Prices correct as at 20/4/12 

Google has provided many IT department -friendly features which makes it more compelling for business users to consider Google as an alternative to Microsoft.

The Cabinet Office has extended the public consultation over its open standards ICT strategy and scrapped some previous proceedings after learning its independent facilitator was being paid by Microsoft, which was lobbying against UK policy.

Microsoft had, during closed meetings last year, requested the Cabinet Office policy on open standards be revised to accommodate Microsoft’s definition of an open standard. The official UK definition of an open standard had been in place since January. Cabinet Office retracted the policy after Microsoft’s requests, and under lobbying pressure Microsoft placed through MPs. The subsequent public consultation put the question of the UK definition of open standards up for debate.

Who says money can’t buy you everything; it clearly can when lobbying!

Canny procurement people can use the hardware sales falls as a way of pressuring Oracle sales people to give greater discount on their hardware as the pressure to sell more must be intense within Oracle.

Oracle Corporation reported revenues of $9.1bn for the third fiscal quarter, up 3% from the same period the year before, beating analysts’ expectations. Oracle said software license revenues rose 7% to $2.4bn, while analysts expected only 3% growth for the quarter. Software license updates and product support revenues were up 8% to $4.1bn, but hardware systems product revenues were down 16% to $869m.

Energy company EDF has signed a £100m 10-year deal with Atos to provide datacentre services.  The contract is intended to consolidate EDF Energy’s datacentre infrastructure and cut costs by more than 20% over the next decade. Atos will provide EDF Energy with additional datacentre capacity to meet increased demand. It will rationalise the existing datacentre facilities, by introducing services from its global network of datacentres. It will also improve service resilience.  

Ten years is a really long time in the IT industry; I just hope EDF negotiated a great contract that include year-on-year innovation, technology improvements and cost reductions.

Let’s hope it does save £300m and instead of dumping the money into the coffers at Whithall to waste on more bankers bonuses, let’s hope they re-allocate the savings to pay our armed forces more and to ensure they and their families are looked after while on service and afterwards.

Charities like Help for Heroes are taking up the slack that the Government should be shouldering. So come on Capita, save some money and make sure those savings get into the right hands.

Microsoft hopes the price cut will lure users away from rival cloud services such as Google.

Microsoft is also cutting the price of its Office 365 product. The company claims it is passing on savings due to an uptake in customers. By running its datacentres more efficiently, Microsoft says it is passing on a 20% saving to Office 365 customers. Hmmmm, I wonder whether that’s the case or whether they are losing business and have cut prices to try and save some competitive situations. You be the judge.

The tech-savvy demographic known as Millennials, born in the eighties, are now a significant proportion of the workforce. These individuals have grown up with technology and represent an opportunity for enterprises to make best use of the latest technologies. However, they are also extremely demanding and if business wants to attract the best employees, it needs to offer the technology they want.

In its ‘Future of Work’ initiative, IT services firm Cognizant said the Millennial mindset will change how people communicate in work and with customers, and businesses will have to cater for this.

Enabling employees to buy their own computers for work is one such example of user-driven change, with traditional Windows-based desktops increasingly being replaced by mobile devices. Social media is another element of millennial behaviour, with workers in group communication, in real time, using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

CIOs need to provide an environment conducive to the use of these technologies, but must ensure their use doesn’t compromise the business. Ensuring the compatibility and security of these new technologies is for example essential.

Businesses expect CIOs to play a key role in changing a business through IT, according to the research. It found 57% of CIOs believe they are regarded as taking a lead in transformation at an organisation level. The same number of CIOs said they play an instrumental role in developing organisational vision.

The combination of a new generation of tech savvy workers and IT transforming business practices means the role of CIO is critical.

The research also revealed one of the main drivers of IT strategy is gaining the ability to do less with more, with 98% of respondents saying this, while 92% of respondents believe how technology enables the use of information is a key factor in business success.

Web applications were among the weakest, with a high concentration of cross-site-scripting (68%) and SQL injection (32%) vulnerabilities. The Web Hacking Incident Database shows that SQL injection exploits are responsible for 20% of reported incidents.

Veracode conducted a comparative analysis of government applications against other industries such as finance, and found that government applications are less resilient to common attacks.Veracode analysed US federal, state and local government applications, which operate critical systems and process critical data such as personally identifiable information (PII) and national security data, and found that they lag behind other industries in key areas. 

Veracode also found that mobile developers tend to make similar mistakes to enterprise developers, specifically with the use of hard-coded cryptographic keys. More than 40% of the Android applications analysed had at least one instance of this flaw, which makes it easier for attackers to initiate a broad assault as all installed instances of the application use the same key.

Before CEO Joseph Tucci took the helm in 2001, EMC was a one-trick pony. It made a healthy profit selling the Symmetrix hard drive array, but under Tucci’s leadership, it expanded into a diversified hardware, software and services company, just as other firms such as Cisco and HP have done.

Today EMC faces multiple challenges, not least of which is the commoditisation of storage and the gradual encroachment of other suppliers on its key turf. But those who ignore what the company has done in the past 10 years risk being blinkered to its future potential. EMC has expanded from a simple storage company to a firm that supports several of ITs major pillars. Identifying these pillars was insightful enough.  But buying and nurturing the companies that were at the forefront of those markets was gutsy and smart.

Yet EMC needs to work out where it want to go. The market has associated EMC with storage for over 30 years. Does it really want to be a storage company anymore? If not, then what will it be tomorrow?