Asset-intensive organisations deploy APM solutions to improve asset maintenance decisions, and reduce the risk of failure for critical assets & equipment.

Although asset management strategies are advancing across industries, selecting the right solution is critical to success as it directly impacts the bottom line.

Download this guide for insights on APM offerings, so that your CIO can make an informed technology decision.

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Japanese giant Toshiba has outlined plans to break up its business into three independent companies in a bid to add more value for its shareholders.

The company will spin-off its energy and infrastructure units under the new brand Infrastructure Co, while hardware and storage services will fall under Device Co.

All remaining units, and its 40.6% stake in memory chipmaker Kioxia, will be handled under the original Toshiba brand, with the spin-offs set to be completed by the second half of 2023. The firm is also said to be interested in "monetising" its shares in Kioxia, so that it can return the net proceeds in full to shareholders as soon as possible.

The spin-off plans are the result of a strategic, investor-commissioned review into the management of the Japanese conglomerate, following a number of scandals. In June, an independent investigation found that Toshiba's management "colluded" with Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, to put pressure on activist shareholders at the company's AGM meeting in 2020.

Toshiba was once a global giant for electronics, but the last decade has proven turbulent for the company.

In 2015 it was revealed that the firm had been over valuating its profits by $1.3 billion for almost seven years, resulting in a $60 million penalty from Japan's Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission for accounting fraud.

Most recently, the 140-year-old firm sold off its laptop business to Sharp, which consisted of a 19.9% stake in Dynabook. Sharp had also already bought an 80.1% stake in Toshiba's PC business just two years earlier.

According to Toshiba's president and CEO, Satoshi Tsunakawa, the company has "constantly evolved to stay ahead of the times" and this current spin-off is "no different".

"In order to enhance our competitive positioning, each business now needs greater flexibility to address its own market opportunities and challenges," Tsunakawa said in a statement. "We are convinced that the business separation is attractive and compelling: it will unlock immense value by removing complexity, it enables the businesses to have much more focused management, facilitating agile decision making, and the separation naturally enhances choices for shareholders.

"Our Board and management team firmly believe that this strategic reorganisation is the right step for sustainable profitable growth of each business and the best path to create additional value for our stakeholders. We are grateful for the Strategic Review Committee's thorough evaluation and recommendation on our best path forward."

Each new company will be listed publicly and will have their own separate board of directors and management.

Myriota has struck a new deal with Spire Global to enhance its global satellite network.

Myriota’s low-cost yet robust internet of things (IoT) connectivity helps customers track, locate, and monitor a wide range of assets, including vehicles, wind turbines, shipping containers, and more.

In addition to providing affordable IoT connectivity, Myriota also eliminates the need for ground-based satellite infrastructure. As part of the new deal, Myriota will employ Spire’s space services and low-earth orbit nanosatellites to develop a global, low-latency constellation.

Spire’s constellation of low-earth orbit nanosatellites features software-defined radio (SDR) technology, enabling partners to test, deploy, operate, and scale custom applications. Over 110 satellites measure temperature, pressure, and humidity at over 10,000 intervals per day, allowing for a holistic 3D weather profile.

Leveraging the firm’s 300 years of space flight heritage, Spire’s in-orbit-reprogrammable platform ensures flexible operations in space. Building on Spire’s space-as-a-service capabilities, Myriota plans to scale its IoT services swiftly and efficiently to meet global demand.

The Myriota-Spire Global partnership is also geared toward growing Myriota's customer base beyond North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

“We’re proud our satellites and technology are ready to seamlessly help Myriota make smart devices more accessible to everyone,” said Theresa Condor, executive vice president and general manager of space services and earth intelligence at Spire.

“Australia is a hotbed of innovative companies, and it’s gratifying to help a leading satellite connectivity provider go to market quickly and scale up efficiently.”

Myriota is Spire's first large-scale, commercial IoT customer.

“With high demand for the Myriota Network from our partners, who are rolling out products at an ever-accelerating rate, this agreement is a game-changer for our business,” said Dr. David Haley, CTO and co-founder of Myriota.

“By leveraging Spire’s constellation, Myriota will rapidly improve its services, and enter new markets such as Europe. Spire is a perfect partner for extending our global reach.”

Tektronix has announced several updates to its cloud-based asset management software CalWeb.

Calibrating large fleets of test and measurement instruments can prove arduous, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. CalWeb by Tektronix offers a fix by enabling customers to keep track of calibration and repair histories with supporting documentation on a centralized web-based application.

"Customers manage complicated fleets of test and measurement equipment, often with multiple brands that require calibrations or other services at different times,” explained Corey Christmann, vice president of service and support at Tektronix.

Christmann added, “With CalWeb, we simplify all of that for customers, so they can track all their services on all equipment from the palm of their hand. With service teams in more than 100 locations worldwide, Tektronix is a leading accredited calibration services provider with more than 75 years of experience serving the world's largest mission-critical manufacturers in aerospace and defense, semiconductor, automotive, medical, and wired and wireless communications.”

Commenting on CalWeb’s latest enhancements, Tektronix said the software’s new features will ensure instant access to critical information. The firm also outlined four key capabilities.

CalWeb can now generate barcodes to tag equipment and correlate them to select database fields. Customers can use a smartphone or barcode scanner to readily access an equipment’s calibration, repair history, and certificates, among other useful information.

Programming language agnostic, REST API ensures CalWeb can easily integrate with customers' in-house IT systems. Businesses can also create, run, and download customized reports on CalWeb-managed assets. Lastly, CalWeb users will receive automated alerts when a test or measurement equipment’s calibration is due.

Tektronix further stated CalWeb can be used to manage varied equipment, irrespective of manufacturer.

"These powerful CalWeb features answer our customers' needs for streamlined fleet management and improved communications around the calibration of all their products, regardless of the brand. The ability to scan and access documentation, run reports and integrate swiftly with existing systems advances our service software beyond expectations," added Tektronix.

Oracle Utilities is teaming up with Veracity and Triniti Consulting to deploy integrated utility solutions across North America.

Oracle Utilities offers an array of horizontal business solutions, including metering, asset management, grid and network management, customer care, and data analytics.

Oracle Utilities will combine its managed services and offshore support with Triniti's custom implementation services and Veracity's extensive project management, testing, and organizational-change management expertise as part of the new partnership.

Oracle Utilities client partner TC O'Hara said, "We've worked with both Veracity and Triniti Consulting for nearly 10 years as they've helped some of the top utilities in North America modernize their legacy systems and migrate to the cloud using Oracle Utilities software and cloud solutions. This formal collaboration helps position our clients for business success by better serving their customers while creating operational efficiencies."

The Oracle-Trinity-Veracity consortium is also geared toward transforming utilities' infrastructure and processes across critical functional areas, including digital transformation, grid and outage modernization, enterprise asset management, and more. The result is enhanced self-service capabilities for customers and streamlined operations for utilities.

Both Veracity and Triniti Consulting are woman owned and led, continuing Oracle Utilities' commitment to diversity.

"Our effort will help utility organizations not only meet diversity sourcing requirements but will also help these clients go well beyond the industry standard when it comes to working with organizations that truly value and emphasize inclusivity, community and transparency," stated Angela Hurt, founder and CEO of Veracity.

Earlier this year, Oracle announced several enhancements to its Procurement platform to help customers reduce costs while increasing operational efficiency. DataFox Supplier Intelligence, integrated into Procurement, gives customers real-time insight into supplier health through alerts and risk indicators.

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Modernising the warehouse with mobile technology and apps can increase operational efficiencies and improve your bottom line.

The warehouse is a crucial link in the supply chain, but relying on manual processes for core functions like order picking, inventory management and asset tracking can lead to lost productivity. With the market for warehouse management systems set to reach $4.8 billion by 2024, it’s clear that many businesses are realising the high stakes of increasing warehouse efficiency.

Download this whitepaper to learn:

• The costs of sticking to manual processes
• How to implement digitised mobile processes
• The capabilities of Samsung’s field-ready mobile portfolio

Atera, remote monitoring and management (RMM) solutions provider, has raised $77 million in a funding round led by General Atlantic, bringing its valuation to $500 million.

Earlier this year, Atera secured $25 million from private equity firm K1 Investment Management.

Atera said it’ll use the funds to grow its business and develop new customer solutions. The Israeli startup also aims to strengthen its research and development department.

Atera’s cloud-based RMM platform helps businesses monitor, manage, and automate multiple networks from a single console. The platform also includes a comprehensive suite of features for MSPs and IT teams, including remote access, patch management, custom scripting, inventory tracking, and more.

Real-time alerts on RAM usage, CPU load, and system resources ensure security teams can proactively handle issues before they arise. Additionally, organizations can configure recovery scripts to run automatically in response to alerts. As for device security, all remote sessions are protected by TLS and 256-bit AES encryption.

"The global ecosystem has changed, and the need for the fast and easy deployment of IT services is more critical than ever to keep businesses running smoothly,” said Gil Pekelman, Atera CEO.

Pekelman continued, “To meet this new reality, we are investing even more into our research, development, and innovation efforts to enhance and accelerate the product offerings and features our customers need most. We are dedicated to upgrading our platform both to better serve our customers but to likewise provide them with the ability to seamlessly scale their business and IT management offerings, friction-free."

“Atera has developed a compelling all-in-one platform that provides immense value for its customer base, and we are thrilled to be supporting the company in this important moment of its growth trajectory. We are excited to work with a category-defining Israeli company, extending General Atlantic’s presence in the country’s cutting-edge technology sector and marking our fifth investment in the region. We look forward to partnering with Gil, Oshri (CTO and Co-Founder), and the Atera team to help the company realize its vision,” added Alex Crisses, managing director and global head of new investment sourcing and co-head of emerging growth at General Atlantic.

Rockwell Automation and Kezzler AS are teaming up to develop an advanced asset-monitoring platform to help manufacturers track the course of their products from conception to sale and beyond.

Per the agreement, Rockwell will link its supply chain infrastructure with Kezzler's tracking technology. Additionally, Kezzler’s cloud-based solutions will offer seamless integration and access to legacy record-keeping systems, including immutable ledgers and traditional databases.

The arrangement is aimed at providing customers with a unified tracking platform that connects suppliers, manufacturing, logistics, and consumers. What’s more, unique identifiers can be used to digitally identify and track products at every stage of production.

“Our partnership with Kezzler will provide greater supply chain transparency to enhance safety and quality control measures, ensure regulatory compliance, and meet ESG goals with cloud-based technologies that are easy to implement and easy to use,” said Matt Fordenwalt, VP and general manager of systems and solutions business at Rockwell Automation.

Fordenwalt continued, “By combining our technology and expertise with Kezzler’s, we can quickly design and deliver a serialization solution customized to meet specific business requirements with advanced cloud-native software.”

But that’s not all. Following the recently announced Plex Systems acquisition, Rockwell will incorporate Plex's cloud-native factory floor track-and-trace capabilities into Kezzler's product digitization system. The combined solution will offer a comprehensive supply chain management system that is deep in functionality and vast in scope.

“Together, we can help manufacturers connect all points of a product’s journey, beginning with its inception and ending with its point of sale, consumption, or even where it’s recycled. Tying upstream and downstream data together creates true end-to-end traceability, with a single data repository for each product,” said Christine Akselsen, Kezzler CEO.

HSBC will not be offering Bitcoin as an asset class anytime soon, according to comments made by the bank’s chief executive Noel Quinn.

The British banking businessman, who was appointed CEO of the HSBC Group in March 2020, told Reuters that the bank is “not into Bitcoin as an asset class” due to the cryptocurrency’s “volatility”.

“We are not promoting it as an asset class within our wealth management business," he said, adding that, “for similar reasons”, the bank is “not rushing into stablecoins”.

Quinn’s comments come as Bitcoin fell from this year's record high of over £45,000 to just over £26,000, tumbling almost 50%.

Meanwhile, China, where roughly 65% of all mining globally is based, announced a crackdown on mining and trading behaviour, forcing cryptocurrency exchange platforms to suspend operations. Although Quinn made no mention of China in his comments, recent events might have influenced HSBC’s decision due to the country being inherent to the bank’s growth strategy, according to Reuters.

“I view Bitcoin as more of an asset class than a payments vehicle, with very difficult questions about how to value it on the balance sheet of clients because it is so volatile. Then you get to stablecoins which do have some reserve backing behind them to address the stored value concerns, but it depends on who the sponsoring organisation is plus the structure and accessibility of the reserve,” he told the publication, adding that his sceptical approach to Bitcoin stems from the difficulty of assessing the transparency of cryptocurrency ownership and issues with their ready convertibility into fiat money.

Quinn’s statement comes weeks after NatWest non-executive director, board member, and chair of the bank’s risk committee, Morten Friis, suggested that the bank would refuse business customers who accept virtual currencies as payment.

“We have no appetite for dealing with customers, whether taking them on as new clients or having an ongoing relationship with people, whose main business is backed by an exchange for cryptocurrencies, or otherwise transacting in cryptocurrencies as their main activity,” Friis said during an online shareholder event last month.

His comments contrast Mastercard’s decision to support specific cryptocurrencies if they prove to be stable, secure, and compliant with industry standards and regulations.

Antarctica might not seem like the most obvious setting for IBM's enterprise asset management platform Maximo. However, once you consider the very unique needs of conducting research missions in the South or North Pole alike, it really does seem like the kind of place that would require specific management solutions.

“The next step from working in Antarctica is working in space really,” says Steven Marshall, head of Governance, Risk and Assurance at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Marshall has two decades of experience working for BAS, having been a base commander in the Antarctic station for six years before becoming a health and safety adviser. In 2005, he was awarded the prestigious Polar Medal.

Marshall is right in his comparison. In a way, Antarctica really isn’t far off the conditions of space: Freezing temperatures, vast emptiness, and few living organisms, if you don’t count the 18 species of penguins, majority of which live on the outer points of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Despite its desolate landscapes, Antarctica contains an abundance of interesting data, which is collected by researchers, compiled, and sent to the BAS headquarters in Cambridge. A lot of data within Antarctic missions isn’t just research: It’s also the massive amounts of planning which goes into ensuring the safety and smooth operation of the research bases.

However, any lack of connectivity can cause serious errors in the bases’ operations and communications with HQ.

“It’s a very small bandwidth of data between our stations in Antarctica and that causes a real headache of knowing what’s the procedure, who's working from what spreadsheet,” says Marshall.

This is where IBM Maximo steps in, in order to “try and remove the errors from that point”. As BAS’ main asset management system and combined with technology from Manchester-based firm SRO Solutions, Maximo allows data to be successfully shared between the Cambridge HQ and the remote stations in Antarctica.

“We're using Maximo to deliver our main maintenance, asset management across our whole infrastructure in our polar regions and our vessels. So not just stations, but our ships as well,” Marshall tells IT Pro.

“But equally, we utilise that to add elements of function, which are key processes like cargo management, training, management, and some of the safety information like incident reporting, risk assessment, and all that,” he adds.

Prior to Maximo, BAS relied on the AMOS management system.

“We still do, in some cases,” says Marshall. However, the organisation was in need of something “big enough to grow into” as well as provide an opportunity for reconfiguration and replication.

The latter is especially important, because SRO's data replication engine can work with Maximo to allow every BAS base station to have access to a local version of the latest available data, ensuring that they aren’t dependent on sourcing it from Cambridge HQ. The replication engine, called SDR, replicates the data as soon as there is some network available – which, due to the difficult conditions, can be very intermittent.

Another, simpler reason as to why Maximo was chosen was its accessibility and that it didn’t require “special software on every PC to operate it”.

“A lot of systems still do that,” says Marshall. “You have to then download it onto your computer, whereas [Maximo] is a web browser system. So it makes it easy to access and it's one of the best in class, so it’s also got its credentials.”

Polar research missions usually face very unique sets of challenges. From generator failures and connectivity issues, every obstacle can have grave consequences if not handled properly. This means that expeditions have to plan the smallest logistical details.

“I call them critical processes we have to deliver in order to maintain the resilience of running an operation in such a remote part of the world,” says Marshall. “If we don't get the right quantity of toilet paper delivered to the Antarctic, things could be quite difficult for the guys if it's during the winter.”

In fact, due to its remote location and lack of regular travel connections, the supply chain for delivering products required in the Antarctic bases takes around a year, as they are planned for the following expedition.

“That person who wanted the toilet roll might not get it for more than a year,” explains Marshall. “So that’s part of our thinking all the time, and that's why we have plenty of toilet paper. (...) It's having that intelligence through the data.”

This is why BAS required a system capable of simplifying the ordering process, having the exact type and cost of the toilet paper already in the system. In that way, someone in Antarctica would be able to scan one barcode and the BAS HQ would know exactly what to reorder and in what quantities – next year.

“As we say, things can go wrong quite quickly, and the consequences in Antarctica can be very severe. So we've had episodes in the past where maybe a generator fails, and we don't have spares for it on the ground, or if we haven't done the right maintenance, so it’s having a better, stronger system to make sure some of those quality, critical things take place,” says Marshall.

However, the stressful situations are no longer a regular occurrence, thanks to BAS’ detailed planning policies and, with IBM Maximo, Marshall says that the main benefit is being “more intelligent in our ways of remote management”.

In fact, if not for the remote management, the procedures would be extremely difficult due to the high turnover of polar researchers, who usually operate on 18-month contracts. Thanks to the system, however, the new incoming batch of personnel can arrive in the Antarctic and already know where to find all the work plans and risk assessments, how to report potential injuries, as well as find out how previous teams handled issues such as generator failures.

“We do the extreme in mapping remote management,” Marshall explains – and even that can be treated as an understatement.

Combining artificial intelligence (AI) with remote asset monitoring helps organisations identify the right alerts among the hundreds generated daily from critical assets. This allows you to optimise your processes and minimise condition-based inspections by your staff, allowing you to deploy maintenance only when necessary.

Here are six reasons why you should consider remote asset monitoring with AI.

According to a new report, most organizations aren’t tracking their IoT assets, and cost was a key reason.

According to the 2020 State of IoT Asset Tracking Report from Helium, Digital Matter and Semtech, over half of respondents (52 %) reported having no tech-based asset tracking, despite the urgency and high demand to do so.

Of those not using or searching for tracking solutions, a quarter of them said they’re not seeking one because of cost.

The report compiled findings from a global survey of IoT decision-makers and analyzed asset-tracking demands, adoption rates, connectivity and hardware choices, deployment challenges, and more.

It found that nearly two-thirds (63%) of respondents are actively researching asset tracking solutions - a promising 14% increase compared to 2020. Of those without tracking solutions, 46% said they planned to address their asset-tracking use cases within the next three months and 91% planned to within a year.

Most of the organizations surveyed that employed IoT tracking solutions, did so for two reasons: preventing asset loss and theft (38%) and enhancing operational efficiency (37%). Of the respondents already implementing asset tracking solutions, most used cellular connectivity (40%) or low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) tech, such as LoRaWAN (29%).

Almost half (47%) of organizations reported wanting asset tracking solutions to address internal use, while 31% reported commercial customers as their primary targets.

Compared with 2019, LPWAN technology use more than doubled in 2020, jumping from 12% to 29 %. On the other hand, RFID use decreased from 28% in 2019 to 11% in 2020.

"Asset tracking is a very important vertical in the IoT market and Semtech continues to develop solutions that specifically addresses this industry. Semtech's LoRa devices key capabilities – flexible, easy-to-deploy – make it the ideal solutions for asset tracking," said Marc Pegulu, vice president of IoT product marketing in the Wireless Sensing Products Group.

Dal Gemmell, head of IoT product at Helium, said that based on inbound demand and outbound efforts, “asset tracking demand remains high, and yet legacy connectivity technologies continue to be costly and complex.”

IT asset management (ITAM) and software asset management (SAM) are vital roles to the rapid digital transformation of many businesses. As cloud and SaaS become more prevalent, however, ITAM teams will need to reimagine their roles so that they are not just focused on compliance, but on alignment with strategic IT initiatives across complex hybrid IT environments.

This whitepaper looks at the value ITAM teams deliver and the future of ITAM as organisations evolve to serve the needs of the digital enterprise. Download the report now for insight from 461 global IT professionals and start improving your own ITAM practices today.

Leanpath, a tech company focused on reducing food waste, has launched Impact Suite, a set of tools that gives food service kitchens actionable suggestions to help track and reduce food waste.

Impact Suite’s Goals feature scans food waste data to determine where a kitchen can reduce its food waste based on cost, frequency and other factors. It then creates action plans to help the kitchen deal with the waste and provides chefs with daily and weekly reports on progress. Beta testing data indicates these reports helped to increase savings by 3% of cost of goods sold as a percent of revenue.

The Shared Goals feature is similar to Goals, but is designed for multi-site managers. It enables them to assign action plans to groups of kitchens and provide common objectives for large teams. For example, if the cost of chicken will increase, the corporate food buyer can create a shared goal of reducing chicken waste for all the kitchens.

The Alerts feature provides chefs and managers real-time notifications when Goal items are wasted or other key waste items are recorded with Leanpath Trackers. This feature can work on its own or as part of the Goals process.

"Leanpath pioneered automated food waste tracking and analytics, allowing kitchens to quickly 'see' what they are wasting and why," said Leanpath CEO Andrew Shakman. "Now our Impact Suite automates the next step in preventing food waste: turning that data into action."

COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the food service industry. With kitchens reopening, it’s important to improve their efficiency by integrating food waste tracking and prevention. Impact Suite enables kitchens to quickly and effectively manage food waste problems. Since 2014, Leanpath has prevented more than 55 million pounds of food waste.

IT leaders are facing a crisis of influence, with decision-making powers being handed to other business units and a 13% drop in the number of CIOs sitting on boards.

These are the findings of the 2019 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey, which interviewed over 3,600 CIOs in 108 countries about trends in their business.

The investigation found that while 66% of those surveyed believed the role of the CIO was gaining in influence, only 58% now sit on the board compared to 71% in 2017.

Additionally, 63% of organisations now allow at least some level of technology management to take place outside the IT department and 43% don't formally involve the IT department in business-led IT decisions.

This practice leads to conflicting outcomes. On the one hand, the survey found that it leads to improved time to market with 52% of respondents saying new products are likely to be "significantly better than their competitors" as a result. A further 38% said it improves employee experience. However, these businesses are twice as likely to have multiple areas of security exposed compared to those that do involve IT in the decision making process (16% vs 7%). They are also 9% more likely to have been the target of a serious cyber attack in the past two years.

It also has a knock-on effect on customer confidence, with the results finding these companies are 23% less likely to be "very or extremely effective" in this area.

As virtually every other trend report has shown, AI is a major focus for adoption and investment. 52% of those interviewed reported that improving efficiencies through automation is a priority for the board, compared to 45% in 2018. In terms of impact on personnel in particular, on average respondents believed 10% of their workforce will be replaced by AI within the next five years, although one third believed this figure would be more in the region of 20%.

It's not all doom and gloom, though. There has been a significant uptick in IT budgets, with an average of 52% of respondents expecting an increase in budget in the next year (50% in Europe) and 51% expecting an increase in headcount over the same period (52% in Europe).

"The fact that the report shows a 15 year high in those projecting increased investment levels suggests that many of us are making new bets with the conviction that there is new business value to be delivered," said Bob Hennessy, group CIO at construction, property and infrastructure company Lendlease. "Cloud, security and privacy are givens now but the power of AI to unlock fundamental value shifts as opportunity (or threat!) to our businesses is clearly being contemplated by many of us."

The global cloud-based digital asset management (DAM) market is expected to grow by 20% between now and 2021, according to a new study by Research n Reports. A key factor for this growth is the recent shift from on-premise to SaaS, as many cloud-based solutions offer low-cost options and rapid deployment of services.

Research and Markets expects the global DAM market to be worth as much as $5.21 billion by 2020. So what is it and how can it help businesses in their digital transformation efforts?

What is digital asset management?

Digital asset management is a process for storing and organising digital assets like videos, photos, music and other multimedia. DAM software will include "capabilities for ingestion, storage, retrieval, collaboration and life cycle management of rich media assets," according to Gartner.

Some of the common uses for DAM systems include a library for video and photo assets, production management for handling fast-moving assets such as those in live media production, and brand management where organisations can make approved logos and fonts easily available. Systems for these uses will often include workflow management, project management and other collaboration tools.

Modern DAM technologies support the need for volume and flexibility through four different modalities:

Stand-alone: A broad range of general-purpose DAM capabilities designed for flexible integration and multichannel output to power websites, brand portals, and multichannel marketing operations.

Modular: DAM capabilities that are acquired on their own or as part of a broader suite of tools that include elements such as web content management, app development, forms and records management, enterprise collaboration and workflow.

Integrated: DAM capabilities offered exclusively as part of a broader suite of tools with which they are tightly integrated.

Distributed: DAM capabilities that are purpose-built for managing distributed marketing assets across channel partners, business units and geographies.

Digital asset management and business transformation

Although DAM systems are primarily used by enterprise creative and marketing teams, businesses of all sizes who are looking to optimise their digital asset workflows will find such a system beneficial.

Cloud-based DAM can be a useful tool to easily manage, share and access all your company's digital assets, as well as preserving important company information and data. Such systems are useful for companies who are looking to increase support for remote and flexible working, as it makes file sharing and accessibility straightforward, with the right people able to access the right files without the need for emails or server transfers.

But DAM systems on their own are just one small part of the picture. When aligned with other elements of software infrastructure such as web content solutions, digital marketing clouds, e-commerce platforms and MRM suites, DAM really comes together. By taking an integrated approach, companies can be more flexible in the way they incorporate digital assets into their overall strategy.

It's this flexibility and ability to integrate easily that makes such systems attractive to C-level executives as part of a digital transformation strategy, as a way of making incremental steps rather than committing to a massive change. It allows everyone in your business to easily access company assets, enforcing brand compliance and consistency.

DAM systems are particularly beneficial for marketing teams undergoing digital transformation as a way of putting the customer experience first in the business. Teams are able to push out messages in a timely manner, and disseminate the data in the best way possible. They can also benefit from detailed insight about response rates.

For channel partners, the advantages are even clearer as DAM offers a centralised system that can deliver marketing assets as and when they're needed. DAM systems are all about maximising a company's assets and publishing them in the most appropriate way, which could be your website, or that of a channel partner, distributed by email or text.

For companies of any size, having a central hub which has all the creative assets needed is a key way of simplifying the process of delivering the right content to the right place. It's a small but important contributor to digital transformation efforts, streamlining the content creation and discovery process, and providing a quick way to prove the value of digital systems to the business.

Google has introduced a number of security and feature enhancements to Google Chrome Enterprise, as well as announcing several partnerships, to help businesses bolster their defences and manage their IT estate.

The company has added four new management controls to its enterprise version of Chrome OS: per-permission extension blacklisting, the ability to disable sign-ins from outdated versions of the OS, preventing non-managed devices from accessing single sign-on, and automatic forced re-enrollment.

The first of these means admins can restrict access to extensions based on the permissions required, such as webcam access, for example. This allows administrators to give users access to the Google Chrome Web Store, while still maintaining granular control over permissions.

Automatic forced re-enrollment, meanwhile, means Chrome devices that have previously been enrolled on the corporate network but subsequently wiped or recovered can connect once again without admin intervention.

In addition to these enhancements, Google also announced enterprise mobility management (EMM) partnerships with Cisco, Citrix, IBM and ManageEngine (part of Zoho) that it claimed will allow admins to manage their IT estate more effectively.

Cisco Meraki provides various management capabilities, such as the ability to lock, disable and control devices, enable auto-updates, set idle settings, and push custom, Chrome and Android apps. This is all controlled through the Meraki web-based dashboard.

Citrix XenMobile, meanwhile, offers device and application management and is supplemental to integrations with various other Citrix products, such as XenApp, XenDesktop and Receiver, that were announced in November.

Finally, IBM MaaS260 with Watson brings IBM's AI and cognitive computing to endpoint management, while ManageEngine Mobile Device Manager Plus is a console that allows admins to configure, manage and secure mobile devices, desktops and apps.

In a blog post, David Karam, product manager of Chrome, said: "All of today's announcements help admins stay on top of their organization's security, and these features are in addition to the benefits admins already get with Chrome Enterprise."

He added that more information about what these enhancements can mean for business will be released in the coming weeks.

Customers of Aviva's online pensions platform found they could not withdraw their money after the platform crashed late last week following a recent migration.

When the insurer faced a deluge of support calls from concerned customers, it "took the phones off the hook" rather than answer the calls as it tried to clear its backlog of problems, according to a customer who first informed IT Pro of the issues.

Those issues included withdrawing money, payments to financial advisers, accessing valuations and more.

While an Aviva spokesperson has told IT Pro the platform was fixed on Monday morning, many of these issues remain unresolved, with payments only due to come out on 9 February now, according to Aviva's own reporting dashboard.

The same source who informed IT Pro about the issue said he was kept in the dark about the problems for more than two days after emailing the company in lieu of call centre support.

The issues began last week after Aviva migrated its Adviser Platform over to fintech services provider FNZ's infrastructure, which also underlies Aviva's Customer Platform.

"As part of this [migration] we invited our advised customers to use a new online service to complement their advisers' access," an Aviva spokesman said.

"There was a technical issue with this access for some customers which resulted in a backlog of customer requests. We took the decision to focus all of our available people, in one of our call centres, on processing the backlog to clear it as soon as possible. Customers could still contact us by email."

But this impacted small business owners like IT Pro's source, who said he needed to make a pensions withdrawal to pay for development work for his online design business.

While he has now been able to access his funds, Aviva's reporting dashboard shows that payments to its Advisers Platform users are still affected, flagging the issue as 'amber', which it defines as "not fully working as expected".

Many other issues were still listed as amber at the time of writing.

"I've resolved my immediate pension issue - but it doesn't resolve the underlying issues with Aviva and their online systems," the customer told IT Pro.

Aviva launched its FNZ-powered platform on 23 January, following five days of downtime as it migrated the system over from another vendor, Bravura, according to Money Marketing.

The launch was immediately impacted by issues including difficulties running quotations, accessing valuations and getting new applications accepted on the platform.

Speaking to the publication, Facts and Figures Financial Planners managing director Simon Webster said: "These problems have gone beyond the minor teething problems that are part and parcel of any big IT project. Large areas of the system are simply not functional."

IT Pro understands Aviva is being referred to the Pensions Ombudsman over the outage.

Toshiba has announced it has no plans to sell its PC business, despite multiple reports saying otherwise.

Media named Lenovo and Asus as interested parties, but Toshiba denied the division is for sale, despite the firm being under pressure to sell assets to avoid being de-listed from the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

"Reports that Toshiba has decided to sell off the business are not grounded in fact, nor is it in discussion with any individual company."" the company said in a statement sent to IT Pro.

Asus was named as one potential buyer by Kyodo News, and the Nikkei and the Tokyo Shimbun a day later.

Lenovo also expressed an interest in buying Toshiba's PC business, Nikkei reported, as the division struggles to generate revenues from sales of its computers. PC sales accounted for just 3.5% of Toshiba's revenues between April and September this year and the company is still being plagued by losses from its now defunct US nuclear unit.

In September, it sold its memory division to investors led by Bain Capital in an attempt to free up some capital. However, the deal is taking a substantial amount of time to go through and so it may mean Toshiba misses its antitrust clearance deadline, which falls at the end of March.

However, Toshiba is adamant the deal will go ahead on schedule. "Toshiba intends to close the sale of TMC to the Bain Capital consortium by the end of March 2018. In the interim, the company is not considering a capital reinforcement of TMC by consortium member," it said in a statement.

IT Pro

Apple is the latest company to be drawn into the fallout from the Paradise Papers. Leaked documents show that the company, in the wake of being asked to pay $14.5 billion in back taxes to the EU, looked to move $250 billion from its Irish subsidiaries to other offshore jurisdictions with more gentle taxation arrangements.

The documents show that Apple asked corporate services provider and law firm Appleby to investigate the pros and cons of the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Mauritius, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. The company ultimately moved its wealth to Jersey, which happened to (for the most part) end corporate taxation in 2008.

If this money were kept within the United States, where Apple is based, the company would be paying a rate of 35% tax on those profits, which would seriously help the country's finances.

Apple has issued a statement defending its tax arrangements, and these broadly come back to one accurate point: the company acted according to the letter of the law: "At Apple we follow the laws, and if the system changes we will comply," the company wrote in a statement.

"The debate over Apple's taxes is not about how much we owe but where we owe it," said a spokesperson for the company. "As the largest taxpayer in the world we've paid over $35 billion in corporate income taxes over the past three years, plus billions of dollars more in property tax, payroll tax, sales tax and VAT. We believe every company has a responsibility to pay the taxes they owe and we're proud of the economic contributions we make to the countries and communities where we do business.

"Under the current international tax system, profits are taxed based on where the value is created. The taxes Apple pays to countries around the world are based on that principle. The vast majority of the value in our products is indisputably created in the United States - where we do our design, development, engineering work and much more - so the majority of our taxes are owed to the US.

"When Ireland changed its tax laws in 2015, we complied by changing the residency of our Irish subsidiaries and we informed Ireland, the European Commission and the United States. The changes we made did not reduce our tax payments in any country. In fact, our payments to Ireland increased significantly and over the last three years we've paid $1.5 billion in tax there - 7% of all corporate income taxes paid in that country. Our changes also ensured that our tax obligation to the United States was not reduced."

The company spokesperson closed their statement by expressing that Apple would welcome global action to reform the way tax is collected. "We strongly support efforts from the global community toward comprehensive international tax reform and a far simpler system, and we will continue to advocate for that."

For a quick explainer on the Paradise Papers, keep reading.

The Paradise Papers: What are they?

The Paradise Papers contain a massive trove of documents, compiled of 13.4 million files showing offshore empires involving tech firms like Facebook, Twitter, Uber and Apple. Used by large organisations to use tax loopholes, the Paradise Papers expose the unscrupulous (although not illegal) dealings by multinational corporations. A total 6.8 million of these files relate to Appleby, a corporate services provider and law firm.

The Paradise Papers: What happened and what do they reveal?

On Sunday, files leaked to German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zeitung, were released. This was the same newspaper that revealed the Panama Papers back in April last year. After sharing the material with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the group was able to coordinate the investigation of the data.

The data in the papers cover the period from 1950 all the way to 2016. There are around 25,000 offshore companies and more than 120,000 names linked with Appleby, revealing the most popular tax havens as the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.

The files expose the ways in which giant companies use loopholes in structures in tax havens.

The most notable finding from the Paradise Papers is the discovery that Yuri Milner, a billionaire investor who owns more than 8% of Facebook and 5% of Twitter, has investments worth hundreds of millions of dollars with backing from the Kremlin. The papers also reveal that the money invested into Twitter has been backed by Russian state-controlled bank VTB, notorious for the making of political deals.

Last year, the Panama Papers exposed how a VTB-owned bank in Cyprus was the bank used to funnel hundreds of millions of pounds to Putin's associate, Sergei Roldugin. The papers showed how VTB has been a facilitator used in exchanges between Russia and huge multinational tech companies for many years.

Back in 2011, VTB made investments of $191 million in DST, a company in the Isle of Man. Half of DST Global's investments in Twitter that month were from VTB.

The Paradise Papers: Why should you care?

The Paradise Papers gives insight into the investigations behind the supposed interference by the Russian government during the 2016 US election. Analysts are suggesting that the papers could reveal how Milner's Kremlin-backed investments could have links to fake news stories, political adverts and pro-Trump rhetoric prominent on Facebook - although this is purely speculation at this time.

Picture: Bigstock

IT infrastructure comprises all the technology that underpins your company's software, processes and operations.

In short, it helps the organisation deliver IT services (and, increasingly, traditional processes like onboarding new staff) to employees.

As defined by ITIL v3, IT infrastructure is a combination of hardware, software, networks, facilities, and more. These are used to develop, test, deliver, monitor, control or support IT services.

Here is an explanation of the different components that will likely make up your IT infrastructure.

Servers

A server is a computer that has the hardware and software capabilities to enable multiple users to access and use its resources. The most common type is a file server that provides users with a central store of files. A directory server provides a central database of user accounts that are used to access server resources.

There are also web servers (using HyperText Transfer Protocol to deliver files to users via a web browser), database servers, application servers and print servers.

Even if you've moved a lot of your infrastructure to the cloud, you'll likely still have some servers lurking on-premise.

Data centres

The data centre is the central part of an organisation's network. It usually contains all your organisation's servers and contains most of its IT infrastructure. A data centre doesn't need to be owned by the organisation that uses it, or to be located on its premises. In fact, many businesses take advantage of colocation to reduce costs, or get rid of their data centres in favour of hosting their infrastructure in the cloud.

Networking equipment

Networking equipment is used to connect servers and user devices (such as computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones) to each other and the outside world via the internet.

A switch delivers connectivity between network devices on a Local Area Network (LAN). It has ports that physically connect to other devices. Routers are devices that route packets between networks. The default gateway configured for your IP address is the IP address of your router.

In addition to this is all the network cabling within an organisation's building and data centre. The main types of cabling are Ethernet twisted pair cabling or fibre optics.

Nowadays, most laptops, tablets and smartphones connect to a network wirelessly through an access point, which in turn is connected to a switch or router via a cabled connection.

Telecommunications equipment

This is the hardware used to transmit voice and data to and from an organisation. Expanding from plain old telephone systems, this equipment now covers PBX (private branch exchange) equipment for call centres, IP telephony, leased lines, as well as telephone lines, telephones and mobile phones.

Facilities and power

Facilities are used to house IT infrastructure, such as the building that contains an organisation's data centre equipment. In addition, data centres will also need electricity to power the servers, storage, and networking equipment, as well as cooling to ensure all this equipment doesn't overheat.

In addition to a mains supply, backup power is also required in case there's a power outage. These are usually diesel generators that can be started up quickly to ensure continuous running. There can also be uninterruptable power supplies, which are huge batteries that allow servers to continue running for a short time while other means of power are switched on.

A corrupt NHS IT director who accepted bribes in exchange for IT contracts has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

Sentenced on Friday, 6 January, Peter Lewis, 57, admitted to receiving 80,000 in corrupt payments in exchange for lucrative IT software contracts, valued at 950,000 in the first year.

Richard Moxon, the supplier of software that recorded accident and emergency data at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford, also admitted to bribing the NHS official and has been jailed for 14 months.

Moxon, 41, of Wybunbury in Cheshire, transferred nine payments totaling 73,770 to Lewis between January and December 2011, as well as a single payment of 7,200 to settle a debt Lewis had at a local stables.

Lewis, of Windlesham, Surrey, had been director of infomatics at the Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust since 2009, and was responsible for management of finances and the awarding of contracts.

Each month, Moxon would hide the bribes through multiple invoices from different companies under his control, all valued at 15,000 so they could be signed off without oversight.

The fraud came to light after the trust conducted a disciplinary investigation into his relationship with another supplier.

"Peter Lewis sought to greedily divert money from the NHS into his own pockets," said detective superintendent Karen Mizzi, head of Proactive Crime for Surrey Police. "While I am glad to see justice being served through his custodial sentence, my team is now focusing on recovering the money Lewis made from his crime, and returning it to the NHS."

An investigation by Surrey Police found that 40% of the ICT products supplied by Moxon did not fulfill the needs of the trust. As a result of the scam, the trust declared losses for the 2011-12 financial year of 433,000.

The hospital was able to recuperate some of the lost money by integrating software supplied by Moxon into a new system in August 2012, however direct fraud against the Royal Surrey hospital amounted to almost 81,000.

"Royal Surrey expects its staff to act with honesty and integrity at all times and will fully investigate any suspicions of wrong-doing," said Alf Turner, deputy chief executive of the Royal Surrey County Hospital Trust.

"Mr Lewis broke these fundamentals and we are pleased that, although it has taken a long time, justice will be served. We would like to thank the police for their ongoing support in pursuing this matter to its positive resolution," added Turner.

Picture: (l-r) Peter Lewis and Richard Moxon

Netflix, one of Amazon Web Services' (AWS) big success stories, has only just finished migrating to the cloud seven and a half years after starting the process back in 2008.

While this may seem somewhat slow for a so-called 'digital native', CIOs and IT directors will recognise why it has taken this long - moving to the cloud is a complicated procedure, even for an AWS poster child.

But while moving to the cloud isn't easy, it offers plenty of benefits, from waving goodbye to big licensing payments to freeing up IT so it can focus on new projects, rather than simply keep the lights on.

The difficult part remains how you migrate - what do you choose to move first? Which provider should you pick? How do you persuade the board to support your plan?

Here to talk you through the best ways to approach a cloud migration is the IT Pro Panel, with some tips and advice to help you get started.

Migrating to the cloud - where to start

Phil Pavitt, Specsavers' CIO overseeing the optician's own cloud journey, points out that IT leaders must have a robust plan of action before beginning a cloud migration project.

"This is tough and needs a proper plan, ownership and timetable," he says. "Do not underestimate the amount of effort required."

But such a blueprint can begin with a simple starting-off point that allows CIOs to test the water with a single project before jumping in.

The problem, as Clive Longbottom, founder of analyst house Quocirca, says, is that it is often not clear what this project should be.

"The decision as to what to move to such a platform is not one that is black and white," he explains. "[Some] will prefer to start with low-level workloads and wait until these are proven before they move anything business important or mission critical over.

"A few others will see cloud as the main means of supporting the dynamic needs of a modern company and will move as much as they can over at an early (ish) stage and keep their fingers crossed."

But IT should start with something that will both demonstrate the benefits of the cloud, and address a specific need of the business, says Alex Hilton, CEO of the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), an industry body that advises on cloud adoption.

"What we have found in our experience is clients will move to cloud-based solutions based on a specific need," he says. "There may be some legacy applications that frankly are maybe no longer supported. There's got to be some kind of driving business desire behind it."

"It's very much needs-based rather than being led by all the wonderful vendors out there saying it's time to move to cloud," he explains, adding that cloud should be "a fundamental part" of organisations' IT migration strategies.

This means that one organisation's first cloud project can differ wildly from another's depending on their respective aims and IT landscape.

For instance, some companies target systems that are old, expensive to maintain, and ancillary to their core commercial aims.

Putting these in the cloud means the vendor maintains this infrastructure on behalf of the organisation, supplying the necessary servers and other hardware, and taking the weight off the business.

In other cases, firms choose to start with a simple collaboration service, such as Microsoft Office 365, to work in a more agile manner and realise benefits more quickly.

Deciding what to move opens up new decisions to take - whether to go for a private cloud, public cloud, or stick with software-as-a-service, and what platform to consider running their cloud services on.

Specsavers' Pavitt believes that initially, a blend of both private and public is the best option, saying: "The answer is a hybrid, a mix, start private and move towards the public."

Julian David, CEO of industry trade body techUK, concludes: "The starting point for moving to the cloud is understanding where you are at the moment and then choosing what to move in a secure way.

"A move to the cloud should be based on business needs and requirements and finding the right cloud approach for your organisation."

Approaching the board

"This 'cloud thing' - the pressure on a CIO is enormous!" says Pavitt, explaining that every member of the board will have their own, often conflicting, views on cloud adoption that they want IT directors to take into account.

"The CEO and/or the board have read about it in an executive magazine and believe it solves all known technology ills, including price, the business has heard about it mainly from unscrupulous suppliers and now believe that unless we adopt it immediately we will be destroyed by the competition, the security officer has heard about it and it's as about as welcome as the norovirus on a cruise ship, the CTO has researched it and has devised the most complex migration and architecture diagram you have ever seen, and finally the commercial leader has seen it and we have to have it now as it costs 1 for 'all you can eat' processing power!" Pavitt says.

So, how does IT juggle all these views and still do what's best for the business?

Quocirca's Longbottom says it is not a case of necessarily recommending the cloud over on-premise alternatives. "Going to the board, IT should never enter into arguments about whether cloud or non-cloud is 'best'," he states.

"IT has to present to the business what options are available from a cost, risk and value viewpoint, and then help the business make the right decision based on the business's risk profile."

The driving force behind the move to cloud is generally the head of IT, according to a recent CIF study, which found that IT leaders were involved in the decision-making process to migrate in 94 per cent of cases and was the final decision-maker in over half of migrations.

But CIF's CEO, Hilton, makes the point that a cloud procurement project might not always be led by IT. Other departments, like marketing, are being granted more power to directly procure cloud services without IT's say-so.

Where that is the case, IT's role becomes one of ensuring the cloud project will integrate well with the company's IT strategy and existing technology landscape.

"What they may not appreciate is the full IT infrastructure environment, when it's usually talked about that migration still needs to go through consideration of old legacy integration and old applications - it's IT's job to guide them on that," Hilton says, calling IT's role "fundamental".

But when leading on cloud migrations, Pavitt stresses the importance of not being unduly influenced by anyone's opinion, whether they are members of the board or supposed experts.

"Cloud is both fashionable and a necessity but can I encourage not to adopt a blind 'follow me' type strategy when looking at the solution - [consider] what suits your business both now and in the future, do not be swayed by consultants and advisors," he says.

IT also plays a crucial role in analysing the security risks the cloud may present to its organisation, and must take responsibility for discussing the IT strategy with the business, adds Pavitt.

He recommends: "Determine what your organisation's risk profile would be, make sure both the business and the board fully understand the direction of travel and sign up to it."

Picking a supplier

Once you've picked a cloud service and worked with the board, the next step is to pick a provider to supply that service, a process that is not as simple as it sounds.

"If it's a bigger, more complex piece of work, the choice of supplier is absolutely imperative," says CIF's Hilton.

The onus is on the customer to do its due diligence in checking the provider will meet its requirements, and offers good SLAs, but there are organisations out there who can lend a guiding hand.

For instance, CIF has its own code of practice that certifies suppliers who go through a certification process. Customers can look on CIF's website to check if a potential vendor adheres to this code or not.

While it is imperative that the vendor can deliver on its promises, Pavitt recommends focusing on the people, rather than the technology, when choosing a supplier.

"Spend time not on the service - they are quite similar - but on the cultural fit, the team dynamics," he says. "Look them in the eye and imagine what it would be like working with them when a service crisis occurs and choose accordingly."

Expectations

Quocirca's Longbottom argued that once a supplier is on board, progress goals are not that important or helpful when measuring the success of cloud services or ensuring a supplier is delivering on its promises.

Instead, "key performance indicators should be based around the value, risk and cost areas", he contends.

He lists some examples as: "Did the business manage to sell more products or services at the same or greater margin? Did it lower the number of exceptions and errors happening in key business processes? Is the help desk getting fewer calls around poor performance and business constraints caused by the IT systems?"

While cost savings make the cloud attractive, Pavitt warns not to promise the board large savings for at least the first year.

"The suppliers will bend this topic to attract you, [but] the cost of migration can be substantial," he explains.

Nevertheless, TechUK's David says that monitoring the success of a cloud project is essential in deciding whether to virtualise more workloads, or even move some back on-premise.

"It's important to do a total cost analysis over time to understand the benefits," he says. "In most cases, companies will find that some things are much better in the cloud but others they might keep in-house. Established apps may be better where they are, while fast-moving new ideas or business areas probably work best in the cloud."

Conclusion

Cloud has real potential to help companies cut costs, free up resources and become more efficient. While IT may not always be the catalyst behind cloud adoption, its role in helping the business pick the right workloads to run in the cloud is essential.

IT can guide the business down the right migration path, helping it work out how the cloud fits into the wider technology strategy now and in the longer term.

The board can help by endorsing IT's decisions, and both must ensure they pick the best supplier not just based on technology, but also how good a cultural fit that vendor will prove to be.

Pavitt sums up by saying: "Above all remember cloud is the right way to go but at your pace, to your design. Go play!"

AGS Airports has outsourced IT support to allow its internal technology team to focus on streamlining the business, following its split from Heathrow Holdings last year.

AGS, which covers Aberdeen, Glasgow and Southampton airports, has struck a five-year deal with outsourcer Getronics to manage all its IT support now it is an independent company.

Its new owners, Ferrovial and Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets, decided to converge the three airports' IT systems into one central managed infrastructure, picking an outsourcer to lessen the burden on its IT team of just eight people across the three airports.

Around 13 million customers used the airports last year, and head of IT Chris Tames said it was crucial to find an outsource partner who could manage the transition quickly, without disrupting the airports' day-to-day activities.

After starting the tender early in 2015, AGS awarded the contract to Getronics over Heathrow incumbent Capgemini in August.

Tames told IT Pro that Getronics' ability to provide a local support base just three miles away from Glasgow Airport's runway was preferable to Capgemini's offshore support offering.

"We are a much smaller organisation than Heathrow, and Getronics is a similar company and is a better fit for us," he said. "We can get to know the people more, whereas with Capgemini it was an offshore service desk and offshore database support.

"We were keen as part of that service tender to bring the service desk on-shore and there's [support] at the other side of our runway three miles away."

Getronics brought an IT service desk online for all three airports on 17 December, and AGS said that end user satisfaction is improving as a result.

Tames added that the company has also proved easy to work with, saying: "No issue has been too much hassle and they bend over backwards."

The next stage will see AGS shift its networking systems to Getronics by the middle of February.

Tames said: "For us it's about making sure the business of keeping the lights on is taken care of so we can better provide service enhancements and look at projects for how IT can help streamline the business.

"I don't have to worry about the hardware infrastructure to take care of, which frees us up to focus on the operational side of it."

Innovation

Tames and his team are now turning their focus to innovative projects, looking at analytics and data integration to make the airports run more efficiently.

"There's a number of areas around the business we are looking at where we can help efficiency, from the check-in process to developing operations with better information provided to people at the right time," said Tames.

"We are trying to achieve overall efficiency through an innovative use of technology. It's about how to streamline things, how we can make better use of integrating the data from disparate systems from across the terminals and to help better manage operations."

Cloud will also play a role, with AGS Airports' ERP system already delivered as a virtualised service (which Getronics supports through a service desk function), and AGS using HP Enterprise's BladeSystem c7000 converged system to support cloud workloads.

Tames said: "It's becoming a much more virtual world. There's a lot more SaaS solutions than we have had previously and that takes away a burden from providing infrastructure to providing a service to the business."

Chief data officers (CDOs) will exist in 90 per cent of enterprises by the end of 2019, Gartner has predicted.

The research firm said the desire to use information in smarter ways will fuel this "sharp rise" in CDOs, who will supervise data use and inform business strategies based on it.

"Business leaders are starting to grasp the huge potential of digital business, and demanding a better return on their organisations' information assets and use of analytics," said Mario Faria, research vice president at Gartner.

"It's a logical step to create an executive position the CDO to handle the many opportunities and responsibilities that arise from industrial-scale collection and harnessing of data."

Yahoo, CitiGroup and Barclays all have CDOs now, said Gartner, while government departments have also been quick to capitalise on this new executive position, with the former chief of the Government Digital Service (GDS), Mike Bracken, adding the CDO role to his responsibilities last March before he left the organisaiton, and the NHS appointed Geraint Lewis as its CDO in 2014.

However, Gartner also predicted that only half of CDOs will be successful by the end of 2019, because of the structural challenges they will face, among other obstacles.

Most CDOs will learn on the job because of the new nature of the role, and will face the difficult task of creating an information strategy with relevant metrics that tie the activities of their team to measurable business outcomes.

Faria said: "With the explosion of datasets everywhere, an important task is determining which information can add business value, drive efficiency or improve risk management.

"The CDO's role will raise expectations of better results from an enterprise information management strategy, with stakeholders wanting a clear idea of the exact mechanics of making success a reality."

To make the role work, Gartner has outlined six recommendations for new CDOs, starting with forming an enterprise information management strategy, then building trust with the CIO, educating senior leaders about the importance of data, establishing key indicators to measure and tying these to business metrics, and lastly adopting formal information asset measures.

Gartner will run a more in-depth CDO programme at the Gartner Enterprise Information & Master Data Management Summit 2016, which takes place between 2-3 March in London.

Business leaders must put technology at the heart of their companies, or risk compromising their potential for success, according to technology consultancy Outbox.

Nicholas Mobbs, managing director of Outbox, a CRM implementaton firm now being acquired by PwC, tells IT Pro that modern thriving businesses are discerning adopters and users of technology.

"The technology market is incredibly challenging because it's changing every day," he says. "It's very difficult for any company to do anything successfully without adopting technology properly."

He adds: "A few years ago, companies could get away with doing stuff without having any technology in place, or having technology in place but not properly adapting it. Now I think that is not possible."

Mobbs names Uber and Airbnb as two success stories that few people had heard of five or six years ago, which both used technology to transform their industries.

The first step on that journey is getting tech workers involved in business strategy, says Bola Rotibi, research director at analyst house Creative Intellect Consulting.

"Bringing the technology people to the heart of business is fundamental. The problem has always been that people have been in their silos: You have the IT department, marketing, and so on," she says. "The challenge is getting people to collaborate that's much more of a business mentality, though.

"You don't want to overload people, but if you don't bring the tech guys in on the business, you're working blind everyone's working blind."

Rotibi explains that involving those with tech know-how with strategic decisions allows businesses to determine what risks they face, but also what the most apparent, and achievable, solutions may be.

Analyst and founder of Quocirca, Clive Longbottom, agrees with Rotibi, saying: "Tech people need to get embedded into the business thought process. They need to be able to listen to the business's needs and then go away and rapidly come back with a range of possibilities on how tech can enable the desired outcome.

"As long as the tech person can provide information on how the proposed systems impact the business's risk and cost, as well as how much it adds to the value of the business, the business can then make a decision based on its own corporate risk profile."

Technology can also break down gaps that exist between departments, like the sales division and the marketing division, according to Mobbs.

It is something that Outbox helps achieve by setting up CRM software, such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

Mobbs says: "Marketing and sales basically have to work as a single solution. Marketing can't any longer be fire-and-forget, it has to be a continual process. Sales have to response to what marketing does, and marketing has to respond to sales they can no longer be siloed."

However, even with technology in place and those that know how to use it involved in strategic decisions, Longbottom warns that such a thing does not guarantee a business will thrive.

"Tech is incredibly important, but good tech married to bad business processes will just help an organisation go out of business faster than it already was doing," he points out.

"Good business processes on top of pre- or proscriptive tech will also be bad news. As the markets change, the tech can't, and so becomes a constraint on the business."

The solution is for business and tech to work together.

"The platform has to be flexible, the software needs to be modular, and the techies themselves need to accept that the best solution may not be one they own' or build and manage themselves," Longbottom says.

But digital strategist Lisa Talia Moretti believes that to succeed, companies must focus on people, rather than tech.

"For a company to simply keep up with technology is a tremendous effort. To tackle the challenge requires very holistic thinking," she claims. "People should always be at the heart of a business, because ultimately, the end users of all products and services are people. And that will never change."

Trinity Mirror Group is using a performance management tool to improve the user experience of dozens of its websites, including regional and national publications like the Daily Mirror and the Liverpool Echo.

To ensure the UX is as good as possible across its 29 titles, the company has already overhauled its content management system (CMS) and, more recently, implemented performance analysis tool mPulse by SOASTA.

"[In] 2011 we selected our new web CMS to roll out across our group," Neil McIntyre, director of engineering for digital at Trinity Mirror Group, told IT Pro.

"We had previously had a bespoke, in-house built CMS that had many hundreds of thousands of lines of legacy code, many of which were no longer relevant but still caused us performance issues. The whole thing needed investment and the choice was either we invest further in that product or we go with something off-the-shelf."

Trinity decided to select an off-the-shelf CMS, starting to roll it out in 2012-13.

The implementation of the new CMS coincided with a redesign of the company's mobile and desktop sites. But, as the project progressed, McIntyre started getting anecdotal evidence that there were loading problems being experienced across certain operating systems, devices and connection types.

"We did and still do have specific performance tools to monitor the performance of our sites, but they are more like an emulation of performance rather than real user performance," McIntyre admitted. "It gives us an idea how our pages are loading, but it doesn't tell us what our users are actually experiencing."

To address this gap, the company decided to implement a front-end, real time analytics platform that could deliver accurate insight into the actual user experience on its digital platforms, known as real user monitoring.

"We looked at a few of the products that are on the market and some of them were very strong on the back-end side - the server side and database side - but we really wanted to understand the performance at the front-end - what the user sees within their browser and how the page loads," explained McIntyre.

"That's why we ended up selecting mPulse, because it was much stronger on that side of things. We also wanted to get a nice dashboard across all the devices and browsers and have a look at what we could actually monitor, what we could actually improve upon," he said.

"Key to this, as well, is that while we've rolled out the new web CMS and done the redesign, nothing stands still. The market changes as well and we have to address that and make sure we are, as much as possible, responsive across all devices," he added.

"So we've engaged that and our project now is to further develop the site, further develop the architecture, and develop processes around that which enable us to deploy code as quickly as we can."

The mPulse platform also gives the company a greater depth of information through a customisable dashboard that can be tailored to the needs of business users and IT.

For the time being, the company is using the product purely for real-time monitoring and before-and-after scenarios when new code is rolled out to see if there is and performance degradation.

"We have set ourselves a goal of page load speed and a reduction in page load time of 'x' amount and we want to be able to be sure we can achieve that. Without having the granularity of this product, we wouldn't be able to measure all of our this, plus third parties', as we move forward," McIntyre concluded.

11/01/2016: Apple Music has gained 10 million subscribers in the six months since its July 2015 release.

Sources close to Apple confirmed to the Financial Times that the company's music streaming service had achieved this figure, which is a significant one.

Apple's closest rival in the music streaming market, Spotify, took six years to achieve the same number of users.Spotify and Apple continue to be the major leaders in music streaming.

Meanwhile, the France-based streaming service, Deezer, had more than 6.3 million users as of last October, and Tidal, the artist-owned venture, led by hip hop musician Jay Z, reportedly hit one million subscribers that same month.

26/10/2015: With Apple Music doing well on iOS, thoughts have turned to the Android version that's expected to land on the rival operating system next month.

New images, allegedly depicting Apple Music for Android, have emerged via German site MobileGeeks (via 9to5Mac) and show off some of the features that could be arriving with the app.

These include Beats 1 and the recommendations page, as well as Apple's social network, Music Connect. As the site notes, however, one surprise feature is the ability for users to change the size of the offline music cache, which isn't available for Apple users.

21/10/2015: Apple Music has reached 6.5 million subscribers, CEO Tim Cook revealed on Monday.

He also said that 8.5 million people are currently participating in a three-month free trial, bringing the service's total users to 15 million.

The company's music streaming service has lost a significant amount of users since its debut, however, with just under half of the 11 million people who signed up to the service's initial free trial in September having chosen not to pay for access after the end of the complimentary period.

Cook was pleased with Apple Music's progress, stating at a California technology conference: "I'm really happy about it, and I think the runway here is really good".

15/06/2015: Apple has finally revealed its new Music streaming service, Apple Music.

The service builds on Beats Music, the music streaming service Apple acquired last year as part of its purchase of Beats.

Jimmy Iovine, co-founder of Beats, took to the stage at Apple's annual WWDC conferenceto introduce the new service, which he said will reduce the fragmentation of the music market, allowing users to listen to their favourite artists all in one place.

Apple Music will offer human curated playlists, which Iovine claimed will stop the kind of jarring switch between genres users can experience when listening to a playlist curated by algorithms.

Apple Music will also provide a platform for new artists to bring their music to a wide audience, as unsigned musicians can also share their music on the service.

Apple Music also has a feature called Connect, whichallows users to follow artists, be they big names or those just striking out in the business.

"Apple Music gives artists the opportunity to express themselves to fans on the deepest level, building relationships that last a lifetime," said Apple.

Another feature is Beats 1. Music, a 24/7 global radio station overseen by Zane Lowe, who joined Apple from BBC Radio 1 in February. Beats 1. Music will broadcast non-stop from Los Angeles, New York and London to over 100 countries.

Apple Music will cost $9.99 per month, with an option to upgrade to family membership for $14.99 per month (based around the existing iCloud Family Sharing feature of iOS) - as expected, there will be no free teir. It will be available in over 100 countries from 30 June with iOS 8.4 on iPhone, iPad and iPod, and as an update to iTunes on Mac, and will also be coming to Android and Windows at an unspecified point this Autumn. UK pricing has yet to be announced.

For full coverage of the WWDC 2015 opening keynote, visit our WWDC page.

Junior coders are botching SAP customisations, increasing the cost to companies running the software.

This is according to Cast Software, which examined millions of lines of Abap (advanced business application programming) code written to customise 83 SAP applications.

Chief scientist Bill Curtis told IT Pro that most of these customisations were performed by outsourcers, including SAP partners that are responsible for implementing the German tech giant's software.

But he accused them of being inexperienced and bungling the job.

"You've got people who just don't know how to write good information management routines," he said. "You wonder how many of them really have a computer science background or at least an IT background."

The consequences for the customer are severe, he warned increasing the total cost of ownership because the complexity of the code is costlier to maintain.

It also makes it harder to add new functionality to the applications, meaning businesses upgrade their software at a slower rate.

"If they're in a very competitive environment, that puts companies at a disadvantage. The agility of a business is directly tied to the agility of their code," Curtis said.

The report found evidence of faulty code across several industries, including public sector, energy, IT consulting, manufacturing and retail.

It said: "The number and density of violations is high in every health factor, and this should be of concern for many applications."

Many of the applications Cast tested were business-critical systems, it added.

Curtis recommended companies introduce targets that outsourcers must meet when customising their applications, as well as quality assurance processes, to reduce the amount of complexity added to the software.

"Create a quality gate for everything that's coming back from your suppliers and set targets in your contract equivalent of service level agreements," he said.

"Say these are numbers I expect you to hit, and this is the rate at which I want to see improvement towards these targets', and measure the code as it comes in."

UK SMBs can now use bitcoins to pay for Dell products on its website, following the success of a pilot payment programme in the US involving the virtual currency.

The hardware giant first announced plans to include bitcoins on its list of accepted payment methods in July 2014, but the option was only being offered at that time to its US consumers and SMBs buying products via Dell.com.

However, the company has now confirmed that UK and Canadian SMBs can opt to pay for goods using bitcoins, thanks to an extension of the payment scheme.

In a blog post, announcing the news, the company said the US pilot had seen customers pay for a wide range of products using bitcoins, with one stumping up $50,000 worth of the crytocurrency for a PowerEdge server system.

"This form of payment is clearly resonating with consumer, small and medium businesses. And now we're excited to take the choice and flexibility this payment option offers global," the company said.

Dell is partnering with bitcoin payment processor Coinbase to offer the payment option to its customers, with the service allowing them to buy, store and spend the currency.

Dell claims to be the largest company in the world to accept bitcoin as payment method, although a number of other high-profile firms have moved to embrace it in recent times. For example, travel website Expedia.

Apple-owned Beats Electronics is facing legal action after one of the co-designers of its original line of headphones accused the firm of fraud.

Noel Lee, CEO of audio technology firm Monster, has filed a complaint with the Superior Court in California against Beats suggesting he invented the technology used inside the headphone brand.

Monster assisted Beats co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine with the company's launch in 2008, and Lee claims he helped create and engineer the technology in exchange for licensing rights to the high-profile brand.

He also claims that Dr. Dre, along with fellow Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine, failed to credit him for the contributions he made, and the effort he put into educating the pair about how best to make and distribute the technology.

However, when Beats sold a 50.1 per cent stake in its business to HTC in August 2011 for $300m, Monster claims it was made to forfeit its rights over the Beats technology because of a change of ownership clause shortly after.

This meant Monster had to hand over the intellectual property rights to the technology. This, it is claimed, cost his company millions in lost revenue.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the move also prompted Lee to cut his five per cent share in the company to 1.25 per cent before selling the remainder eight months before Apple agreed to buy Beats in September 2013.

In the suit, Lee claims he only sold his shares after being assured by a member of the Beats board that there were no plans to sell the company or launch an initial public offering within the coming years.

Lee maintains in the suit that if he had retained his five per cent share in the company, it would have been worth more than $100 million now.

As recompense, Lee is seeking general, special and punitive damages against Beats , HTC and Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine individually.

Neither Apple or Beats have commented on the suit.

The 42 million Alan Turing Institute for Data Science is to be located at the British Library, the Government has revealed.

The announcement puts the Big Data research hub, whose name honours Bletchley Park code breaker Alan Turing, in the centre of the so-called Knowledge Quarter' in King's Cross a grouping of dozens of scientific and academic organisations.

The institute will be tasked with studying new methods of collecting and analysing Big Data, receiving 8.4 million annually over five years in government grants to do so.

It will be run by a joint venture partnership made up of universities selected through a competition by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), with the winners from more than 20 applicants to be announced shortly.

Roly Keating, chief executive of the British Library and chair of the Knowledge Quarter, said: "We are delighted that the British Library has been selected by the EPSRC as the location for the headquarters of the Alan Turing Institute.

"The future of the British Library is increasingly digital and data-driven and our purposes are strongly aligned with those of the Alan Turing Institute.

"This choice of location also allows the institute to benefit from the world-class physical and transport infrastructure of the Knowledge Quarter with its easy connectivity to other parts of the UK and Europe."

Chancellor George Osborne added that, while based in the capital, the institute will forge links with universities around the UK.

"The institute will bring benefits to the whole country through partnerships with universities and businesses across Britain, including in our great northern cities, to better understand and exploit the amazing opportunities presented by Big Data," he said.

Partners of the Knowledge Quarter include the British Library, Google, medical research centre The Wellcome Trust, University College London and the Francis Crick Institute.

Turing was a mathematical genius central to England's codebreaking efforts during World War II, as well as being a pioneer in computer science, but committed suicide two years after being chemically castrated by the government for being homosexual in 1952.

In 2009, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a formal apology for the government's treatment of Turing.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has been fined 56 million by regulators for a 2012 IT glitch that stopped millions of customers from accessing their money.

The problems blighted customers of RBS, and those of its Natwest and Ulster Bank brands, for several weeks in June 2012, preventing them from accessing online banking services and receiving accurate account balance information via the firms' cash machines.

The issues arose due to failures at many levels within the RBS Group to identify and manage the risks which can flow from disruptive IT incidents.

Furthermore, other customers missed mortgage payments or had incorrect credit and debit interest applied to their accounts, while some businesses also reportedly missed their payroll commitments.

As a result, the company has now been jointly fined by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) to the tune of 56 million, with the bulk of the penalty (42 million) coming from the former party.

In the wake of the issues, RBS CEO Ross McEwan blamed the problems on "decades" of IT underinvestment, but in a statement today the FCA denied it was the root cause.

"The incident was not the result of the banks' failure to make a sufficient investment in its IT infrastructure. The RBS Group spends over 1 billion annually to maintain IT infrastructure," it said.

Instead, the regulator blamed a software compatibility problem brought about by the banking group's failure to implement "adequate systems and controls" to identify and manage IT risks.

When the banking group realised some newly-installed software was not working correctly, it opted to uninstall it, the FCA's investigation revealed, without first establishing what the impact of that decision would be.

Tracey McDermott, director of enforcement and financial crime at the FCA, added: "The problems arose due to failures at many levels within the RBS Group to identify and manage the risks which can flow from disruptive IT incidents and the result was that RBS customers were left exposed to these risks.

"We expect all firms to focus on how they ensure that they can meet the requirements of their customers when looking at their IT strategies and policies."

News first emerged earlier this month that the banking group could face a multi-million pound fine from the FCA for its IT failings, with earlier reports suggesting the sum could be cut should RBS pay up early.

In a further statement, RBS chairman Phillip Hampton said the firm had already made financial provisions to cover the cost of the joint fine.

"Our IT failure in the summer of 2012 revealed unacceptable weaknesses in our systems and caused significant stress for many of our customers. As I did back then, I again want to apologise to all customers in the UK and Ireland that we let down two and a half years ago," he said.

"I am confident that the progress we have made in increasing the resilience of our IT systems through the additional investment of hundreds of millions of pounds and the enhancement of our control structures - has made RBS better able to provide the service our customers expect and deserve.

"I am also pleased that the regulator acknowledged the steps we took at the time to provide redress to anyone who had lost out as a result of our mistakes," he added.

Salaries for highly-skilled IT professionals are reportedly rising faster than the UK average, according to recruitment firm Morgan McKinley.

The organisation's 2014 salary survey reveals that pay for IT workers, at all levels of experience, is increasing faster than average salaries across the UK.

Those with skills in social, mobile, analytics and cloud are most in demand at the moment, the report's findings show, as enterprises rush to tap into these industry megatrends.

"We have seen an increase in demand for highly-skilled IT professionals in almost every sub-sector," said Cem Baris, associate director for Morgan McKinley IT.

"Cyber-security, big data, business intelligence and application development are all in high demand. While two years ago, hirers were demanding skills as well as corporate experience, now we see a focus on skills irrespective of age and track record."

Looking ahead, Baris said the growth in salaries for UK IT professionals looks set to continue for some time to come.

"Technologies are moving fast and companies are keen to ensure they take advantage of the new opportunities these offer," he said.

"While there are not enough STEM graduates coming into the workplace from UK universities to fulfil these opportunities... the result will be higher remuneration for those with the IT skills most in demand."

The Morgan McKinley report was compiled using feedback from employees and line managers from a wide range of industries within the permanent and contract recruitment market.

This was used by the company to compare the salaries of thousands of new jobs over the past year, which were then compared to similar offers made in the 12 months prior to that.

Within its pages, the growth of the UK's technology start-up scene was also flagged, with Morgan McKinley pointing to the growing demand for skilled developers. However, it seems they too are in short supply.

"Not only are entrepreneurs increasing the demand for IT skills, but also the supporting ecosystem of venture capitalists, private equity houses, financial advisers and bankers that support the start-up community," the organisation said, in a statement.

"At the supply end, there are not enough technologists with high-level skills to meet this growing demand... leading to salary inflation."

Oracle has been accused of generating "hostile" and "mistrustful" feelings among its customers when it comes to licensing matters in a new report.

The document, entitled Key Risks in Managing Oracle Licensing, was compiled by the Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL) to highlight the key issues end users face when dealing with the vendor on licensing.

It features insights gleaned from several sources, including a survey of 100 of the software giant's customers, a roundtable event and an "open discussion" with the firm's licensing management team.

According to its findings, Oracle's approach to licensing has resulted in "hostile" customer relationships.

"Based on our research and conversations over the last six months, we have found that customers' relationships with Oracle are hostile and filled with deep-rooted mistrust," said Martin Thompson, CCL founder and author of the report.

"So entrenched is this feeling of mistrust that some organisations were fearful of speaking to us in case of any audit repercussions."

Respondents to the survey (88 per cent) described the vendor's software audit requests as unclear and difficult to respond to, while 78 per cent said Oracle's licensing management arm was largely unhelpful during the process.

Furthermore, changes to Oracle's software licensing rules were not clearly communicated, according to 92 per cent of the survey's respondents.

Oracle's licensing management division was given the opportunity to address some of the report's findings, and stated that it was on hand to help customers work through their licensing problems.

It also admitted that, in response to concerns about how licensing rule changes were communicated, that "customer's documents are not updated regularly" and that the licensing team "don't always receive updates on new products."

The report wasn't all bad news for Oracle, as the vendor received positive feedback in several areas, including its willingness to publicly share information on its website for users to refer to, while the professionalism of those in its licensing department was also praised.

"Whilst every organisation entering into contracts must be accountable for the agreements they purchase, a disproportionate amount of risk and management overhead appears to be placed on the customer by Oracle," Thompson continued.

"Similarly, many customers have not invested, or are not capable of investing, sufficient resource to manage their Oracle estate, or are aware of the investment in management overhead that they will require prior to engaging with Oracle.

"On the whole, the customers we surveyed appear to have an arms' length, impoverished relationship with Oracle," he added.

IT Pro contacted Oracle for a response on this story, but had not received one at the time of publication.

IBM's Watson group has set up shop in New York and five other cities around the world as part of its mission to bring the cloud-based artificial intelligence system to over 25 countries.

As well as New York, the Watson group will set up "Watson Client Experience Centres" in Dublin, London, Melbourne, Sao Paulo and Singapore.

The New York-based branch office will be home to more than 600 IBM Watson employees. The office will provide developers and entrepreneurs in the area with access to Watson.

The firm said it had signed up customers in six continents across 25 countries including the UK, South Africa, Australia and Thailand.

Students at New York University and City University of New York will also be able to access the centre with students working to develop new applications based on Watson technology.

"Watson is bringing forward a new era of computing, enabling organisations around the globe to launch new businesses, redefine markets and transform industries," said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of the IBM Watson Group.

"Watson is fuelling a new market and ecosystem of clients, partners, developers, venture capitalists, universities and students. The next great innovations will come from people who are able to make connections that others don't see and Watson is making possible."

IBM said Watson is now engaged in learning Spanish through a new partnership with Spain's CaixaBank. Other new clients using Watson include ANZ Global Wealth in Australia, Bumrungrad International Hospital in Thailand, Deakin University in Australia and South Africa's Metropolitan Health.

In the UK, Watson is being used by Red Ant to offer a retail sales trainer mobile app that lets store employees identify individual customers' buying preferences by analysing demographics, purchase history and wish lists, as well as product information, local pricing, customer reviews and tech specs.

It uses voice or text input to enable a natural question-and-answer interaction against the wealth of information available within a retail business, including product information, copybooks, manuals and customer reviews.

IT professionals need to change the way they position Big Data to business decision makers, by focusing discussions on the bottom line benefits rather than the technology.

That was one of the key themes of Dennis Business Media's (a joint event for Cloud Pro, IT Pro and PC Pro) Big Data or Bust roundtable breakfast briefing this week.

Hosted in association with Intel, the event brought together expert speakers and IT decision makers for a lively debate on the topic of information analytics and best practice.

Speaking at the event, Ray Ford, CTO of vehicle replacement service Accident Exchange, said Big Data has the potential to bring huge business benefits, but IT departments must be mindful of how they position the concept to secure it a place on the boardroom agenda.

For example, trying to blind people with science by focusing on the technology side of things is not the way to go, he advised.

"Big Data, whether you like it or not, isn't sexy. If you walk into a room and try to sell a Big Data project by talking about noughts and ones and how many calculations you can do in seconds, you're going to get nowhere," said Ford.

"What people want is the results right there and then, very quick and nicely presented."

The difficulty is, given the growing amounts of data companies have to wade through, it's not always possible to know before a project is undertaken exactly what information will prove useful. And if ultimately it will have a positive impact on the business bottom line, Ford admits.

Intel's view of the Big Data era

Stuart Dommett, IT evangelist and head of UK business marketing at Intel, also attended Big Data or Bust. He tells us why now is an exciting time for the IT industry.

"We've seen two industrial revolutions, and we believe we're now in a third, which is the information age. And what we're seeing is businesses are under going a lot of change at the moment.

"So when we look at the third industrial revolution, we think there are a number of things to consider and they're coming together as a real force of nature, and they are social, mobile, analytics and cloud.

"They're all intertwining at the moment, which is radically changing what's happening in the world. "So when we talk about Big Data, we're really talking about analytics and the ability to analyse on the fly what's happening."

For this reason he thinks it's imperative that IT departments work closely with the other parts of the business to ascertain the true value of the data they have.

"The biggest problem for any business is the people who know the data never get asked how we can contribute to the business bottom line," he said.

"We have regular meetings where we get the people who know what [data] we've got to challenge the people who think they know what we've got."

To ascertain the value of the data it has, his company sometimes undertakes small-scale analytics projects, using the data at its disposal for R&D purposes before embarking on a major deployment.

"It's easy to get carried away with technology, but there's no point if it doesn't benefit the bottom line," explained Ford.

This was a sentiment echoed by Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at market watcher Quocirca, during his presentation.

"There is no point collecting data if it doesn't have a use or a positive outcome for the business. It's a great way of spending money on IT, but that's all it is," said Bamforth.

"I certainly encountered people doing lots of stuff with data, but the critical thing is, is it having an impact?"

Volume vs. everything else

When it comes to Big Data, too many companies have an "unhealthy focus" on the amount, or volume, of data they have, rather than the variety, veracity and velocity of it, added Bamforth.

Cloudera's view on the Big Data era

Mark J. Lewis, senior director of marketing at Cloudera, also spoke at Big Data or Bust. Post-event. Lewis joined IT Pro for a quick chat about some of the key themes touched upon during the roundtable discussion.

IT and business: Meeting in the middle on Big Data I think that's been a long-term challenge, actually. IT and the business. Is IT another cost centre,like catering, is it really a part of the core business?

Those who are in IT know they are, but it's very difficult for the business to recognise that because it's doing it's own thing. I think that is about to change.

The Big data skills gap There is definitely a skills gap when it comes to big data, and what typically happens when you have a skills gap, is the experience you already have [within your business] can be built upon.

The only danger is if people assume their existing knowledge is all that's needed. It's useful as a baseline, but then they need to extend it further too.

How Hadoop and co. can help make sense of Big Data Big Data is not really about the data itself, but the amount of times you want to manipulate that data, and ask different questions of that data [which is something Hadoop helps to facilitate].

When we started out we used to talk about Hadoop, and we started talking to customers to understand what we needed, we started adding this new framework around it because we realised they needed more.

"Variety [of data] is critical and really badly understood in many ways by not understanding what's out there, what's available or what to do with it."

On the topic of how to manage the information overload, David Postle, head of global services and customers at Actian, said Apache Hadoop is often cited as a "cure all" for Big Data problems.

"Let's use Hadoop for everything, seems to be the common answer and certainly 18 months ago we were finding that a lot of IT folks were presuming Hadoop was the answer to all their problems and headed down that path, before running into other complications."

This was a topic fleshed out by Mark J. Lewis, senior director of marketing for EMEA at Big Data management experts Cloudera, who outlined the work his company is doing with the support of Intel to make Hadoop-based data management easier for the enterprise.

Lewis provided further insight on the Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub reference architecture, which combines Hadoop with a series of other data and system management tools so data from a variety of sources can be processed on a single, scalable platform. The end result is a significant reduction in processing time.

He backed Postle's point that Hadoop alone is no longer enough for the weighty Big Data demands of the enterprise these days, which is why it makes sense to package it with other tools.

"Eighteen months ago it was all you needed and all that was available, and as long as you had an ability to write data and shove it in there... but people need to extract data in different ways, they need to upload it in lots of different ways [now] and they want to be able to do a lot more with it," he explained.

The Big Lottery Fund is to pay out 5.8 million to support a UK project that aims to teach digital skills to people suffering from hearing and sight problems.

The three-year project is being spearheaded by the Royal National Institute for Blind People (RNIB), and aims to train 125,000 people in basic online skills so they can confidently use web-based resources to shop online, pay bills and gain employment.

They will be taught how to use the internet through a mix of events, surgeries, training sessions and home visits.

The initiative is volunteer-led, and also seeks to boost awareness of the range of equipment and assistive programmes that exist today to help those with sight and hearing impediments access the internet.

The funding will be used to deliver on the above, as well as train further volunteers and encourage private and public sector firms to get involved too.

Dawn Austwick, CEO of the National Lottery's Big Lottery Fund, said the internet has the potential to make the everyday lives of those suffering sensory loss easier, but many don't where to start.

"This is why it is important that the Online Today project will offer a tailored approach according to people's needs, including one-to-one advice and the use of mobile resources and home visits to accommodate those who are homebound or in rural areas," she said.

Lesley-Anne Alexander CBE, the CEO of the RNIB, added: "The internet and new technology is an increasingly important part of modern life and for people who have sight or hearing loss, being able to get online confidently can make a real difference to being able to live independently and as part of an inclusive community."

The project is part of a wider push by the Big Lottery Fund to clamp down on digital exclusion, and a further 9 million has been earmarked to support other efforts in this area.

Inside the enterprise: Sometimes, the most interesting advances in technology, and in IT, come about when different technologies are put together.

Over the last few years, much of the IT industry's efforts and many of its successes have centred around data analytics. Being able to predict the near future, or at the very least, narrow down the range of possible outcomes, is a useful tool for a wide range of businesses. Advances in business intelligence and analytics have made these prediction systems both more accurate, and cheaper to build.

To work, though, analytical systems need raw data, and lots of it. Much of this information has come from relatively static sources of information, such as databases. But the move is now towards real-time monitoring of data, from transactional systems, social media, or networks of sensors.

The growth of the Internet of Things is opening up more ways to monitor the physical environment, from roads to energy grids. But there is another challenge when it comes to monitoring fast-moving objects and, indeed, people. For practical and regulatory reasons, it is not always possible to use conventional sensors.

In sports, the use of real-time data is growing. Telemetry, including data on drivers' physical condition, is a key part of motorsport, for example. And world-class athletes are making more use of sensors in training, to monitor their technique and vital signs. But there are restrictions on using such monitoring in competitive games.

In football, both club and national teams are now using small sensors, which players wear in their socks, to monitor training; the data from these are fed into analytics tools, which help coaches assess the players' techniques and suggest improvements. Sensor data is especially useful in sports such as football, where there is a lot of individual movement: with 22 players on the pitch, human coaches cannot spot everything.

However, current international football rules ban the use of body-worn sensors during competitive games, blocking coaches' access to a valuable source of data. This has led to a collaboration between the broadcast equipment arm of Panasonic, and the data analytics division of software vendor SAP, announced at this year's IBC broadcasting event.

SAP has been moving into sports analytics for some time, and created a prototype system, Match Insights, for the World Cup. But, because sensors are not allowed in matches, Panasonic has stepped in to provide a camera-based system and video tracking software.

By using four HD cameras, Panasonic has created a super-wide angle field of view, which allows the unit to be fitted to the roof of a stadium. The cameras can track players, and the ball, 30 times a second and feed that into the analytics system, which runs on SAP's Hana in-memory database.

This gives coaches access to detailed data on players' movements and techniques from matches, without the need for sensors, and by staying within the rules. Potentially, too, the data could be provided to broadcasters for use in match highlight programmes.

The analysis so far has certainly proved useful. After all, Germany won this year's World Cup - and remain favourites for 2018 too.

Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT Pro.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) suffered a major failure in its IT systems last December that left three quarters of a million customers unable to use their credit and debit cards for three hours on one of the busiest shopping days of the year during the run up to Christmas.

The problems also ran into the following day for some, while others claimed funds had vanished from their accounts.

This wasn't the first time RBS suffered a failure at the hands of legacy systems. In June 2012, a corrupted software update for one of the payment processing systems running on its mainframe stopped customers from withdrawing cash from machines. It also caused customers to miss deadlines for paying bills, resulting in an investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority.

The banking disaster led RBS chief executive Ross McEwan to admit to "decades" of underinvestment in its IT systems. While the problems were eventually fixed, it has thrown a spotlight on banking IT and whether or not it is fit for purpose.

Up to the job

A spokeswoman for the group told IT Pro that the majority of that investment was "in response to new regulatory requirements and to maintain our complicated and inefficient infrastructure that still is a reflection of the past shape of the bank".

"Over the next 5 years we will maintain our IT spending. But now the majority of that investment will be directed at resilience, simplifying and modernising our infrastructure, resulting in real benefits to our customers, giving them new innovative capabilities such as mobile, as well as greatly simplifying and speeding up core processes such as account opening and mortgage applications," she says.

In light of this respond, IT Pro contacted the other major banks about their plans for modernising their IT estates and how they planned to avoid the same fate as RBS.

A Lloyds Banking Group spokesman went on record to say its focus was on customer service, risk mitigation and operational continuity and - to that end it - "became the first bank to have a Chief Digital Officer reporting directly to the Group CEO and represented at the Group Executive Committee."

The spokesman says Lloyds spends excess of 2 billion on IT annually and over the past six years "we have invested 800 million across the Group to develop our digital assets to serve the changing needs of our consumers and commercial clients. In 2014 we plan to invest a further 275 million (vs. 225 million in 2013) in digital."

At the time of publication, IT Pro was still awaiting comment from the other major banks.

We also contacted The Financial Conduct Authority regarding RBS' IT failures. It wouldn't comment on individual banks' systems, other than to say it had started an investigation into the situation in June and July 2012 that would "reach its conclusions in due course and will decide whether or not enforcement action should follow that investigation."

These systems have grown over the decades and each time a new one is put in the bank's IT infrastructure it has to be integrated with the others. Soon enough this becomes a maze of systems complicated enough to make the upkeep and maintenance an exceedingly difficult task.

The main problem is that these legacy systems are essential to the continued running of the banks. One anonymous developer working at a London-based North American bank says that nobody really wants to get rid of old systems as the gamble of changing them is too great.

"Even here there is another system that has meant to be retired for ages which is a front office system. I would say it will still be going in five year's time, because these systems are so heavily relied upon that to retire them is just such a big job," she says.

"A back office system is even worse because that's got every single settlement. And if that goes wrong, that is the worse thing ever as that is our system of records. It too much of a risk."

Tom Bell, head of operation at Viewsy, used to work as an IT strategy and transformation consultant for Accenture dealing with various banks.

He agrees that banks have old and out-dated processes.

"The problems are just huge though. A few years back when I was still consulting with the banks, they still have all the old legacy systems running behind the scenes. It is such a complex problem to pick apart, it is not just a process issue, it is just expensive. And sometimes it is just easier to leave those systems running," he says.

At a London-based European bank an IT director we talked to says that he thinks "all systems are potentially ticking time bombs in a way."

"It doesn't matter how old they are, if there are faults, breakdowns will occur. It's really the severity of the faults that are the problem," he says. "What legacy systems have going for them is that the code has been around for decades so a lot of the problems within that code has been sorted out."

The real problems start when you try to integrate these old systems with new ones, he adds. "This often happens when you have to deal with new rules and regulations."

For these systems, given their complexity and the core nature of them, change is gradual.

"There is one project going on to retire a system," says our IT developer. "All these retirement projects are really, really long term because it is so much work. They can't just do it in one big bang. They have to do it gradually."

Dan Mayo, chief analyst and practice leader of Financial Services Technology at analysts Ovum, says that sometimes problems are approached on a year-by-year basis.

"The CIO would let the next guy sort this mess out because in terms of hitting targets and bonuses it makes more sense to focus on what is going to add value this year," he says.

"It often takes a little bit of catalyst like you have seen with RBS, where something has gone wrong or the business is looking to make a fundamental change that actually drives this in the industry," says Mayo.

There is a need to take a longer term view in Mayo's opinion. He says the Nationwide Building Society is one of the few organisations thinking this far ahead.

"You see Nationwide starting this off back in 2008, as it was one of the few institutions that was able to take a view of the longer term," he says.

He also thinks the UK would be better off taking a look at the experiences of the Australian market.

"The first bank that did this (the Commonwealth Bank of Australia) has acted as a catalyst for the rest of the banks there. Because if suddenly one of the large banks has modern systems, that puts a lot of competitive pressure on the other banks because they can innovate and do more things in terms of improving customer service," says Mayo.

As such, Mayo says it will be interesting to see the impact of Nationwide and RBS' efforts to modernise their IT estates on their competitors. "If it gets its act together and can start producing some results from what its investing in, [this will act as a catalyst] for the rest of the sector."

"RBS is effectively at the consolidation stage. Lloyds has done a lot of consolidation having taken on the HBOS systems, though it has been largely consolidation onto fewer of its older systems rather than a really modern one."

Bell says that in the banks there is a "growing, but painful, realisation that IT is strategic rather than just a cost centre but it is a slow process. And that has to happen before the culture changes".

"When you're a bank you focus on the money. Until you recognise the value IT brings you..., then you are not going to focus on the right things," he says.

Can the various debacles caused by old infrastructure teach the wider industry about how to get out of the legacy timewarp?

Said Tabet, head of governance risk and compliance at EMC, says failures in the banking sector represent both a warning and an opportunity for lessons to be learnt that other industries can take advantage of.

"Information systems will become more complex and stressed and we will continue to demand a lot more with the dream of real-time data management for better insight, better decision making and future innovations. While legacy systems so far can still handle many of the requirements and needs of most industries, that will not be true moving forward," says Tabet.

Mark Keepax, vice president at ASG Software Solutions, believes that cloud offers firms a way out of their legacy commitments.

"Implementing a sturdy cloud infrastructure can reinvent and reinvigorate business processes, making the organisation more agile, responsive and, most importantly, more cost-effective in everything from data management to BYOD and customer outreach. IT now need to go back to its roots and be seen as a business service with the first step in the new age, being to remove (if only partially) legacy IT infrastructures," he says.

Google is the latest tech giant to enter the drone market, after announcing that it's been researching the use of self-flying vehicles to deliver goods for two years.

The work is being carried out by the search firm's Google X arm as part of its Project Wing initiative, and the firm has already built and tested a prototype of the device.

The Google prototype drone is white, has a wingspan of 1.5 metres and features four propellers.

Google announced details of the initiative in a video, where Project Wing founder Nicholas Roy said: "It's years from a product, but it is the first prototype we want to stand behind."

Similar technology was mooted by Amazon in late 2013, with the firm's chief Jeff Bezos saying it could help revolutionise the way it delivers products to its customers.

Astro Teller, captain of moonshots at Google, said, in the video, the project's aim is to reduce the "friction" involved with shipping items across the globe.

"Throughout history there have been a series of innovations that have taken a huge chunk of the friction out of moving things around," he said.

"Project Wing aspires to take another big chunk of the remaining friction out of moving things around in the world," he added.

However, Google told the BBC its long-term goal for the project is to use drones to deliver disaster relief products to isolated areas in need.

"Even just a few of these, being able to shuttle nearly continuously could service a very large number of people in an emergency situation," Teller told the BBC.

It also reports the technology was initially intended to aid the delivery of defibrillators to heart attacks victims.

"When you have a tool like this you can really allow the operators of those emergency services to add an entirely new dimension to the set of tools and solutions that they can think of," explained Project Wing leader Dave Vos.

Amazon's efforts in this area have run into trouble of late, with the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) claiming the use of unmanned aircraft for commercial purposes in illegal.

This is one of the reasons why Google is thought to have favoured Queensland, Australia, as a testing site for its drones, where they have been used to ferry objects from one property to another.

Technology start-up Estimote has launched a line of mini-wireless sensors that can track the status and condition of household objects.

The European company was founded in 2012 as a platform focussed on changing the way businesses and consumers interact with products and venues.

Beacons are wireless sensors that attach to objects and locations, broadcasting minute radio signals to smartphones to provide contextual awareness.

Stickers do the same thing, but are significantly smaller and lighter so can be placed on more objects.

They have in-built accelerometer and temperature sensors, as well as an optimized ARM processor with flash memory and a Bluetooth smart controller.

The devices trigger different actions by enabling communication between the object they are attached to. For instance, a sticker on a pet can tell your smartphone when the animal needs water or is too hot.

Reminiscent of wearable technology, Estimote has dubbed these stickers "nearables" and said their aim is to provide highly personalised insights by collecting large amounts of data.

Beacons and stickers are both compatible with iBeacon, Apple's trademarked indoor proximity system.

Wojtek Borowicz, the community manager at Estimote, said: "We think of Estimote Stickers as a next step towards contextual computing."

Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at Quocirca, added: "Essentially it's a way of tagging the physical world with an ID and some context that relates to the virtual world.

"It could of course replace things like the audio guides you pick up in museums. But the real challenge is making the jump from that specific application to other classes of applications."

According to Borowicz, the technology has a number of real-world applications.

Bamforth added: "There is a potentially valuable application of this technology for those with visual impairment, which tagging with proximity sensors could help enormously.

"It could also be useful in memory jogging applications for those with some forms of dementia."

Consumers can pre-order a developer kit with ten sticker beacons now for $99 and the devices will be shipped out late October 2014.

HP claims former Autonomy boss Mike Lynch should be held accountable for fraud, as the legal battle surrounding the hardware giant's takeover of the Cambridge-based software player rumbles on.

In papers filed with the federal court in San Francisco, HP has accused Lynch, along with former Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain, of fraud.

The vendor said it also plans to sue Hussain, who has been embroiled in a bid to block several shareholder settlements relating to HP's 2011 acquisition of Autonomy.

Hussain's issues relate to the decision to excuse a slew of past and present HP executives from having to pay shareholders damages.

Instead, it was ruled that the shareholders would work with HP to pursue claims against the likes of Lynch and Hussain.

"The notion that [Hussain] should be permitted to intervene and challenge the substance of a settlement designed to protect the interests of the company he defrauds is ludicrous," the court filing states.

"The shareholder plaintiffs, who originally sued HP's directors and officers, now agree that Hussain, along with Autonomy's founder and CEO, Michael Lynch, should be held accountable for fraud."

The wording used in the filing is markedly stronger than HP has employed in the past, where it's made vague references to "financial impropriety" at Autonomy.

According to a report on the BBC, Lynch has described the comments as a "personal smear."

A spokesperson told the broadcaster: "This breathless ranting from HP is the sort of personal smear we've come to expect.

"As the emotional outbursts go up, the access to facts seems to go down," it added.

The two parties have been at loggerheads since November 2012, when HP claimed "serious accounting improprieties" took place at Autonomy before it was acquired, which may have misled the company about its true value.

This was on the back of the $8.8 billion write down HP was forced to swallow in the wake of the deal.

Facebook is introducing a "Buy" button for advertisers to include on the content they post to the site to help them drive up sales of their products and services.

The social networking giant announced the move in a blog post, which will enable site users to purchase goods via ads or page posts without leaving the site.

However, the firm has been quick to stress that every effort has been made to ensure any payments made through the site are done in a safe and secure way.

"None of the credit or debit card information people share with Facebook when completing a transaction will be shared with other advertisers, and people can select whether or not they'd like to save payment information for future purchases," the blog post states.

At present, the addition is only being featured on the ads and pages of a select number of US-based SMBs, but if the trial is successful it could be rolled out more widely across the globe.

The feature will be available for users of both the desktop and mobile versions of the site, and according to a report on Reuters the firm is not "currently" taking a share from any purchases made via the button. Although it could do in the future, if the pilot proves successful.

Increasing the amount of time people spend on Facebook is important to the firm, as it means its advertisers are likely to get more exposure, which ultimately means more money for its coffers.

The site isn't the only social media company looking to make moves on this area, though. Micro-blogging site Twitter has acquired a company called CardSpring, which could potentially pave the way for "in-tweet" purchases to be made.

The company has created an application platform that lets digital publishers and retailers offer customers access to loyalty card programmes or product promotions as a result of making a credit card purchase.

The acquisition was confirmed in a Twitter blog post on Wednesday, where it talked up its past efforts to make it easier for users to access product deals and discounts.

"We've already given users the ability to get deals and discounts, surprise someone with a coffee, or even add items to their online shopping cart all directly from a Tweet," it said.

"As we work on the future of commerce on Twitter, we're confident the CardSpring team and the technology they've built are a great fit with our philosophy regarding the best ways to bring in-the-moment commerce experiences to our users."

KPMG is investing 20 million in boosting the number of data scientists the UK has at its disposal, as part of a joint project it's undertaken with Imperial College London.

The professional services firm said the aim of the partnership is to establish the UK as a leader in the data science space through the creation of the KPMG Centre for Advanced Business Analytics.

The centre will be run by researchers from the Imperial College Business School and will aim to develop new big data analytics methods and approaches that can be adopted by businesses to benefit the wider economy.

The two organisations plan to work on the project together for eight years, and hope the staff at the centre will complete between 15-to-20 big data initiatives a year.

Overall, the college wants to train up 800 PhD students through the scheme to become big data scientists.

Simon Collins, chairman of KPMG UK, said one of the centre's core aims is to ensure the UK PLC is primed and ready to make use of the growing amounts of data it produces.

"Our collaboration with Imperial is about developing the people and skills to use that data to drive new industries and new services. It is immensely exciting for the UK economy and we are very proud to be leading in this crucial area," said Collins.

Professor G Anand' Anandalingam, Dean of the Imperial College Business School, said a thorough understanding of the data analytics is essential for businesses to develop and innovate in today's economy.

"Processing huge swathes of data is a major challenge for leading businesses. Today's datasets are so big and complex to process that they require new ideas, tools and infrastructures," he said.

"The KPMG Centre for Advanced Business Analytics aims to address these challenges by looking at how we can translate complicated information and turn it into potential solutions.

"Doing this successfully could help businesses solve a range of issues and develop more commercial ideas," he concluded.

Figure out what makes people tick and everything else will fall into place.

That was the key theme that emerged from our Good BYOD/Bad BYOD roundtable breakfast briefing this week, which brought together expert speakers and an array of IT decision makers to discuss and debate what works and what doesn't.

"If you can understand what the human beings are doing you can be much more mindful about technology," said speaker Dave Coplin, chief envisioning officer at Microsoft, who pointed out that although IT has evolved over the years, we're still using technology to essentially do the same things at work.

However, Coplin added that our personal lives have been shaped and dramatically changed by technology, meaning we have greater expectations in and out of the office and are frustrated by the apparent 'department of no'

"In the IT industry, we have forgotten the experience that is happening in people's personal lives. We have grandparents Skype-ing grand kids and so on. At work, though, people are greeted by some long bearded person like me saying 'no'."

He also warned: "If we don't get this right the only thing left for us is not to work smarter but work harder and I refuse to accept that."

Mark Evans, head of IT at construction firm RLB concurred that too often we let technology get in the way of what we are really trying to achieve from a business perspective.

"I asked our HR department about six years ago whether we hired the best people or just the best people who live in commuting distance of one of our regional offices. If we hired the David or Davina Beckham of quantity surveying and they lived in Truro, would they be willing to commute to our office in Bristol?" he said.

"Two years ago, I asked again whether we employed the best people. Or do we employ the best people who use windows? We are immediately crippling someone who could bring real value to the business [by handing them PCs automatically].

"That's not a criticism of Windows, but because it's alien to them they're hampered."

"If we became authoritarian and libertarian we would not be pleasing anyone. We've gone down the libertarian route. We're trusting employees with 500,000 contracts, if we can't trust them with 500 laptops then..." Evans added.

His vision of the future is to have a workforce so accustomed to the tools and technologies they use there isn't a need for the IT department as we know it.

"We wanted to remove barriers and make RLB a place people can come and work to best of their abilities ... it is a compromise. It offers flexibility to staff, saves money, doesn't discriminate based on location, doesn't discriminate based on technology and gives the business a certain amount of introspection so it can see the appetite for risk," he said.

"We are getting very close to a position where I can say to my CEO that he doesn't need us anymore. This is a fundamental change to our industry. There will be casualties."

Others in the room agreed that the nature of IT and how it is delivered was changing and that it is key professionals keep pace or else risk alienating users further.

Coplin added: "We have to stop talking about BYOD or the consumerisation of IT like it's another tool in IT. It's like putting an extra phone on someone's desk and saying

'You're twice as efficient now.' We need to look at it as a principle/service that allows people to embrace technology in ways they'd not imagined before.

"In order to get to a transformational experience, you need employees that are empowered and they need the tools too. You need to connect these three things ... the power is in unleashing the workforce. Unleashing all their skills, talent and inquisitiveness as to what tech can do..."

Apple's tax arrangements are to be investigated by European regulators, following allegations the consumer electronics giant has received preferential treatment from the Irish government.

The European Commission has confirmed that a formal investigation into the iPad maker's Irish tax arrangements is being launched, as part of a wider, Europe-wide clampdown on tax evasion.

Ireland has come under fire for a series of tax loopholes that permit large companies to take advantage of lower corporation tax rates.

The standard rate of corporation tax in Ireland is 12.5 per cent, which is considered to be one of the lowest in the world.

However, according to claims made by the US Senate last year, Apple had been granted permission by the Irish government to pay a corporate tax rate of two per cent or less.

This was disputed at the time by the government, who denied claims that "special deals" were being struck with multinationals that would give them access to preferential tax rates.

This was reportedly made possible by Apple's decision to establish its international headquarters in Ireland, but the firm did not declare a tax residency.

The Irish government has taken steps to outlaw this practice by ruling that all companies incorporated in Ireland must register a tax residency in another jurisdiction or face having to cough up for the full corporation tax rate by 2015.

Speaking at a press conference earlier today, Joaqun Almunia, the European commissioner for competition, said exploiting tax loopholes gives companies an unfair advantage.

"In the current context of tight public budgets, it is particularly important that large multinationals pay their fair share of taxes," he said.

"Under the EU's state aid rules, national authorities cannot take measures allowing certain companies to pay less tax than they should if the tax rules of the member state were applied in a fair and non-discriminatory way."

Starbucks and car manufacturer Fiat are also among the companies having their tax arrangements probed, with Almunia adding that its investigations could be extended to further countries and companies over time.

"It is well known we contacted Belgium and the UK, in particular the UK in the case of Gibraltar, and maybe we will open a new investigation," he added.

Using big data and analytics software, companies can track extinction patterns and prevent climate change before it occurs to "save the planet".

That's according to HP managing director Jonathon Dove, who heads the company's transformation services division. HP's Earth Insights, he told journalists at the company's Discover event in Las Vegas, is bringing the benefits of tech to tropical forests.

Using a "truly end-to-end integrated solution" combined with the HP Vertica analytical platform, HP analysed 16 tropical rainforests in 14 countries and four continents, raking in 1.4 million photos and three million climate measurements. It is, said Dove, "big data on the equivalent of analytical steroids."

That data, when crunched by HP's software, created the Earth Insights platform. The platform enables scientists to downsize the time it takes for them to create correlative conclusions.

Earth Insights also features an early warning system that warns researchers of trends that need to be investigated. For example, a species might begin to dwindle in a certain area due to human presence, which would be picked up on by the analysis software and passed on to scientists.

The results, said Dove, have been "spectacular". An 89 per cent improvement on compute time has reduced the time taken to understand environmental threats from weeks to hours, it is claimed.

"Before the scientists would have to send multiple teams out into the jungle in order to collect this data and analyse it," Dove continued. "Now it's possible for all of this to be done through the Earth Insights program."

Using the program, the company has discovered two previously unknown species of animal and is also working on adding facial recognition tech to track population migration through the rainforests. The big data platform recognised when 60 species were in decline and demonstrated the rate at which forests were being affected by humans.

"HP makes this data meaningful," added Dove. "You can only imagine what a platform like this could do for our enterprise customers."

Inside the enterprise: "This is a local shop for local people. Nothing to see here." That's a catchphrase from TV comedy The League of Gentlemen, and was a send-up of all that is parochial about English towns.

But if Royston Vasey - the fictitious village where the League of Gentlemen was set - was for local people, how would that sentiment translate to the internet? A new series of top level domains (TLDs), is posing the question of how local is local enough.

The new TLDs, which include .London, are now in a "sunrise" registration period. This means brand owners can secure their trademarks under the new domain, before registration opens to potentially any internet user.

Internet watchers have suggested iconic brands will want to secure their .London domain. Harrods.London has been mooted. But this is where localism, and the global reach of the internet, collide.

Harrods bills itself as "Harrods of Knightsbridge" rather than of London. But .Knightsbridge is not yet available as a TLD. Nor are other districts of London, or other large cities. A domain such as .Soho or .City could appeal; .Chelsea might have as much resonance with football fans as with fashionistas.

Interestingly, Harrods does not actually use a .co.uk domain. Rather it, and a host of other iconic British brands, use .com. Much of this is to do with creating a global presence. Some of it is to do with search engine positioning. And, at least in part, companies have been forced to register their dot com domains to stop others from doing so. And if you own it, it makes sense to use it.

This also raises the issue of cost. A proliferation of TLDs means more costs, in registration fees, and more time and effort for businesses in managing their online identities. Recent TLDs, such as .xxx, may be ones that can be ignored by most mainstream organisations. But city-level domains are another matter. Brand and business owners may feel obliged to register them, and absorb the expense.

The other question is whether more local TLDs really help customers find businesses, or whether it is really a way of putting extra domains into the market.

At the moment, new TLDs such as .London and .Scotland are too broad to help people find a business close to them. And if the business is global, search engines will find it anyway. A more local system, based around a recognised system of sub-domains, could be more effective.

The public sector has already gone a way down this road, with its subdomain system for local government and schools. This, at least, makes it easy to find the right school, housing department, or local tip from what could be a confusing number of online search results. But it also makes it clear that you are searching for, say, Richmond, Surrey, rather than Richmond, Virginia.

Perhaps shop.roystonvasey.co.uk could be the way forward. But only for local people, of course.

Stephen Pritchard is contributing editor at IT Pro.

"You can't take it with you when you die," the old adage says. But, when it comes to leaving our digital assets to our nearest and dearest, it seems you can't pass them on either. Depending on who consumers buy their e-books, MP3s and movie downloads from, the right to use these digital assets often expires when the person who buys them dies. Therefore, it's often legally impossible to pass them on.

"The long and the short of it is you're borrowing the music or books you buy from iTunes or on a Kindle," Keith Etherington, a solicitor from family law specialists Slater & Gordon, tells IT Pro.

Digital legacy preservation: First steps

Before you can start taking steps to preserve your digital legacy, you need to take stock of what accounts you have and their contents, advises Emma Myers, head of wills, probate and lifetime planning at Saga Legal.

"[We] recommend creating a directory of all online accounts (excluding passwords for reasons of security), which is stored with your will," she explains. "This means next of kin will find it much easier to locate all your accounts."

For on-premise assets, locked up in laptops or stored on tablets, Simon Lewey, a partner at family law firm Cripps Law, says there are organisations who will store device passwords until someone dies and then disclose them to select parties afterwards.

Alternatively, people could store these details with their wills and leave them in the care of their solicitor instead, he suggests. "I've got one client who has given me, to keep physically with his will, a piece of paper in a sealed envelope, with the passwords to his PC," Lewey reveals. "He feels that's a good way of ensuring I can get to that [data], and unlock it."

"As far as I understand it, these are license agreements, not purchase agreements. And, as a result...that license terminates on death." This may come as a surprise and shock to some, particularly when they total up how much money they're likely to spend on accruing these digital assets during their lifetimes. "You might spend 20,000 on iTunes over your lifetime, but once you die, that's it. Apple keeps your money and no-one else gets to listen to the music," Etherington adds. IT Pro raised this point with Apple and the company confirmed it's not possible to "legally bequeath" an iTunes library to someone, as per its terms and conditions. However, Apple did say it is possible to make it accessible to others after the owner's death. This involves contacting iTunes customer services and asking them to transfer ownership of the account to another person who must provide a copy of the deceased's death certificate and a legal document confirming they have the right to take over the account. Alternatively, as Etherington points out, a person could simply pass on their iTunes login details to whoever they want to have access to it after death. Failing to do so won't just stop loved ones accessing your iTunes library, but could also prevent them from accessing an iPad or iPhone that's been passed on too. That's a situation Josh Grant has found himself in after his late mother bequeathed her two-year-old iPad to her family in her will. Since her death from cancer at the age of 59, they've been unable to use it because they do not know her Apple ID and password. Grant told the BBC he was asked by Apple to provide written consent from his mother for the device to be unlocked. "We obviously couldn't get written permission because mum has died. So my brother has been back and forth with Apple. They're asking for some kind proof that he can have the iPad," Grant says. "We've provided the death certificate, will and solicitors letter, but it wasn't enough. They've now asked for a court order to prove that Mum was the owner of the iPad and the iTunes account. "It's going to have to go through our solicitor and he charges 200 an hour, so it's a bit of a false economy," he adds.

Since news of this story first came to light, Apple has responded to the family's request to access the device and restored the factory settings.

E-books after death

Amazon's Kindle store terms of use seem to take a similarly dim view of people who might want to pass on their e-book collections, post-death. "Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense, or otherwise assign any rights to the Kindle Content or any portion of it to any third party," it states. The same goes for rival e-reader maker Kobo, who told IT Pro that once a customer dies, their account will remain open, but no-one can use it and ownership of it cannot be transferred to a third-party. It is also impossible to bequeath a Kobo account in a will.

"However, if the owner of the Kobo account gives the email address and password...to someone before dying, the person who has the Kobo credentials can log into the Kobo account and use it," a statement from Kobo to IT Pro helpfully states. In fact there is nothing to stop users of any of these services passing on their login details, adds Etherington. "I suspect what people will practically come to do is leave behind a little book of their passwords, and provided someone has [that] they can get in. Apple or whoever won't know who is logging in," he adds. The cyber security risks associated with taking this kind of approach are obvious, but it might be the simplest, if not the most secure, way of passing on access to your digital assets after death. Particularly if people have accounts with a large number of digital media providers, such as Apple, Amazon, Kobo, and use streaming service such as Netflix and Spotify too.

Planning ahead

The work involved to shut down someone's account, if ownership transfer is not allowed, can be arduous as each company tends to have its own way of handling things. This is why, Emma Myers, head of wills, probate and lifetime planning at Sagalegal.co.uk, says people need to start planning what will happen to their digital estate after death sooner rather than later. "Without a properly planned digital legacy, your loved ones can face a stressful struggle to gain access to online accounts and shut them down," Myers tells IT Pro.

Tweeting after death

Twitter users unwilling to let the small matter of death stop them accruing followers should sign up to automatic tweet generation service Liveson.

Once people sign up, Liveson will analyse their Twitter feeds and then generate Tweets based on what's been written before once they've died.

The company's tagline is "when your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting" and around 417 people have signed up to use it since its launch.

To spare the feelings of friends and family, these preserved profiles will not generate birthday reminders or be used to populate Facebook's lists of friend suggestions for users.

"[Facebook] will automatically memorialise an account when we know that an account user has passed away," the company said in a statement to IT Pro. "Anyone can request memorialisation, with proof of a user's passing." In some cases, friends and family may want the deceased person's profile deactivated or deleted, a situation Facebook is more than happy to comply with. "Family members/executors may request to have the profile removed entirely, but they do not have the right to actually access the account," a Facebook spokesperson added. "Verified immediate family members may request the removal of a loved one's account from the site, and Facebook will close or completely remove [it]." Microblogging site Twitter offers similar service, whereby a verified family member or the executor of the dead person's estate can ask the site to deactivate their account by supplying copies of the user's death certificate, driver's license and username details. These must be accompanied by a signed statement confirming their relationship to the deceased.

Despite the huge amounts of time people spend cultivating their digital footprints, very few are taking steps to preserve them at the moment, claims Simon Lewey, a partner at legal firm Cripps Law.

"At the moment, while it wouldn't be right to say the use of digital media is restricted to the under 40s at all, I don't think we're quite at the generation yet [who are most actively using these services] that are actively concerned about dying," Lewey tells IT Pro.

"Emotional issues like [their family] seeing a Facebook picture after they've died is not really in their contemplation...because the younger you are, the less concerned you are about dying."

The legal costs involved with sorting out your digital estate could also be a barrier, opines Lewey, particularly as its difficult to put a value on how much someone's digital estate is worth.

"I'm not seeing a lot of concerned clients at the moment, and unless they make some reference to it, we're not raising it as a specific issue, not least because a lot of people would say a lot of this stuff doesn't have any real value," Lewey explains. "They might have hundreds of pounds worth of iTunes stuff, or something of that sort, but I'm not going to pay my lawyer a fortune to deal with...something of hypothetical value."

Even so, Saga Legal's Myers says taking steps to preserve your digital legacy is something everyone should think about doing now, regardless of their age.

"The concept of preserving your digital legacy is relatively new and isn't widely known," Myers admits.

"Social media accounts and shopping online are no longer just the preserve of younger generations: tech-savvy over-50s are more common than ever," she adds.

"As we inevitably become an increasingly digital society, planning for your virtual afterlife should be something on everyone's to-do list."