbalance and has regularly covered a number of women in IT initiatives and news threads. It is therefore interesting t...
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Computer Weekly Data Bank
Telecom Services Spend - Post & Courier Organisations
Post & courier organisations with 1000+ staff spend only £80 per employee on telecom services. Smaller sized concerns have outlays considerably larger with companies employing 50-99 staff expending nearly £1,200 per worker.Source: IT & Telecom Spend - 80 Industry Sectors (www.kewassociates.co...
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Inside Outsourcing
Who are the top outsourcing advisories?
The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) recently published the results of its research identifying the world's best outsourcing firms.One part of this focuses on outsourcing advisors. I think the number of CIOs that outsource without taking independent advice must be pretty much z...
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Public Sector IT
DWP drops agile from flagship government software project
The Department for Work and Pensions has dropped a coalition government scheme to avert software disasters from its £2bn Universal Credit programme.The DWP gave up using the "agile" method of software development for Universal Credit, the coalition government's flaghsip reform programme, last month.It had ...
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CWDN
The cloud developer's toolkit takes shape
It's official. The software application development discipline now extends to a wider definition and the cloud software application developer has arrived. Call him (or her) a 'cloud developer', call him a 'service-based computing programmer', call him a 'hosting coder' or call him Software-as-a-Service App...
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Quocirca Insights
Next generation MPS: From Big Paper to Big Data
Paper-based information is not often thought about in today's Big Data picture, which tends to focus on the proliferation of unstructured data from sources such as blogs, social media and video that is growing at exponential rates compared to traditional enterprise data. Yet paper documents are an importa...
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Inside Outsourcing
Is outsourcing the answer to IT innovation?
I recently blogged asking the question: Can you outsource innovation? In this guest blog post Matt Cooper, CEO at Imaginatik, tells us why the answer is yes. In fact he thinks outsourcing could be the answer.This is interesting because one of the biggest criticisms of outsourcing is often that there is no ...
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Computer Weekly Data Bank
System Software Spend - Top Manufacturing Sectors
Beverages & tobacco manufacturers with 1000+ employees spend over £1.2m each on system software. This is 40% more than large transport equipment makers. They in turn have an expenditure which is twice that of pharmaceutical manufacturers.Source: IT & Telecom Spend - 80 Industry Sectors ...
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Inspect-a-Gadget
BlackBerry Live 2013: BES 10.1 - Security updates
BlackBerry Live kicked off in Orlando, Florida this week with a bang; a new QWERTY Q5 handset and significant updates to its messaging tool BBM stole the spotlight. However, BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) also had a few updates with the operating system's upgrade to BlackBerry 10.1 this week. I've spok...
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StorageBuzz
Has the storage hardware lock-in had its day?
Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Two years ago I wrote that the storage industry was apparently ripe for huge change. The nub of my argument was that storage is a sector of the IT supplier world in which customers are forced to spend money on what are essentially a...
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Inside Outsourcing
UK smart metering delayed, as expected by anyone with the ability to think
It came as no surprise to hear last week that the GB smart meter implementation programme (GB SMIP) has had its target of having smart meters in UK homes has been put back a year.The project, which is planned to be fully completed by 2019, had a target for the introduction of smart meters in homes by the ...
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Open Source Insider
Blackberry Messenger (BBM) to run on Android
Reports emanating from BlackBerry's annual developer conference confirm that the firm is planning to offer the Blackberry Messenger (BBM) service on other platforms. Google's Android and Apple's iOS operating systems are scheduled to feature BBM by the summer of 2013. Rival platforms This is the first time...
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Inspect-a-Gadget
BlackBerry Live 2013: Hands on with the BlackBerry Q5
BlackBerry's third handset to sit on the BlackBerry 10 operating system was announced today at BlackBerry Live in Orlando, Florida. The mid-range Q5 device sports a QWERTY keyboard and is aimed primarily at users in emerging markets, however, UK MD Rob Orr told me that its roll out in the UK and Europe wil...
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Computer Weekly Editor's Blog
Is G-Cloud changing the behaviour of the big IT suppliers?
The government's G-Cloud has its critics, who like to cite the relatively few millions of pounds of spending put through the programme as being tiny compared to the annual £16bn government IT spend. But - putting aside the obvious counter argument that such change takes time and plenty of Whitehall buyers ...
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CWDN
How many developers use in-memory computing?
Big enterprise data vendors can't say enough about in-memory computing and the databases serving these new development streams right now -- but how much usage goes on in the real world? The number of developers using in-memory databases in relation to their software application development has increased 40...
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Inspect-a-Gadget
Review: Samsung Galaxy S4
I have yet to own a Samsung phone but have taken great joy in the past few years at having them on loan to get to grips with. Admittedly I favour the giant Galaxy Note range over the more popular Galaxy S devices, but there is no denying the sales figures and the latter has taken the smartphone industry by...
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Inside Outsourcing
How a war injury in 1943 lead to a software development centre in Poland
I recently met up with the CEO of finance software maker Microgen. One of the things we talked about was outsourcing. Microgen does a lot of its development work in Poland. The story behind this is a great one.Neil Thompson, CTO of Microgen, discusses how, following the advice of his father who was injured...
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Public Sector IT
NHS watchdog commandeers data in bid to stimulate privatization
The Care Quality Commission wants public approval for a plan that will use health data to help private companies make inroads into the NHS.The scheme will see the NHS care watchdog repositioning itself as quasi-market regulator and consumer champion for a newly privatized health service.It was sketched out...
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Open Source Insider
A shot in the arm for enterprise Linux
After this week's news of the International Space Station's move to Debian Linux for its laptop installation, the enterprise Linux space is also now strengthened by Bromium, Chelsio, Fusion-io, nexB and ownCloud all joining the Linux Foundation. NOTE: This year's 2013 Enterprise End User Report show the wo...
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Inside Outsourcing
Union threatens strike as O2 plans to outsource call centre
The Communications Workers Union (CWU) said it will use all actions at its disposal, including strike, to oppose call centre outsourcing at O2 if reports are accurate.I missed this late last month but thought it worth noting.Reacting to an article in the Sun Newspaper, revealing plans at O2 to outsource ca...
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Open Source Insider
International Space Station adopts Debian Linux, drops Windows & Red Hat into airlock
It's nothing to do with Windows 8 and the lack of a 'Start' button (or orb) at all. But reports from the Linux Foundation confirm that the International Space Station's (ISS) laptop installation is to drop Windows into the airlock in favour of a new deployment of Linux for its machines. Manager of the Spac...
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Computer Weekly Data Bank
IT & Telecom Spend - Legal Services Companies
Small legal services concerns with 50-99 staff spend £150m on IT and telecom services. One third of that expenditure is on IT and telecom professionals whilst a quarter is on telecom services. A further fifth is directed at computer services. The remaining fifth is split between hardware ...
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When IT Meets Politics
BT launches offensive on Sky's broadband bulge: markets believe Talk Talk, not Sky, will be the main loser ...
Ian Livingstone parked his tanks on Rupert Murdoch's lawn and the analysts clearly liked what they heard. At the end of Friday, after some fluctuations, BT shares closed 7% above their peak in March. Sky shares were 10% down from a similar peak. Talk Talk was down 20% from its March peak. ...
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The Full Spectrum
Wi-Fi in the US sky? Follow suit EU!
Plane taking off (Photo credit: Wikipedia)I recently moved home and had the joyful stresses of trying to move my broadband service. Despite phoning three weeks in advance to organise what should have been a simple change of address and redirection of my connection, I spent two hours on the phone to Virgin ...
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Open Source Insider
Amazon launches Android app store in China
Reuters reports news this week of Amazon.com launching an Android application store in China offering "paid" and free applications. With this move Amazon effectively beats Google (whose store only offers free open source apps) in terms of the amount of digital content it offers to what is indisputably the ...
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CWDN
Intel 'Silvermont' Inside microserver microarchitecture
New software application development stream possibilities have come to light this week after news from Intel as the firm announces its Silvermont microarchitecture. This new technology targets tablets, smartphones, microservers, network infrastructure products, storage and other areas such as entry-level l...
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Inside Outsourcing
Should outsourcing ranking be taken with a pinch of salt?
Two different ranking lists in the outsourcing sector struck me this week because they both lacked the name IBM within them. Both had reasons for not including IBM but it does put into question the value of these lists.IBM Global Services personifies IT services and its absence from these lists was surpris...
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Downtime
Facebook outs Fergie's successor
David Moyes, Manager of Everton Football Club. Everton Played Club America after FC Dallas beat Colorado (Major League Soccer) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)We have all made the odd social network faux pas. From being it tagged in a picture on a drunken night out you didn't want your family to see through to tw...
