Business intelligence is supposed to provide decision-makers with the insight they need. The growth in data is making it harder for people to gain meaningful insight because they can only track data on a quarterly or yearly basis. Increasingly, business leaders want to make decisions faster and this is putting the IT department under more pressure at a time when they are being asked to do more with less.

IBM (with Cognos), Microsoft, SAP (Business Objects) and Oracle have strong BI offerings. IBM and Microsoft lack ERP products that the other two can offer. But Gartner says so far it’s an open and heterogeneous position and increasing use of services in its value proposition are helping IBM to maintain par as a standard with SAP and Oracle.

However, in Gartner’s report, The Changing Attitudes of Business Intelligence Users, Gartner analyst James Richardson notes that, in 2011, more than 50% of IBM Cognos respondents stated that SAP or Oracle is their primary ERP and these firms will form a key battleground over the next few years for Cognos.

Richardson says: “The biggest loser in the standardisation battle is Microsoft, which has neither the strength in ERP nor IBM’s service provider touch to defend its position, and as such has fallen out of parity with the other three megavendors as a BI standard.”

The UK government’s decision to accelerate the dismantling of the NHS National Project for IT (NPfIT) came as little surprise to those who have followed the terminally ill project since 2002. But what is the prognosis for the NHS’s badly needed modernisation programme?

Few details have yet been released on how the end of the NPfIT will affect NHS trusts and existing contracts with BT and CSC, but there will be significant changes under the government’s move to a local commissioning-based approach. The previous framework contract under the NPfIT meant just a handful of suppliers dominated this market. There is optimism that the decision could stimulate a more vibrant healthcare market, including greater involvement from SMEs. This could also dovetail into the government’s cloud strategy, with the likes of Google supplying records systems.

Part of the cancellation of the NPfIT means the government is devolving commissioning responsibility to trusts. But as the market fragments into multiple suppliers and multiple procurements, there is a real danger that systems won’t be able to communicate and share patient information – one of the fundamental reasons for electronic healthcare records. The cancellation of the project will likely mean that already cash-strapped trusts will have to dig deep in their pockets to find the cash to deliver their own electronic records systems.

Francis Maude’s “no stone unturned” cost-cutting drive has led to £450m savings across government ICT in past ten months, the Cabinet Office claims.

It saved £300 million by “applying greater scrutiny to our ICT expenditure” , the department said in a statement, adding the government departments had stopped or reduced their spend on low value ICT projects. The other £150 million was stripped out of 2010/11 budgets for major government projects, either halting or pruning spending.

The £450 million total is part of an overall government saving of £3.75 billion since May 2010.

These are significant numbers, but are they real?

Silver Bullet Associates has been knocking on central governments door offering our services to save the tax payer money, but it seems they don’t like independent scrutiny of their ICT costs as our overtures to help have been ignored time and again.

So come on Mr Maude, let us “turn a few stones” for you and let’s see what we can find!

Site management company moves its UK-based IT infrastructure into a dedicated cloud environment, dropping incumbent IT services provider CSC.

The UK division of Danish facilities management giant ISS has signed a five-year IT infrastructureoutsourcing contract with Atos. The deal will see ISS move its UK-based IT infrastructure onto Atos’ Sphere cloud platform. This means it will be hosted in Atos’ data centres and charged for on a “pay for use” basis.

All of ISS’s infrastructure and applications (excluding email, which is based on Microsoft’s cloud-based service) will be hosted on dedicated servers, with shared network, storage and backup systems, an Atos spokesperson told Information Age. ISS will also use Atos’ managed desktop service, Adaptive Workplace.

Atos is displacing IT services provider CSC, with whom ISS signed a global IT outsourcing deal in 2003.

Tesco has signed an eight-year software licensing and services deal with Microsoft aimed at helping improve the retail giant’s global productivity and international growth. As part of the agreement, Microsoft will provide the latest versions of its products and services to Tesco’s head offices, stores, distribution and datacentres, including Windows, Office, SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, System Center, BizTalk and SQLServer. The deal also includes consultancy services under Microsoft’s Enterprise Strategy programme.

Tesco plans to create a new global collaboration platform by deploying SharePoint, Exchange and Lync as part of its strategy to grow internationally, expanding its retail services, including banking, online and mobile. “Putting innovative technology in the hands of its customers, staff and suppliers will allow Tesco to get closer to its goals of multi-channel retailing and meeting people’s needs as they change,” said Tesco in a statement. Bill Gonzalez, general manager for worldwide distribution and services sector at Microsoft, said the agreement will change the way Tesco connects internally and with its customers.

But is it a good idea to sign such a long term agreement for desk-based versions of software in the light of the developing Cloud market, which includes Microsoft’s own Office 365 Cloud offering?

Spend, spend, spend. At least that’s what Gartner thinks.

Worldwide IT spend is poised to grow 7.1% in 2011, reaching $3.67trn (£2.29trn), according to Gartner’s quarterly outlook. This is an upward revision of the 5.6% growth projected by the analyst firm in the first quarter of this year.

Spending on public cloud services is set to grow nearly four times faster than overall IT spend in the next five years. Gartner predicts an annual growth rate of nearly 20% for public cloud services, increasing from $70bn in 2010 to $180bn in 2015. However, the 2010 figure represents only some 2% of total IT spend, rising to just 4% by 2015.

The computing and hardware sector is set for the strongest growth, with spending forecast to increase by 11.7%, reaching $268bn in 2011. Enterprise software will be the next largest area of growth, forecast to rise 9.5% to $268bn, while IT services will comprise the largest area of IT spending at $846bn, a 6.6% increase from 2010.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) sales are expected to reach $12.1bn in 2011, an increase of 21% compared to $10bn in 2010, according to research firm, Gartner.

According to Gartner’s latest figures, SaaS will comprise almost a third (32%) of the total customer relationship management (CRM) software market in 2011, accounting for $3.8bn in 2011, an increase from $3.2bn in 2010.

“The market landscape for on-demand CRM continues to evolve and mature as the availability and use of SaaS solutions become more pervasive,” said Tom Eid, research vice-president at Gartner. “Initial concerns about security, response time and service availability have diminished for many organisations as SaaS business and computing models have matured and adoption has become more widespread,” Eid added.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) SaaS sales are the lowest in the market, making up only 7% of the overall ERP market. Gartner predicts ERP SaaS sales to reach $1.7bn by the end of 2011.

Gartner expects the SaaS market to grow to reach $21.3bn by 2015 with 90% of sales being regarded as cloud services.

Since the release of Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud-based service, the pros and cons of how it stacks up against its competitors in terms of cost and usability have been hotly debated, but it is Office 365′s security credentials that really sets it apart, according to the company’s Trustworthy Computing Group.

Microsoft, the group says, is the only cloud services provider that addresses security at every level in the stack, starting with the underlying infrastructure, which is certified as complying with the ISO 27001 information security management standard.

Certainly something to consider when comparing Microsoft Office 365 to its rivals.

Salesforce.com has long been a pioneer of the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry. And as many of the larger software vendors have now started getting on the SaaS bandwagon, they have found that SaaS is not as easy to deliver as they expected. SAP has struggled and in 2010 only 100 users wereusing their SaaS offering. UK accounting software provider Sage scrapped its first attempt at SaaS owing to security flaws. Other vendors have decided to follow a different route following the old mantra ‘if you can’t beat them join them’. In 2007 Salesforce.com launched Force.com, a platform as a service (PaaS) offering that allows third parties to build their own applications on top of the salesforce.com core. This gave a way for independant software vendors a way to ‘go SaaS’ without having to build or host the platform themselves.

One of the first companies to do this was CODA, a UK based accounting software provider that has since been acquired by the Ducth software company Unit4. Since then many more have followed the path to PaaS as a low cost way to deliver SaaS. According to Forrester there may be as many as 25,000 organisations currently using Force.com to build their applications.

So you can’t ignore the Cloud and SaaS and you should include it in your technology roadmaps. Top tip: don’t sign long term traditional licensing deals with any software supplier as their current pricing model will be replaced with something better within the next few years.

Oracle is offering heavy discounts on the software and hardware for its Exadata database platform in a bid to drive sales. In the past few months, Oracle has offered discounts of up to 70 percent and 30 percent on its Exadata software and hardware respectively.

We believe that the discounts offered by the company were due to the fact that it wanted to drive sales before the fiscal quarter ended on May 31. One source told us that the discount offered by Oracle is based on the list price of the software license deal. For example, for a software license deal worth £250,000, the company offered a discount of 45 percent to 50 percent.

While the discounts and Oracle’s pricing plans for Sun servers and its own database software can be negotiated to a reasonable level for large organisations, many mid-sized and small companies that rely on Oracle’s database services are planning to move to Microsoft SQL due to the large maintenance and support fees being charged by Oracle.