The government has saved £10bn in public spending through a series of financial cutbacks including a drastic overhaul of its use of IT.

The figure is a £2bn improvement on the £8bn Whitehall was hoping to save for the financial year just ended. Cabinet office minister Francis Maude said the savings underlined the success of the government’s efficiency drives including IT spending.

“For years the governments had fritted away billions on disastrous IT projects,” he said at an event in Whitehall attended by V3. “So we set about scrutinising how every pound was spent and negotiating better deals with better suppliers.”

As well as this Maude touted new IT initiatives such as the Gov.UK website as evidence of where efficiency savings were being made, claiming the new site had already saved £42m by consolidating all government sites into a single portal.

“This has enabled users to have one place for government information. This is just the start of something more transformative,” he said. “Our digital by default strategy will make it easier for users to access government services online and we estimate this could save £1.7bn a year.”

Government chief operating officer Stephen Kelly added that the Gov.UK website was now receiving over one million hits a day, while other initiatives such as the G-Cloud were also pushing improvements.

“The government cloud opens up tremendous potential for contracts to be concluded swiftly as well as working with small and medium enterprises,” he said.

In total the government estimates some £1.1bn has been saved through IT improvements and property rental and ownership reductions.

The £10bn figure represents 7.42 percent of central government spending per year of £138bn, from an entire budget, of both local and central authorities, of £695bn. The figure is also currently unaudited and so could be subject to change in the future.

The government has admitted that its cloud computing service G-Cloud is currently “underused” by public sector authorities.

The service is designed to allow the public sector to meet IT requirements by taking advantage of tools hosted in the cloud and reducing the complexity in procuring services. It is also designed to help SMEs sell to the government more easily.

However, cabinet officer minister Francis Maude said although some departments are benefiting from the G-Cloud, more need to be made aware of its use.

“It’s underused so far. There’s huge potential and those parts of the public sector that have use the CloudStore have shown very substantial savings and the ability to get stuff done very quickly,” he said.

The latest figure, from March, said that just £18m has been spent on the G-Cloud, although this is now out of date. The service celebrated its one-year anniversary earlier this year but analysts said it has struggled to gain much traction. It is still growing as 368 more firms were added to the roster of services earlier this year.

However, Maude said the G-Cloud was part of the ongoing push within the government to improve contracts in order to break the old dominance of the major IT suppliers and let smaller, younger companies into the government IT supplier arena.

“We were in a bad cycle and we ran procurements that were very complex and ran very slowly. This meant, in the world of IT, we were buying things that were obsolete by time they arrived and by the end of the contract they were ancient,” he said.

“By breaking that up you get more visibility, more transparency to see what we’re paying, and we can allow newer, smaller, more innovative and more dynamic suppliers to break into the market.”

Maude made the comments at an event on Monday announcing government savings of £10bn in the last financial year. IT savings made up a bulk of this, thanks to services like Gov.UK and a more ruthless attitude to contracts with large companies.

Data centres may not seem like a sexy topic but they’re the 21st-century equivalent of the mines, mills and factories that powered the economic growth of the world over the last 500 years.

In Nice this week, over 1,000 delegates gathered to discuss the latest issues in the sector and celebrate its successes at the DataCentres Europe conference – and V3 was on hand to cover everything from discussions on the best locations for data centres to the costs of running ever-growing sites.

Attending various panel sessions and keynote speeches, we also heard some interesting, quirky and strange facts and thoughts on the world of data centres, and here’s our pick of the bunch.

10. The data centre market is rosy (for banks at least)

Given the huge growth of data being stored in the cloud, and therefore in data centres, the market is one that the banking sector is looking on with pound signs in its eyes.

Barclays head of telecoms, Sean Duffy, said lending to data centres is the largest part of the tech team’s balance sheet.

He said any firm operating in this space should have confidence that new funding will be available if needed, given the clear long-term drivers that will keep the data centre market buoyant.

This view was backed up by data centre consulting firm BroadGroup, which said it sees the growth of the market at between 12 to 15 percent in the coming year, driven by the demand for cloud services.

IBM has updated its Business Analytics lines with aims on changing the way companies handle employee feedback and evaluation.

The company said that its workforce analytics platform will be adding new services which will allow companies to better spot potential employee issues and provide management with a better picture of how employees see their company and its issues.

Among the new additions will be an update to Retention Analytics. The service will allow firms to compare unstructured data on employee patterns and behaviours to help firms better spot possible human resources issues ahead of time.

Murray Campbell, senior manager of business analytics for IBM research, told V3 that the service will pooint out pssible ‘hot spots’ where behaviour patterns can suggest employees will soon be on the move. By spotting issues such as rapid turnover in management or discrepancies in compensation which could be remediated before a staff exodus takes place.

“It gives them the chance to proactively respond,” Campbell explained.

“The capability that we are talking about here is predictive, it forecasts what might go on in the future versus what has already happened.”

IBM is also planning to bring its big data analytics capabilities in to the employee survey space. Designed to better manage long-form response questions, the Survey Analytics service will provide companies with a visual representation of what employees see as the key issues and terms facing their company.

By providing data organised both regionally or mapped out by company branch or level, the service seeks to enable intelligence into how employees truly see their company forming and move beyond the “check-box” performance survey format.

IBM said that it will be making the platforms available as both on-premise and service offerings, though long-term plans are to offer the platform as an on-demand cloud service.

NICE: Google places customer data security as its number one criteria when selecting data centre sites to try and avoid the prying eyes of governments.

Many large technology firms, such as Google, Facebook and Apple, are rapidly growing their data centre locations to take advantage of benefits such as cool climates, access to power, and connectivity to major web hubs as user demand for their services rockets.

However, speaking at the DataCentres Europe conference on Thursday, Google programme manager for global infrastructure, Peter Jones, explained that privacy is still the overriding factor as the firm is wary of any regions where it cannot guarantee data control.

“The primary consideration is information privacy and security. Since we’re dealing with customers’ data this is a make or break criteria,” he said. “Beyond that you have issues such as corruption and importing equipment as you go further down the list [of site criteria] but how we keep data secure is the headline issue.”

Issues of data privacy are not simple, though, as Jones acknowledged, with policies differing across regions and nations, such as in the European Union.

This could change in the future, though, as the Data Protection Regulation makes its way into law. Ed Cooke, head of international data centre advisory at law firm Bird and Bird, said this could make it easier for firms like Google to operate across Europe.

“At the moment there are many variations across Europe but hopefully the new regulation will give a more consistent law implemented across the region,” he said.

The issue of data centre site selection was raised on Wednesday at the event with one UK data centre owner arguing the creation of a hub within London for data centres is bad for businesses as it puts their data at risk.

Google has updated its Gmail inbox for desktop and mobile, introducing tabs to help users sort and prioritise emails.

For desktop users, the inbox will group mail into categories and these will appear as different tabs. Users will be able to choose the categories they want, allowing them to ignore promotion emails easily and concentrate on messages from their key contacts.

Google product manager Itamar Gilad said in a company blog post: “Your inbox is organised in a way that lets you see what’s new at a glance and decide which emails you want to read when. You can easily customise the new inbox, select the tabs you want from all five to none, drag-and-drop to move messages between tabs, set certain senders to always appear in a particular tab and star messages so that they also appear in the Primary tab.”

For mobile users of the Gmail for Android 4.0+ and Gmail for iPhone and iPad apps, they will see their Primary mail category when they open the app. Google has said they will then be able to easily navigate to other tabs.

Google plans to roll out the new inbox gradually to desktop, Android and iOS users in the next few weeks. If users do not like the updated inbox, they can switch off the tabs in the settings menu.

The updates to Gmail follow similar updates made by Yahoo in April to its mail service, helping users more easily manage their increasing number of daily emails. 

The chief executive of Workday has thrown down the gauntlet to major players SAP and Oracle, claiming that they are losing a battle to stop the exodus of customers to its own cloud-based services for human resources and financial management.

Speaking exclusively to V3, Aneel Bhusri, the founder of Workday and former PeopleSoft veteran before its hostile takeover by Oracle in 2005, said that SAP and Oracle, are moving too slowly to the cloud while firms like Workday and Salesforce are taking full advantage.

“It’s a classic case of any disruptive innovation, with firms like Salesforce or Workday changing the market and then the legacy players try to chase them down, but usually they don’t manage this, so it’s our market to lose,” he said.

“SAP and Oracle didn’t want the cloud to happen as it was disruptive to their traditional business, so they fought it for many years, but customer demand and the growth of cloud applications has forced them to jump on the bandwagon,” he said.

Bhusri admits it will not be easy due to the sheer size of its rivals, but he said the head start the firm has due to its earlier move to the cloud means it will win out.

“Our big advantage is our product, they have the sales and distribution channel. We have to build our distribution channel, but they have to build the actual products and if we’re successful in our sales push, I think it will be very hard for them to catch us.”

To date the firm has won some notable customers that have at least 20,000 seats, such as Primark, Aviva, the London Stock Exchange, Yahoo and many of the world’s largest social media sites, while HP revealed a 300,000-plus deployment.

However, the firm has yet to post profits, as it moves first to get customers on board. But its subscription revenue has risen 85 percent year on year, a rise that Bhusri claims proves the firm is on track and going through “hyper-growth”.

The firm’s next big push is around big data, with a planned offering coming later this year for HR and finance teams in order to help provide more insights into data within the application.

“This will be based on Hadoop and allow you to bring in data ranging from Twitter feeds to compensation data to provide a rich framework for analysis within the Workday system, and that’s already proving exciting to customers. We have four customers already using that ahead of general availability later this year.”

The fighting talk from Bhusri comes after SAP and NetSuite traded barbs earlier this month during their customer conferences, despite analysts suggesting a war of words is nothing more than posturing.

NICE: IT skill sets will need to evolve as the hybrid model of cloud computing becomes the dominant architecture used in the future, according to Morgan Stanley’s global head of data centres.

Speaking at the DataCentres Europe 2013 conference, Michael O’Toole said that the hybrid model offers the best mix between security, access and staff productivity. As such, this will lead to an evolution in the skill sets that IT staff will require to do their job.

In particular, IT will have to learn to deal effectiely with third party service providers that are used to host cloud-based applications and infrastructure outside of the IT department’s control.

“The face of IT departments is going to change. They will need to become a lot more commercially focused and have people who understand service levels, procurements, outsourcing and relationship building, rather than just using technology in silos and as components for putting systems together,” he said. “This will lead to roles like cloud architects and those working on cloud brokering services.”

O’Toole said it may be around three to five years before there is heavy demand for such skills, but he was upbeat that future generations would be equipped to deal with these issues.

“People will want to have the skills that are in demand. Graduates will understand that they will have to have a degree, say in computer sciences, but also financial and commercial skills, so they move to the top of the ranks in the IT world.”

He added that Morgan Stanley was currently developing its own internal strategies for this evolution, explaining that it has already moved some non-critical services to the cloud, such as business problem solving, into a system that now handles “millions of tickets a year”.

The firm also explained how it has a zone-based approach to its data centre needs based on speed, in an interesting insight into the demand of the financial sector.

• Zone 0 covers data that needs to be accessed almost instantaneously, around 50-100 microseconds.
   
• Zone 1 is for data centres that need to be close to the firm’s clients, so are often found in metropolitan zones, with latencies again around 50-100 microseconds.
   
• Zone 2 is for staff applications where speeds of around 50 milliseconds are acceptable, although over 150 milliseconds is considered too slow.
   
• Zone 3 data centres are those that are for non-time sensitive application requirements, such as overnight batch processing.

HP has revealed a suite of software and services designed specifically for developers wanting to build business cloud and mobile applications.

Collectively called the Application Transformation Solutions suite, the three packages will be available to HP customers from this July.

Peter Schofield, practice director at HP EMEA Enterprise Services, told V3 the suite builds on the application lifecycle tools HP already offers the developer community.

“We see a lack of necessary skills for enterprise-grade application development. This is why we are increasing investment to make it easier for developers and enterprises to manage their application portfolio,” said Schofield. More key announcements will be made at the HP Discover event on 11 June, he added.

An HP User Experience Design Service will offer businesses advice on how they can improve the design of their business applications, while the HP Anywhere software platform will allow developers to easily build mobile applications and link them to their back-end systems, said Schofield.

“This software platform is to help enterprises manage their bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategies, but it also reaches out to developers directly,” Scofield said. “Enterprises can also use a new HP solution, called Real User Monitoring to monitor the user experience of mobile applications running on the Android platform end to end.”

A Performance Anywhere cloud application will allow firms to monitor the performance and availability of mobile applications and wireless networks.

The final major component of the suite HP is releasing is the Application Integration to Cloud Services, which will allow developers to tie-in applications they have created to cloud-based services such as Salesforce, said Schofield.

HP announced disappointing profits earlier this month – with net income falling 32 percent to $1.1bn in the second quarter of 2013, compared with $1.6bn for the same period last year – as chief executive Meg Whitman continues to face a tough task turning the firm’s fortunes around.

NICE: HP took advantage of the DataCentres Europe 2013 conference to wheel out its recently launched Moonshot server platform, as it tries to entice web-hosting firms with low-power kit.

Unveiled earlier this year, Moonshot is designed to meet the low-power needs of applications that require little processing power to manage, to help the growing number of firms operating in the cloud cut hardware and energy costs, and save space.

As part of this push the firm had some of the first-generation technology on display at the conference. V3 was able to have a peer at it, and take a few photos, to see just how small the firm has managed to make a fully functioning server.

As you can see from the above, a fully mounted rack is able to hold 45 server cartridges within a single unit, allowing a typical data centre rack to hold 450 servers. This is made by possible by the fact each server is only around the size of small pizza box (see below).

New versions of the technology are due to be rolled out towards the end of this year that will feature four nodes in a single cartridge, enabling 180 servers to be placed within a single chassis.

This will form the next stage of the Moonshot push, as the firm develops ‘application-specific servers’ that enable firms with all manner of storage, access and compute requirements to benefit from its low-power offerings.

The firm added that it already has some customers using these products in beta, and reconfirmed that products running on other silicon will be launched in the fourth quarter as it looks to ‘increase the flavours’ of Moonshot servers available.

While the current Moonshot cartridges are based on Intel’s Atom S1200 Series processors, AMD revealed today that its newly launched Opteron X-Series chips are to be used in Moonshot. HP has also made no secret of its intent to deliver ARM-based server modules, possibly before the end of this year.

29 May 2013