Recent Blog Posts

Telecommunications companies spend on system software per employee increases substantially with size of organisation. The largest firms' expenditure is over twice that for medium sized concerns. ...

A bar in Sao Paulo in Brazil has come up with a special glass that only stands upright when placed on a mobile phone. This is an attempt to encourage people to put their working day behind them and ...

Images of how humans will look in 100,000 years' time have been produced by artist Nickolay Lamm and Computational Genomics PhD Dr. Alan Kwan. According to Mashable, Lamm's interpretations of ...

Technology goes through fads when it comes to size. Just a few years ago we were all competing to have the easiest to lose smartphone, whereas now manufacturers are touting bigger screens than ...

File sync specialist SpiderOak has bolstered the Google Play Android app market with an open source secure sync tool.

English: High detail closeup of a cockroach. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)The last thing many of us would want to spend our day staring at is a scuttling cockroach. However, neuroscientist Greg Gage is ...

Banqueting House, London (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Yesterday was possibly the most awkwardly timed summer party I have ever attended, and not just because of the ironic grey clouds hanging around ...

Daimler is the latest corporate to announce plans to bring IT that is currently outsourced back in-house. The firm's announcement follows similar plans from fellow manufacturers General Motors (GM) ...

The Data Dynamics Census indicates a global growth in demand from data centres of 60%: let us assume that the UK is half that, as data centres are moved off shore to where electicity is cheaper and ...

one of the lessons from the past is that the Internet as currently conceived cannot survive unless those who want it to do so work together to help rebuild confidence that it is worth protecting. ...

I would, however, say that Skillset and NESTA are rather good at what they do and some of the new courses to develop the skills for the computer games industry are excellent. Nonetheless changing ...

Late last week, the NAO revealed it was looking into the government's BDUK project to roll-out broadband across the country and whether the £530m being invested was value for money. Today, ...

Google patents pull a silly face log in security software

Nobody in the IT profession can be disappointed that technology has become such a central part of the way we all live and work. For anyone who has been in the industry for 10 or more years, it is ...

We all like a good squabble, especially when watching from the sidelines. Trust me, had you been part of my friendship group in the past few weeks you would have had quite a floor show! But, I ...

Given the pressures on finance ministers around the world to balance their books, or at least reduce the rate at which they are increasing their debts, it is only a matter of time before "net ...

There are some 50 large banking & finance companies in the UK employing over 1000 staff. On average each spends £5m on customised software. This is more than twice as much as life insurance and ...

It would be ludicrous were the stakes not so high. Science, technology and engineering skills, including those for systems and communications engineering, are critical to the futue of the UK.

Can PostgreSQL break Salesforce's love/hate Oracle bind? Salesforce's Marc Benioff makes little secret of his true feelings for Oracle's Larry Ellison.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has introduced free software designed to get people using the tiny Linux-based computing more quickly.

We have a Logitech Business BCC950 Conference Cam up for grabs. We reviewed this nice little bit of kit last year and were suitably impressed... Logitech claims that its ConferenceCam bridges the ...

US national security has become an issue for procurement managers in little old England after claims that a US military security agency has established direct access to the servers of firms ...

Wi-Fi Signal logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Earlier this week I had the pleasure of visiting a sun soaked Spain to talk all things Wi-Fi with Aruba Networks. Ok, as the conference was based just ...

As the saying goes 'humility goes a long way'--this statement does not really apply to most perfectionists as they are always right. Perfectionists do not know the meaning of the word humility even ...

An inside outsourcing reader sent me an interesting email this week. He brought to my attention something that e-kills UK had published regarding a proposal from the Department of Culture Media and ...

I had an interesting conversation with the CIO at Ceva Logistics yesterday. Peter Dew was telling me all about the companies move to the offshore IT delivery model. More specifically how it has ...

Dell has launched a global competition to encourage students to propose new initiatives for empowering women and girls. Announced at the fourth annual Dell Women's Entrepreneur Network global event ...

Relying on your name, brand and reputation is a dangerous tactic, one that Nokia and Blackberry know all too well.Some of the absolute garbage and speculation I read regarding next generation ...

The IT industry's vital role in the UK economy is under threat from what appears to be a desperate attempt by a Whitehall department to avoid being cut back or even scrapped in chancellor George ...

Cyber security is the least likely segment to employ women, within the IT and telecoms sector, according to figures from training company QA.

I met up with Hardeep Garewal, who is the head of Europe at tier-two Indian IT services firm ITC Infotech. It is always interesting to speak to some of the lesser known Indian suppliers. ITC ...

Small machinery & equipment manufacturers spend a little over £50 per employee on application software packages. This is similar to that for all manufacturing companies. For large firms with ...

Dell has revealed the results of its Gender Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI), ranking US women as top for high potential female entrepreneurship.

Русский: Коробки для пиццы. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)There is nothing quite like that feeling of waking up hungover on a Sunday morning and knowing just a few clicks away is the saving grace to ...

IBM senior VP Robert Le Blanc has used his speaking opportunities at this year's Innovate 2013 technical summit to reinforce his firm's now quite heavily reverberating DevOps message. The IBM ...

I have been inundated with emails from IT services suppliers today about them being included in a framework by Network Rail. TCS, Cognizant and Accenture have all sent press alerts out about being ...

Dell, Acer and Asus have all unveiled various PC models at Computex in Taiwan this week. In a midst of a PC market crash, the computer manufacturers have taken a leap of faith and revealed new ...

The next generation of applications will be better served by battery-aware technology existing at both the hardware and software level.

That means cutting across a number of agendas: from the cyber warfare and defence responsibilities of the MoD and Foreign Office through the "defence of the realm" and the law enforcement agendas ...

The Free Diagnostic Pathology (FreeDP) Software Project came about as part of a Department of Health initiative to improve the NHS through the use of technology.

IDC analyst Douglas Hayward sent me an interesting article he wrote, with other IDC analysts, about TCS. This followed an analyst day at TCS. It is interesting to see how big TCS is in the UK. We ...

If the government is serious about wanting to use investment in 21st century infrastructure to help pull through economic recovery it has to return our regulatory structure to the objectives and ...

The stakes are now much higher. The time has come for those who think they understand the problems to start putting forward effective solutions, not just snipe at those who advocate that which it ...

FDM Group recently held an event at the House of Commons to discuss what business people, media and parliamentarians can do to encourage more young people in to a career in technology.....and I ...

The Dell Women's Entrepreneur Network (DWEN) has kicked off its fourth annual event with the theme of 'Pay it Forward.'

Capita has taken over the management of O2's customer services operation for the next ten years. The deal will include increased digitization of services.O2 says it is responding to changing ...

Once upon a time, IBM used to make computers. Of course IBM still makes 'some' computers for internal use and at the higher Z-systems server level, but these days we think of IBM as a software company.

Waste management companies spend on hardware per employee is smaller than that for all UK organisations across all employee bands. The closest match comes for medium sized concerns employing ...

Although WordPress is considered a mature platform, regular updates address serious security vulnerabilities that may be used by an attacker targeting a WordPress site.

I may be the UK managing director and RVP Northern Europe of a successful technology company now, but the route I took to get here is far from traditional.

The UK Major Projects Authority made in a pigeon-step for the cause of transparency and accountability with the publication of its traffic-light ratings of government projects last week.You had to ...

I blogged earlier about a report about planned job cuts at O2 on Telegraph.co.uk. O2 have responded and claim the Telegraph article is incorrect as it presents what it has seen in a leaked document ...

Badger (Photo credit: Tatterdemalion!)Brian May has been fighting against badger culls across the UK and making us fall in love with the furry creatures, but techies beware; they are after your ...

O2's decision to outsource the management and digitization of its customer services to Capita will result in more job cuts than originally revealed. According to an article on Telegraph.co.uk, ...

This is what every gadget-loving foodie needs in their kitchen - an iSpoon.Remember the last time you were using the Jamie Oliver app on your iPad and confused your stylus with your wooden spoon, ...

Watching the IT industry at the moment is a little like reading a good crime novel. There are pieces of evidence appearing, from various sources, often apparently unconnected, but which all point ...

Renegotiations/restructuring now accounts for over half of the IT outsourcing contract value in Europe. Suppliers are largely driving this by approaching existing clients and offering them the ...

IT & telecom spend as a proportion of turnover increases smoothly by size of organisation for architectural & engineering consultancies. This is unlike that for UK overall where the largest ...

I recently spoke to Kim Stevenson, CIO at Intel. When she started in IT, people used to try to issue one device per employee. She says Intel has been running BYOD for three years. "People like ...

Only the Olympics was a more in demand live programme on iPlayer than the funeral of former PM Maggie Thatcher.There were 986,000 requests for the programme, with most of them people watching the ...

This week there have been a few articles about cyber war and the hacking of US military information. Unsurprisingly China is at centre stage. What will this mean for the IT services sector in ...

Fedora 19 Schrödinger's Cat hits beta Release - each Fedora release is said to represent the culmination of work by 'hundreds' of engineers and 'thousands' of contributors.

A government pledge to cut £1.4bn off its computing costs has disintegrated after a key scheme behind the target was fingered for being near to failure.The Cabinet Office G-Cloud scheme was meant ...

Map of Cuyahoga County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)The days of the internet café seem a somewhat distant memory as now we all pile into the nearest coffee chain with our own devices and merely leech ...

The new mantra today is that it is not if your organisation will suffer a security breach, but when. In a recent survey released during Infosec Europe 2013, 93% of large organisations reported that ...

Some large corporates haven't used traditional western IT service providers for years.I wrote an article last week about how the offshore IT service providers that are based mainly in India are ...

That does not mean that the problems of surveillance are intractable. "Merely" that the Big Data "solution" predicated in the thinking behind the Communications Bill is not the most practical and ...

Medium sized pharmaceutical manufacturers (100-999 employees) spend around £50k each on application software packages. This is twice as much that laid out on system and custom software. Development ...

Free & open source World of Tanks game blasts XBox One away. Famed for its truly impressive World of Tanks game, UK and America-based Wargaming has announced details for the version 8.6 update ...

One effect of this incident will be to accelerate the rate at which we move into an age of increasing Internet censorship and propaganda. I only hope that "our" side will be more effective than ...

If any of the big, incumbent Whitehall IT suppliers have not yet done so, they really need to read this web page. It's part of the new Government Service Design Manual, launched earlier this week ...

When HP acquired EDS it had a plan to become a global leader in IT services. HP realized that the future was not in the PC and server markets where commoditisation and cut throat competition was ...

Demand for IT professionals is set to grow in 2013, a worldwide survey of businesses and IT professionals by CompTia, reveals.

If you're a football fan, you'll no doubt be aware of the latest news from the world of football; Sir Alex Ferguson stepping down as long-serving Manchester United manager; Roberto Mancini, manager ...

This directive could be the touchstone because the vast majority of Internet users appear to agree that something must be done to improve on-line security. Unfortunately this is not the "something" ...

Fedora is a free and open source Linux-based operating system sponsored by Red Hat

Apparently we are in the post-PC era. The PC is dead. Deceased. Pining for the ffjords. Ceased to be. An ex-market. But nobody seems to have told Lenovo. Look at the latest quarterly sales ...

SAP is working with software testers and programmers who sit on the autistic spectrum.

I blogged last week about the fact 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.According to Department of ...

At some point during the 1900s (or thereabouts) what we used to know as video conferencing became known as presence, telepresence, or even immersive telepresence if you will.

General insurance companies of all sizes spend dramatically more per employee on computer services than do UK organisations overall. Large general insurers' outlay is over £12,000 per staff member ...

Downtime has nothing against eating healthily in principle - in principle - it's just that all the things that taste so good rarely seem to be calorie-light or good for the arteries. And, as an ...

The twitterverse has whipped itself up into a Hyacinth Bucket storm of indignation after the creator of the Graphics Interchange Format or 'GIF' protested that his invention is actually pronounced ...

Last month the Communication Workers Union (CWUs) announced that it intended to take action if stories about O2 transferring jobs to Capita, as part of an outsourcing deal were true. An article ...

Not enough companies are talking about the guts of cloud mechanics.

Offshoring IT made sense ten years ago because labour costs in countries such as India were so much lower than the UK. But is this still the case?In this guest blog post Andrew Holley, founder ...

Intel has released a new set of development tools for the Android Jelly Bean mobile device operating system called Beacon Mountain.

Those who wish small firms to transact online should focus on ensuring that the products and services they wish to promote are indeed "fit for purpose" - with a premium on security processes that ...

In my last post, I had just joined the graduate scheme at Cognizant, the global IT services and consultancy firm, within its insurance department. Six months on, I have gained a lot of valuable ...

Looking at the Q3 balance sheet, what trend lines emerge, and how does this performance reflect changes in global WAN infrastructure (not overlooking the fact that some, geographies are still stuck ...

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 ...

It's a sad yet common misconception that the UK IT industry is a "man's world". Unfortunately, the statistics are hard to argue with - according to eSkills, fewer than one in seven applicants for ...

Any number of surveys will give you broad brush summary stats on the dearth of women in professional IT roles.

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 ...

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 ...

The Department for Work and Pensions has dropped a coalition government scheme to avert IT disasters from its £2bn Universal Credit programme.The DWP gave up using the "agile" method of software ...

It's official. The software application development discipline now extends to a wider definition and the cloud software application developer has arrived.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...