News

IT services and outsourcing

• April 23, 2026 23 Apr'26

  FairPrice to roll out AI-powered smart carts to more stores

  Shoppers can expect smart carts that slash checkout times to just 36 seconds, while supermarket staff will get an AI sidekick to automate daily operations

• April 23, 2026 23 Apr'26

  Digital twin of athlete’s heart to demonstrate future of healthcare

  IT services firm opens a window to the future of healthcare and physical training as tech advancements converge

• April 23, 2026 23 Apr'26

  AI adoption is rapid but many stuck at basic levels, says AWS

  The UK could unlock £35bn of productivity – equivalent to the economy of Manchester – if organisations can move from basic use of AI to productive, often agentic, modes of working

• April 23, 2026 23 Apr'26

  Using AI to manage insider risk amid Middle East conflict

  As geopolitical tensions reshape the cyber threat landscape across the region, organisations are turning to artificial intelligence-driven behaviour analytics, investigative automation and monitoring of AI agents to detect insider risk faster and ...

• April 22, 2026 22 Apr'26

  Bunnings shows off AI shopping agent at Google showcase

  The Australian hardware chain has gone from digital laggard to e-commerce pioneer, teaming up with Google Cloud to launch a conversational AI assistant that turns simple queries into DIY project plans

• April 22, 2026 22 Apr'26

  Government terminates Capita’s Royal Mail pension contract

  Contract termination comes as Capita’s failings in a separate government pension scheme hit the headlines

• April 22, 2026 22 Apr'26

  Google launches Gemini Agent Platform, eighth-generation TPUs

  With more AI agents moving to production, Google Cloud is targeting governance, multi-cloud data architecture and purpose-built silicon to help enterprises orchestrate agentic workflows

• April 22, 2026 22 Apr'26

  Egypt targets nearshore IT outsourcing market as global demand shifts

  Talent scale, cost advantage and AI capability position Egypt as an alternative to Eastern Europe in evolving sourcing strategies

• April 22, 2026 22 Apr'26

  Blackbox replaces two racks of HPE storage with 8U of Everpure

  UK-based IaaS ‘sovereign’ provider, with multiple public sector-facing clients, replaced end-of-life 3PAR arrays with FlashArray storage that saw it reduce power consumption by 85%

• April 21, 2026 21 Apr'26

  More finance firms join FCA’s AI testing initiative

  Barclays, Experian and UBS join the FCA’s live AI testing initiative, exploring cutting-edge technologies like agentic AI and SLMs to ensure safe, responsible innovation in UK financial markets

• April 17, 2026 17 Apr'26

  Capita lacked ‘detail and thoroughness’ in planning botched Civil Service Pension Scheme takeover

  CEO of former civil service pension administrator claims Capita’s pre-takeover processes were inadequate

• April 16, 2026 16 Apr'26

  UAE education builds digital resilience as regional tensions accelerate shift to remote learning

  Ankabut CEO Tarek Jundi outlines how national infrastructure, AI-driven platforms and distance-learning capabilities are helping schools and universities maintain continuity amid geopolitical uncertainty

• April 15, 2026 15 Apr'26

  Data dive: A new American Century in the datacentre pipeline?

  Looking at datacentre development internationally, we see how the UK faces apparent relative decline, how countries are responding to the AI age, and what MW vs GDP can tell us

• April 15, 2026 15 Apr'26

  England Rugby chooses Capgemini as it targets half a million new fans

  French supplier will support the Rugby Football Union’s four-year plan to ensure the sport thrives in England

• April 14, 2026 14 Apr'26

  Finance regulator outlines its open finance vision

  Financial Conduct Authority wants small businesses and consumers to be able to use their data to get better finance deals

• April 13, 2026 13 Apr'26

  ‘Grand Theft Auto’ publisher Rockstar hit by hackers again

  The notorious ShinyHunters hacking collective menaces video game publisher Rockstar and says it will leak data on 14 April

• April 13, 2026 13 Apr'26

  Go West! US datacentres head for available and cheap energy

  Texas the hotspot as US datacentres enter the GW age, Virginia set to hold its status as ‘datacentre alley’, while constrained west coast states set for market share decline

• April 10, 2026 10 Apr'26

  OpenAI ‘pauses’ Stargate UK: Sudden setback or calculated move?

  OpenAI’s decision to pause Stargate UK, much vaunted and based on a memorandum of understanding with government, cites energy costs and regulation, but may be driven by wider uncertainties

• April 09, 2026 09 Apr'26

  European Union deep tech plan too late for quantum champions IQM and Pasqal

  European quantum computing firms hurry to get US stock exchange listings so they can be predator not prey in a coming wave of consolidation

• April 08, 2026 08 Apr'26

  Capita’s troubled Civil Service Pension Scheme hit by data breach

  A data breach affecting 138 members of the Civil Service Pension Scheme piles pressure on the service’s administrator, Capita, amid ongoing issues

• April 08, 2026 08 Apr'26

  Azure customers up in arms over ‘full’ UK South region

  Microsoft customers report being refused capacity, migration projects stuck halfway, and accusations that AI is being prioritised over ‘bread and butter’ offerings

• April 08, 2026 08 Apr'26

  Hyperscaler datacentres set to dominate by 2031

  Driven by artificial intelligence deployments, hyperscaler datacentres are expected to comprise more than two-thirds of all capacity by 2031. Meanwhile, on-premise datacentre capacity will shrink to 20%, down from 56% in 2018

• April 02, 2026 02 Apr'26

  How ‘Wikipedia of cyber’ helps SAP make sense of threat data

  SAP runs enormous cloud environments for some of the world’s most heavily-regulated organisations, and in the hyperscale era, data security and compliance were becoming big challenges. It turned to cutting-edge agentic tools from Uptycs to cut ...

• April 02, 2026 02 Apr'26

  Fujitsu injects another £80m into UK arm amid Post Office scandal fallout

  IT services provider’s UK arm has received a further £80m from parent company headquarters in Japan

• April 02, 2026 02 Apr'26

  Data dive: UK government’s 2030 datacentre capacity targets look shaky

  We look at UK datacentre capacity – current and projected – and find DSIT’s 2030 target for 6GW of AI-capable capacity is currently out of reach, unless operators get a move on

• April 02, 2026 02 Apr'26

  How ANZ firms are driving automation and AIOps

  Tech leaders from Westpac, NAB, Telstra and ACC New Zealand share their automation journeys, from overcoming cultural resistance to the cautious adoption of AI

• April 01, 2026 01 Apr'26

  Microsoft to invest $5.5b in Singapore’s AI and cloud infrastructure

  The tech giant is spending over $5bn through 2029 to bolster its footprint in the city-state while rolling out programmes to equip students, educators and non-profit leaders with AI skills

• April 01, 2026 01 Apr'26

  Post Office scandal supplier Fujitsu to cut nearly 10% of UK workforce

  Troubled IT supplier announces voluntary redundancy programme with hundreds of UK jobs set to be cut

• March 31, 2026 31 Mar'26

  CityFibre launches 8.5Gb service across wholesale multi-gig network

  UK’s largest independent full-fibre platform provider makes the next step in its roll-out of its 10Gb-capable network, and claims strong customer growth continuing as it approaches one million users

• March 31, 2026 31 Mar'26

  CMA to launch strategic market status investigation into Microsoft; Amazon Web Services off the hook

  CMA to investigate whether Microsoft should be given strategic market status. Amazon escaped, but both companies will need to make changes to egress fees and interoperability

• March 27, 2026 27 Mar'26

  Flaws in government procurement show in HMRC £473m AWS award

  After a rushed contract award with only one bidder and a tender notice ‘for hyperscalers only’, critics call for live oversight on government contracts, claiming the procurement is unfair and likely to be expensive

• March 27, 2026 27 Mar'26

  Capita left to deal with 13,000 civil service pension cases over a year old

  More details of the Civil Services Pension Scheme administration backlog left to Capita revealed in parliamentary committee hearing

• March 25, 2026 25 Mar'26

  Amazon Web Services bags Fujitsu’s HMRC loss

  US tech giant wins contract to run three datacentres for the government department after cutting ties with Fujitsu

• March 20, 2026 20 Mar'26

  Essex Police halts live facial recognition over bias and accuracy risks

  LFR deployments by Essex Police will not continue until risks associated with bias and inaccuracy have been reduced

• March 19, 2026 19 Mar'26

  NHS digital ambition needs reality check amid frontline work pressures

  The NHS 10-year plan is ambitious and brave. However, Cheshire and Merseyside GP Tom Micklewright says limited funding flexibility and pressure on primary care are among the issues hindering success

• March 19, 2026 19 Mar'26

  Zopa Bank continues its transformation with further growth

  UK digital challenger bank has 1.7 million customers, five years after it completed its transformation from a peer-to-peer lender

• March 19, 2026 19 Mar'26

  Hit the north! UK datacentre focus shifts to M62 and points north

  Barbour ABI data shows 8GW of total datacentre pipeline with most big projects in the north and Scotland, while London and the M4 corridor are about 25% of projected capacity

• March 18, 2026 18 Mar'26

  UK MoD awards more than two dozen contracts for AI targeting systems

  The UK Ministry of Defence is ramping up its investment into military artificial intelligence in a bid to increase the ‘lethality’ of the British armed forces

• March 17, 2026 17 Mar'26

  Alibaba joins AI agent race with Wukong launch

  Following the viral success of OpenClaw and product launches from Nvidia and Tencent, Alibaba has unveiled an agentic AI platform that integrates with DingTalk to orchestrate business workflows

• March 17, 2026 17 Mar'26

  Health workers call for Palantir to be booted from NHS contracts

  Health justice charity Medact warns that Palantir’s involvement in NHS data systems is a threat to patients and healthcare organisations

• March 17, 2026 17 Mar'26

  Lendi Group standardises on MongoDB for AI-ready data layer

  Following a merger that left the Australian fintech with a fragmented data architecture, Lendi Group has consolidated its databases onto MongoDB Atlas to reduce microservices sprawl and power AI-driven broker tools

• March 16, 2026 16 Mar'26

  Whitehall unable to reduce consultancy spend amid digital skills shortages

  Digital transformation projects rely heavily on external consultants, and while government aims to reduce costs, it holds no accurate data on how much it spends on consultancy services

• March 12, 2026 12 Mar'26

  MP report calls for legislation to overturn Post Office Capture convictions

  Report from MPs warns of unknown number of unsafe subpostmasters convictions based on multiple pre-Horizon systems

• March 11, 2026 11 Mar'26

  Met Office ‘supercomputing as a service’ one year old

  Artificial intelligence is not key to the weather picture, as the forecasting and climate prediction agency lauds the benefits of moving from on-site supercomputers to cloud computing for scientific modelling

• March 11, 2026 11 Mar'26

  Zendesk to acquire Forethought in major agentic AI play

  Zendesk is acquiring Forethought to bolster its agentic AI chops with specialised and self-learning AI agents capable of managing complex customer service workflows

• March 10, 2026 10 Mar'26

  Open banking presents £43bn opportunity for UK economy if warnings are heeded

  Open banking has already delivered billions of pounds to the UK economy and has huge future potential, but industry leaders warn against complacency

• March 09, 2026 09 Mar'26

  IBM takes a second shot at Post Office contract to replace Horizon

  The US tech giant is bidding for a £323m contract to replace the Post Office’s flawed Horizon IT system, a decade after its previous attempt was abandoned due to complexities

• March 09, 2026 09 Mar'26

  AI factory builder Nscale announces another $2bn of funding

  Nscale has a pipeline of 1.3GW of capacity across the UK, Norway and the US, with contracted supply of 200,000 Nvidia GPUs, and is name-checked as a British supplier of AI factories

• March 06, 2026 06 Mar'26

  Regulate AWS and Microsoft, says UK cloud provider survey

  Open Cloud Coalition survey, commissioned ahead of the CMA’s decision on measures against the two hyperscale giants, finds competing cloud providers demand regulation

• March 06, 2026 06 Mar'26

  Enterprises warming to AI PCs amid growing cloud costs

  While global memory shortages will pose a threat to the broader PC market, AI PCs are gaining momentum across Asia as companies look to cut cloud costs, boost productivity and secure sensitive information