Recent Blog Posts
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Public Sector IT
Odds stacked on Cornwall outsource
The cards were stacked against Cornwall Council when councillors met on Monday to discuss their chief executive's proposal to sell key services to BT.But Cornwall's head of ICT and three other directors presented back-of-the-envelope estimates that showed how they could still cut costs if they kept council...
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Inside Outsourcing
Do IT analysts skew the services market?
I recently met up with an analyst relations executive form a consultancy. Being a journalist who regularly talks to analysts it was interesting to get some views on industry analysts from the other side of the fence.The views of IT analysts are taken very seriously by businesses when they draw up It strate...
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Downtime
Gizoogling
Downtime has found itself with more time on its hands than usual this week, mainly as we wait for much of our work to be returned with Hugh Grant's approval, but fortunately we stumbled across an ideal outlet for time-wasting.www.Gizoogle.netRunning the address of any webpage through it instantly returns t...
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Downtime
Calling all earthlings
The telco industry charges more, kilobyte by kilobyte, for sending a text message from your phone to next door than what it costs to send the same message from Mars to Earth, according to a cost comparison put together by Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge. Click here to see the maths behind his ...
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Inside Outsourcing
Are banks wasting money on mobile and online innovation?
I recently wrote an article about some research looking into what banks were intending to spend money on. The research jointly done by Infosys and banking association Efma found that 70% of 330 banks questioned respondents are planning to increase their spending on innovation, with the mobile and online ch...
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Inspect-a-Gadget
On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me... an iFusion iPhone dock
As Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) takes off in the enterprise, companies are begin to test out whether becoming entirely mobile is plausible, and in doing so, some are deciding to scrap landline phones in favour of smartphones. While this this may be far off into the future for your company, it is slowly beg...
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CWDN
Indigo Studio: a free User eXperience GUI design tool
As the term User eXperience (or UX) now seems to be falling into the lexicon of de facto standard IT terminology, it is logically guaranteed that vendors focused on presentation layer and GUI technologies should use the UX term to colour and spin the worth of their latest products. What is User eXperience?...
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Computer Weekly Editor's Blog
The economics of the cloud in action
Compare and contrast the following excerpts from Computer Weekly news stories in the past few days:27 November: Google is expanding its infrastructure-as-a-service cloud computing platform into Europe and cutting the price of its cloud-based storage by 20%. From December 1 the price for up to 1TB of storag...
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Bloor Security
Advanced threats require advanced weapons
The threats we face today are no longer smash-and-grab raids, looking for instant gain. Rather, perpetrators are looking to get a deep foothold into the network. They use subterfuge to trick their way into the organisation that is being specifically targeted and, rather than exiting rapidly, they then move...
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Inspect-a-Gadget
Samsung Galaxy Note II - Is this love that I'm feeling?
Samsung Galaxy Note II Hits Korean Store Shelves (Photo credit: samsungtomorrow)Despite my four years as a tech journalist, and several more as a gadget geek before that, I have rarely fallen in love with a mobile phone. I once had a Motorola that lit up with disco lights when it rang - which I dubbed 'Dis...
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Inside Outsourcing
Has the touchpaper of offshoring confidential UK citizen data been ignited?
I wrote in October about Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) winning a contract with the Home Office to run the Criminal Records disclosure service for over 10 years. The contract is worth hundreds of millions. It had been shortlisted for a contract on the government's new Disclosure and Barring Service ...
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Downtime
Texting in your sleep
Young Couple Sleeping (Photo credit: epSos.de)A new study into sleep disorders has found technology is not just edging its way into the bedroom, but taking over our sleep patterns as well. Dr Kirstie Anderson, head of the Neurology Sleep Service for the Newcastle Upon Tyne NHS Foundation Trust, has told th...
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Inside Outsourcing
Cisco has 75% of European networking services sewn up. Survey part 6
I have been blogging about the findings of research from Computer weekly parent company TechTarget.Part one looked at how IT services budgets will change next year. See it here. Part two revealed what the drivers for the IT services budget increases and decreases are. See it here. Part three revealed...
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Inside Outsourcing
Don't forget you can outsource almost anything except for responsibility
When things go wrong in outsourcing contracts the service provider might pay a penalty but no matter how much that is it will not cover things like reputational damage. In this guest blog Hornbill's chief evangelist talks about how the cloud makes it more important than ever to take care with what you deci...
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The Full Spectrum
Maria Miller - the buck stops with you
EU symbol 1 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)There always seems to be a spat between Westminster and the European Union, especially in these current days of having a government looking to get out of it at the nearest opportunity. However, the latest row has seen the EU grow a pair and bite back at what I think w...
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Computer Weekly Data Bank
Track Wipro's share price
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CWDN
Develop now for the Dragon's Den SMB cloud
Logically we saw the initial birth of the cloud computing model of service-based IT delivery focus on the enterprise big business space. Big advances in operational flexibility with application and data storage changeability and agility, plus of course the cost savings represented by a pay-as-you-go model ...
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Inside Outsourcing
Inside outsourcing interview: Downturn gave tier two Hexaware access to skills to help it compete
Here is the latest Inside Outsourcing interview where I let suppliers tell me what they are doing. I have started of with a run of Indian suppliers. My first in the series was with Infosys, then came HCL (see links at bottom) and now Hexaware. Hexaware is an Indian IT services provider with about 9000 staf...
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Inside Outsourcing
Are IT contractors, known as Ringers, winning multiple contracts and sub-letting the work to low cost workers?
I was approached yesterday by BBC radio asking me whether I was aware of a trend that is seeing IT contractors win multiple jobs and then subletting them to low cost IT professionals from overseas. These contractors known as "Ringers" are taking a slice of the work done by others.I know there are a lot of ...
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Inside Outsourcing
There is much more IT outsourcing to come at UK banks
There may not be many greenfield sites for IT outsourcing at banks but there is plenty of space for more. Nationwide building society is an example of a bank that was late to the outsourcing table, coming to it in 2008, but now a major user of outsourcers including heavy use of Indian services. But t...
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Inside Outsourcing
Accenture and Capgemini latest corporations identified as tax avoiders
Accenture and Capgemini, which both have lucrative contracts with HMRC are the latest companies to be drawn to the UK corporate tax avoidance row.According to a report here on Contractor UK, which followed up a Sunday Times report, Accenture managed to reduce its tax bill to less than 3.5%, while Capgemini...
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CWDN
Modern apps will be differentiated through Agile programming
IBM loves Agile programming methodology, this we know to be true. Indeed, Big Blue's Scott W. Ambler is the chief methodologist for 'Agile and Lean' at IBM Rational and (as a company employee) his blogs (arguably) rank up there with many independent journalists when he's focused on methodology rather than ...
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Inside Outsourcing
Was data that might have stopped £1.4bn rogue trader losses at UBS deleted at Indian captive centre?
Reports suggesting that an offshore service in India being partly responsible for missing for missing the rogue trading that cost UBS £1.4bn seem to be accurate. I was talking to a contact of mine today and he told me that the problem occurred at a UBS captive centre in Hyderabad. He told me unlike s...
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Inspect-a-Gadget
On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me... a pair of touch screen gloves
Now these are not a new innovation - since the arrival of capacitive touchscreen devices, these handy gloves appear every winter. I've tried a couple of products so far which are a bit "stop-start" and not very effective. A good little stocking filler, these gloves work better than the others I've tried, a...
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Cliff Saran’s Enterprise blog
Home working alert
A couple of weeks ago I received a telephone call at home claiming to be from the Windows Support team. The lady on the phone asked me if my PC was running slow (which it was!) and put me through to a tech lead."How did you get my number," I asked.The tech support man said he worked for a company...
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Inside Outsourcing
Indian offshore IT service was part of the cause of £1.4bn loss at UBS
It seems, according to this report, that the £1.4bn loss at UBS caused by a rogue trader could have been avoided if a service managed offshore by an Indian IT services provider had not failed. The FSA reported that: "The computerised system operated by UBS to assist in risk management was not effective in ...
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Inspect-a-Gadget
On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me... a Filofax iPad case
I'm an iPad user who also likes to use a pen and paper to take notes and I love the comfort of writing appointments in a traditional diary, although it is something I tend to do less and less these days.My first impression of the Filofax Pennybridge case was: "I need this on my Christmas list - it weighs a...
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Inside Outsourcing
Is technology knowledge more important than price when choosing an IT service provider? Survey part 5.
I have been blogging about the findings of research from Computer weekly parent company Techtarget.Part one looked at how IT services budgets will change next year. See it here. Part two revealed what the drivers for I service budget increases and decreases are. See it here. Part three revealed...
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Inside Outsourcing
Can CIOs move completely off the Microsoft stack or will SI vested interests make it difficult?
I was having a conversation with an IT supplier last week about the cloud and how it was changing and it appears CIOs are asking: where does Microsoft play these days?It is being attacked from all angles from the industry. Exchange is being challenged by the likes of Google, SQL server has its niche but is...
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Open Source Insider
Santa Claus, Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy go open source
DreamWorks has released its OpenVDB open source C++ library for general community consumption and adaption. The animation studio has used the technology itself on its "Rise of the Guardians" fantasy film that features a whole group of childhood legends including Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth ...
