Computing.co.uk Latest updates

Mental health data stolen from NHS trust

Tom Young — 2009-11-13T15:51:00.000Z

Tom Young, Computing, Friday 13 November 2009 at 15:51:00

Data not properly protected by NHS authorities

An NHS trust has lost data relating to 1,000 occupational therapy patients and staff members, according to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Great Yarmouth and Waveney Primary Care Trust (PCT) informed the ICO of the theft of two desktop computers containing sensitive personal data including information about people’s physical or mental health and trade union membership.

The premises did not have an intruder alarm system, the internal office doors did not have security locks and the computers were not protected with any form of encryption software.

Six desktop computers holding personal data relating to 2270 patients were also stolen from Gloucestershire PCT.

The computers were used by medical secretaries for preparing letters and notes relating to diagnosis and referral of patients.

Although the computers were password-protected and held in a locked office, the ICO said patient data should have been held on a local server, rather than on the hard drives of the stolen computers.

Formal Undertakings have now been signed by both trusts committing them to take a number of steps to ensure that personal data is processed in compliance with the Data Protection Act.

"Both of these cases have put thousands of patients’ sensitive personal information at risk," said Mick Gorrill, assistant information commissioner at the ICO. "Personal information is valuable and keeping it safe and secure should be at the heart of good corporate governance. I am pleased these PCTs have taken steps to ensure patient data does not fall into the wrong hands."

Government uses dodgy case study to justify CPS proposals

Parliamentary reporter — 2009-11-13T14:27:00.000Z

Parliamentary reporter, Computing, Friday 13 November 2009 at 14:27:00

The Home Office insists moor rescue was the result of communications data

The Home Office has come under attack for attempting to justify its proposals to force Communications Service Providers to keep communications data for a year by falsifying a case study.

A Home Office document outlining the plans said that the rescue of a student lost on a foggy moor in the Western Isles would not have been possible without mobile telephone data which identified where he was.

It stated as a fact: “The use of telephone communications data was essential to finding this man, without which coast-guards would not have been able to approximate his location and save his life.”

But a local newspaper report at the time said the 23 year old student and his dog were rescued when he heard a helicopter nearby, pointed his mobile camera towards the sky and pressed the flash button several times.

A coastguard spokeswoman was reported as saying: “The helicopter crew were able to see the man on infrared after seeing the flashes.”

The Home Office has since presented a statement from the Marine and Coastguard Agency defending the blunder. It said that although the casualty attracted the helicopter with his flash, "his mobile data did aid his rescue."

This defence is questionable, since it took 14 hours for a helicopter to find him even though the telephone mast had been able to give a rough indication of his location following a phone call made by the student. He telephoned the coastguard and said he was lost on the moor before his phone lost power.

Western Isles SNP MP Angus MacNeil said he would raise the accuracy of the document with Home Secretary Alan Johnson.

He said: "This is the Home Office looking for 'intelligence' to justify its plans just as the government did [when it went looking for weapons of mass distruction] in Iraq. I hope the Home Office will think again about their reckless proposals for a Stazi-like society."

Environment Agency signs "greenest ever" IT contract

Tom Young — 2009-11-13T11:38:00.000Z

Tom Young, Computing, Friday 13 November 2009 at 11:38:00

Capgemini will halve agency's carbon emissions from IT

The Environment Agency has signed a seven year otusourcing contract with supplier Capgemini which it claims will cut 50 per cent of its carbon emissions from IT.

The Agency says the deal is the most environmental IT contract ever signed by a public sector body and will also result in significant costs savings.

"This contract not only aims to exceed the Government’s sustainable IT targets, it also sets a high standard for environmental performance which we hope that other public sector organisations and businesses would wish to reflect," said Graham Ledward, director of resources at the Environment Agency.

The agreement includes hosting services, application operations and maintenance, network services, a support desk, security, and disaster recovery.

Much of the Environment Agency’s existing hardware is due for refresh so Capgemini can install more energy efficient systems.

All disposals of end-of-life equipment will be done in accordance with Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) regulations and new hardware will be produced and transported sustainably and consume less energy in operation.

In September the Government claimed it had saved £7m in the previous year through its green IT strategy, cutting the carbon footprint of Whitehall technology by the equivalent of 12,000 tonnes of CO2.

According to Whitehall figures, IT is responsible for up to 20 per cent of carbon emissions generated by government offices - some 460,000 tonnes a year, or the same as a million households emit in a month.

The Cabinet Office aims to make the energy consumption of public sector IT carbon-neutral within four years.

NHS IT spending falls short of forecasts

Tom Young — 2009-11-13T11:13:00.000Z

Tom Young, Computing, Friday 13 November 2009 at 11:13:00

Delays in implementing systems mean only a fifth of forecast money has been spent on paying contractors

The Department of Health has spent only around £1.2bn of the £5.1bn it forecast on paying contractors in the five regions of the National Programme for IT, according to official figures.

The outlay is so low largely because of the four-year delay in implementing electronic patient records and strict payment on delivery terms in the original contracts.

Spending on national systems such as the spine - which will store electronic patient records - the N3 broadband network, and the Choose and Book appointment booking system have adhered largely to spending forecasts.

But timetables on implementing electronic patient records in the five regions have slipped because of problems with the software, unsuccessful go-lives, and the departure of local service providers Accenture in the North East and East regions and Fujistu in the South region.

The Department of Health also released figures on how much it had spent implementing iSoft – one of the two patient records software packages – at earlier adopter trusts.

South Birmingham PCT, University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust, Hereford Hospitals NHS Trust, and Five Boroughs Partnership NHS Trust spent £4.7m each on implementation.

Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust paid £8m.

Mike O'Brien, minister for the National Programme for IT, refused to be drawn by parliamentary questions on how many people he expected to be using patient record systems.

"Numbers of users will depend on progress achieved in deployment of the systems concerned by that date," he said.

UK IT Industry Awards 2009 - The winners

Computing staff — 2009-11-13T08:00:00.000Z

Computing staff, Computing, Friday 13 November 2009 at 08:00:00

Computing and the BCS announce this year's prizes in a glittering ceremony in London attended by more than 1,300 guests and VIPs

The winners of the inaugural UK IT Industry Awards were announced last night in front of a packed house at the Battersea Park Events Arena in London.

The new awards, combining the longstanding Computing Awards for Excellence and the BCS IT Industry Awards, were presented in front of more than 1,300 VIP guests. The show was hosted by comedian Sean Lock, who led the congratulations for all the winners.

The party afterwards was great – and the quality of the winners and the runner-up medallists was outstanding. The roll call of winners and medallists is shown below. To see all the shortlisted entries, visit our web site at www.computing.co.uk/awards.

David Clarke, chief executive of the BCS said: "This year's awards have been exceptional. To qualify as a finalist is terrific, to win is an absolutely fantastic achievement, and I offer my heartfelt congratulations to all those took part. They not only provide examples of best practice but also demonstrate how IT is enabling today's information society from entertainment to healthcare, manufacturing to retail."

Computing congratulates all those whose excellence and quality was duly rewarded.

UK IT Industry Awards 2009

Outstanding Contribution to UK IT, sponsored by Deloitte

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, on the 20th anniversary of his invention of the world wide web

Individual Excellence Awards

Presented to IT professionals for demonstrating excellence in their field

IT Leader of the Year, sponsored by Qedis

Winner:

Phil Pavitt, chief information officer, Transport for London

Medallists:

David Henderson, chief information officer, Daily Mail & General Trust plc
Ajay Burlingham Bohr, director of information systems and media services, Anglia Ruskin University

Young IT Professional of the Year, sponsored by NetworkersMSB

Winner:

Jacques Erasmus, director of malware research, PrevX

Medallists:

Luke Claughton, IT & telecoms manager, Micheldever Tyre Services
Riyaz Patel, IT professional, Yorkshire Water

APM Group Project Manager of the Year

Winner:

Jeff Ridgley, performance & quality manager, Oxford City Council

Medallists:

Jayne Wirepa, project manager, National Grid
Mark Sweeny, project manager, Parity

Systems Developer of the Year, sponsored by CGI

Winner:

Josh Twist, application development consultant, Microsoft

Medallists:

Christian Jensen, business systems developer, Berwin Leighton Paisner
Rob Parsons, senior certified technical applications developer, Allianz Insurance

IT Service & Support Professional of the Year, sponsored by itSMF

Winner:

Mark Porton, programme & service delivery manager, Liverpool Direct

Medallists:

Jamie Brown, lead technology consultant, National Australia Group
Jagtar Singh Johal, service manager, National Grid

Business Analyst of the Year, sponsored by Assist Knowledge Development

Winner:

James Archer, business analyst, Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea

Medallists:

Christine Henly, business analyst, Allianz Insurance
Paul Perry, business analyst, NFU Mutual

Project Excellence Awards

Presented for projects that have delivered real benefits to organisations through the implementation of IT

Innovative Project of the Year, sponsored by Konica Minolta

Winner:

Glasgow School of Art Digital Design Studio and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hull – Venus: Virtual exploration of underwater sites

Medallists:

National Grid - Planning for Success
Mouchel Group - Maps@mouchel

Community Project of the Year, sponsored by Businessgreen.com

Winner:

Comic Relief / Carrenza - Red Nose Day 2009

Medallists:

Bradford Chronic Kidney Disease Electronic Advisory Service - E-consultations
Yorkshire Air Ambulance Service / SICL - Unified communications

Private Sector Project of the Year, sponsored by Neverfail

Winner:

Clear Channel Outdoor UK - WAVe

Medallists:

Portaltech - QuickLive for Long Tall Sally
British Airways - Zero touch desktop

Public Sector Project of the Year, sponsored by Intellect

Winner:

Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals – BloodTrack

Medallists:

HM Revenue & Customs – Self Assessment Online
Northern Ireland Department of Finance and Personnel – IT Assist shared service centre

Environmental Project of the Year, sponsored by Ricoh

Winner:

Petroleum Geo-Services / Keysource – Europe’s most efficient datacentre

Medallists:

National Australia Group – Managed print services
The Insolvency Service - Enabling the future

IT Project Team of the Year, sponsored by Connections Recruitment

Winner:

Portaltech - QuickLive for Long Tall Sally

Medallists:

Matalan Retail / Capgemini - E-commerce project
Virgin Atlantic - IT Lite

Organisational Excellence Awards

Presented for the delivery of IT excellence and customer satisfaction across the organisation

Best IT Strategy of the Year, sponsored by Pirean

Winner:

Rolls-Royce

Medallists:

Whitbread Group
Wales & West Utilities

Best SME IT Strategy of the Year, sponsored La Fosse Associates

Winner:

Bottomline Technologies

Medallist:

Business Stream

Diversity in IT Award, sponsored by IBM

Winner:

Google

Medallist:

Microsoft

Best Technology Supplier of the Year, sponsored by intY

Winner:

Emis

Medallists:

Vivantio
Hitachi Data Systems

Best Small IT Supplier of the Year, sponsored by Computing

Winner:

Telnic

Medallists:

nFlow Software
ScriptSwitch

Best IT Services Supplier of the Year, sponsored by Corizon

Winner:

Northgate Managed Services

Medallists:

Glasshouse Technologies
FDM Group

Promoting IT Professionalism award, sponsored by the BCS

Winner:

IBM UK

Medallists:

Lincolnshire Police
Deloitte
Allianz Insurance

Technology Excellence Awards

Presented for the new hardware, software or IT services products that make the biggest contribution to business technology

Research & Development Achievement of the Year, sponsored by Portal Technology Services

Winner:

BT - Autonomic failure prediction and prevention

Medallists:

Lloyd's Register Group Services - Enterprise calculation framework
HR Wallingford - OpenWeb: Integrated environmental modelling

Information Security Product of the Year, sponsored by Rosslyn Analytics

Winner:

ScanSafe - SaaS web security

Medallists:

CrypotCard - Crypto-MAS
SafeNet - ViewPIN+

Internet Product of the Year, sponsored by Postcode Anywhere

Winner:

Huddle.net - Huddle

Medallists:

Ninth Wave / Lloyds Banking Group - Change management toolkit
Mr Site - Takeaway Website: Pro Edition

Mobile Product of the Year, sponsored by IT-Freedom

Winner:

Agant - National Rail Enquiries for iPhone

Medallists:

Cordia - E-router
Point to Point - Leicestershire Constabulary mobile data project

IT Infrastructure Product of the Year, sponsored by SoThin

Winner:

Autonomy - IDOL

Medallists:

Zeus Technology - Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager
NetSupport - NetSupport DNA version 3

Best New Product Developed in the UK, sponsored by Telnic

Winner:

Vicon - T-Series

Medallists:

Sales-i – Sales-i
Rosslyn Analytics - RA.Pid

Gateshead gets superfast broadband

Tom Young — 2009-11-12T11:09:00.000Z

Tom Young, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 11:09:00

Council hopes the speed and quality of the network will bring businesses to the area

Gateshead Council has deployed a high speed broadband fibre network offering its business quarter speeds of up to 10Gb per second.

The network, known as G-ti, will be open access so any service provider can deliver any application to users. Gateshead Council hopes the speed and quality of the network will bring businesses to the area and encourage innovative start-ups.

Council lead Mick Henry said: "Gateshead Council is delighted to be at the forefront of broadband technology and leading the way by being the first

local authority to go live with a project like this."

The Council envisages businesses offering services such as video conferencing, video on demand, streaming media, data storage, disaster recovery and image processing could be interested.

The network was developed in partnership with Alcatel-Lucent and the Community Broadband Network which helps develop local broadband schemes.

"G-ti is a great project, adding to the growing patchwork of next generation broadband initiatives around the country," said Malcolm Corbett, chief executive of the Community Broadband Network.

The government estimates that up to a third of the country does not have access to super fast broadband and is instigating a 50p levy on phone bills to provide universal coverage.

The Conservatives have promised to abolish the levy should they win power next year.

A number of local projects have sprung up to fill the market gap in the third of homes and business not currently being reached, including projects in Bournemoth, Dundee and Northampton.

BT outlook slightly improved amid pension and IT services worries

Tom Young — 2009-11-12T11:04:00.000Z

Tom Young, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 11:04:00

Restructuring of firm continues apace but pensions deficit doubles

BT today reported second quarter profits of £677m - a six per cent fall on the £722m earned in the year ago quarter.

The firm is in the process of restructuring following two profit warnings last year and problems in its the Global Services division, a supplier of IT services which has struggled with some troublesome contracts such as the National Programme for IT.

Chief executive Ian Livingston was cautiously optimistic about the process.

“We have had another quarter of progress but there remains a lot more to do, " he said. "With total cost reductions of over £900m in the first half, we have made significant headway towards our previous target of well over £1bn for the full year."

The Global Services division continued to struggle with revenues falling another 6 per cent on the year ago quarter to £2bn.

Revenues in its Retail division fell 3 per cent to £2.06bn though core earnings rose by 11 per cent.

And the firm also revealed that the deficit of its final salary pension scheme has more than doubled in the past six months from £4bn to £9.3bn. BT is continuing efforts to reduce its pension deficit, paying £525m into the scheme in its current financial year, and committing to the same amount in 2010-11 and 2011-12.

But BT said its trading conditions are now improving and it increased revenue and dividend forecasts for the full year. It now expects its revenues for the year to 31 March 2010 to decline by between 3 per cent and 4 per cent, better than its previous guidance of a fall of between 4 per cent and 5 per cent.

Innocents to be kept on DNA database for six years

Tom Young — 2009-11-11T15:27:00.000Z

Tom Young, Computing, Wednesday 11 November 2009 at 15:27:00

Length halved from 12 years after pressure from opposition and campaigners

The DNA of people arrested in England and Wales and then found innocent will no longer be held for more than six years, according to the BBC.

Currently the DNA of those arrested for a crime but not convicted can be held on the database indefinitely.

But the European Court of Human Rights ruled last year that this was illegal.

The Home Office then announced plans to keep the DNA of those cleared of crimes on the DNA database for a minimum of 12 years. This has now been reduced to six years after pressure from opposition parties and campaigners.

But the new proposals will allow police to keep DNA from those arrested for terrorism for an indefinite period, even if they are freed or found not guilty.

Almost a million of the six million profiles on the database are thought to belong to innocent people.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson said the package of proposed reforms will protect privacy - while still allowing police to use DNA to solve crime.

The current database has helped detect 300,000 crimes over a decade - 0.68 per cent of all crimes.

Between April and September 2009 the National DNA Database produced 112 matches to murders, 286 to rapes and 17,984 to other crimes.

Urban Outfitters to introduce multichannel sales capability

Angelica Mari — 2009-11-11T15:11:00.000Z

Angelica Mari, Computing, Wednesday 11 November 2009 at 15:11:00

Retailer wants to streamline order management with new platform

Fashion retailer Urban Outfitters has adopted a new order management platform to improve its multichannel shopping experience.

The rollout is part of a customer relationship management (CRM) implementation and will cover all the retailer’s channels and brands.

The retailer hopes to improve inventory visibility and synchronise channel operations on its website, allowing customers to research, buy, ship and return using the site, regardless of their location.

“The new system will provide us with a foundation for our cross-channel operations that will help us to deliver the customer experience we are aiming for,” said Calvin Hollinger, chief information and logistics officer at the retailer.

The system also provides call-centre capabilities as well as tools to manage the sales lifecycle, including order capture, order management, transportation, warehouse and yard management and supply-chain visibility.

Sterling Commerce is providing the system, as well as another platform for secure managed file transfer to enable the secure integration of major customer files stored internally and externally as part of the CRM rollout.

Brittany Ferries improves online search

Angelica Mari — 2009-11-11T14:47:00.000Z

Angelica Mari, Computing, Wednesday 11 November 2009 at 14:47:00

New search functionality should boost web sales

Brittany Ferries has introduced a new search functionality to its website in an attempt to boost holiday bookings.

Under the web revamp, the search function has been transformed from a linear process to a filtered search system, meaning customers can choose their holiday using a more flexible search criteria.

“The new function allows customers to be really specific about what they search for - allowing them to create their perfect holiday, for example customers can look for hotels with gyms, or cottages where pets are welcome,” said Matt Randle, internet services manager at Brittany Ferries.

“We’ve also seen a huge increase in the number of pages Google is indexing - in just over two months it has leapt from 3000 to 308,000 pages, and shows no signs of slowing. This is really helping to improve our search engine optimisation,” said Randle.

Other new site functionality now includes a new booking widget, a tab panel, gallery and RSS feeds.

The website was built by GOSS Interactive and uses the supplier’s tools for content management and daily administration.

Bibby cuts software to the bone

Martin Courtney — 2009-11-12T16:52:00.000Z

Martin Courtney, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 16:52:00

Software asset management solution staves off indignant vendors and improves distribution company's bottom line

As one of the UK's top logistics providers, Bibby Distribution operates from over 60 locations in the UK and employs around 2,500 people, providing outsourced distribution services to household names such as the Toyota Parts Centre and Golden Wonder.

With so many staff, the company's IT department needs to keep close track of the applications and operating systems running on over 1,000 desktop PCs, which makes effective software asset management (SAM) a priority from both a legal and financial standpoint.

"We have a strong governance culture – the demands are that we are legal and we stay legal," said Bibby IT director, Robert E. Lee. "But nothing says we have to pay more [for software licensing] than we actually need to, either because we do not need as much software as we thought, or because we can defer support [costs] on software that we are not using."

In a bid to reduce its expenditure on unnecessary software licensing, Bibby appointed SAM and IT audit consultancy Liken to conduct a pilot software efficiency audit using the Abexus Enterprise Meter data gathering tool earlier this year. The results of that pilot proved better than expected and the software has now been rolled out across Bibby's organisation.

Using a third party organisation for SAM represents a new strategy for Bibby, which previously endeavoured to tackle the issue in-house.

"Software licensing is an absolute minefield and you have to review [licenses] with care," said Lee. "The general view is that some software vendors make it deliberately difficult and opaque so we preferred to use a specialist company to do it for us. I do not claim to be a solicitor but find it useful to rely on Liken to meet legal and economic objectives."

Bibby uses a wide range of applications, from standard software suites and back office products to specialised freight forwarding and transport warehousing applications. Abexus helps Bibby see exactly where that software is and more importantly how often it is being used. That means underused applications, like Microsoft Office Professional for example, can be removed and the license allocated elsewhere.

"MS Office can be used for an intensive period by somebody, but then not used again for six months, so the question is do these users actually need it," said Lee. "If not, we can uninstall it and put it on another desktop."

Lee admits that some users are reluctant to give away any software, whether they use it or not, but says it is simply a matter of selling the concept properly.

"Very few people actually object if you explain to them that if they have a problem or find that [taking away an application] restricts them, they can come back to us and we will re-assess the situation," said Lee.

Lee would not divulge how much Bibby is paying for the contract with Liken and Abexus, "It does involve a bit of extra workload for one of our infrastructure team, but still pays for itself because we can heavily deskill that work," he said. "We do not have to have an out-and-out technical specialist – the software does it for you and we always have a Liken expert on tap."

So is Bibby Distribution more confident that it is 100 per cent compliant with its current software licensing requirements following a full implementation of the Liken/Abexus combination?

"I would be very upset if any software supplier became indignant, as I hope we are tantalisingly close to being perfect now. But I suppose nobody ever is," said Lee.

Given the difficulties involved in achieving that perfection, Lee has unequivocal advice for any company that is approached by software vendors which have a right to insist that it is compliant with the terms and conditions of any one software product.

"You declare, then go and buy a license – it isn't rocket science," said Lee. "Most software providers will not have a problem and are more than happy to oblige if you are honest and say 'We checked and found we are a few licenses short, but we'd like to buy some more.'"

BT broadband map has wrong co-ordinates

Martin Courtney — 2009-11-12T12:23:00.000Z

Martin Courtney, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 12:23:00

Next generation access network will fail to reach many regions with high demand for faster fibre optic links

BT’s next generation access (NGA) broadband network will fail to reach many prospective customers, say experts, who have compiled research into where end user demand is most likely to be.

A report published today [12/11/09] by broadband analyst company Point Topic has overlaid its own map of NGA broadband demand over BT’s stated plan for coverage. It finds that BT's rollout falls considerably short in many urban areas, meaning thousands of business and residential customers may be left with no access to superfast broadband links.

“The program they have announced is quite a way short of even what will be driven by market demand, so we are likely to see a big have and have-not divide,” said Point Topic chief analyst Tim Johnson.

BT has long argued that it is uncertain about the scale of demand for fast, fibre optic broadband links offering up to 40Mbit/s of downstream bandwidth amongst UK homes and businesses, and Point Topic’s research seems to suggest the telco has substantially underestimated end user interest.

Many businesses and local councils are concerned about the prospects for NGA in their region, with bandwidth up to 40Mbit/s expected to boost the local commerce by helping businesses thrive in the digital economy.

Alternative high speed broadband provision from rival providers will be available in a few selected areas, including South Yorkshire. Digital Region, a partnership between Yorkshire Forward (the regional development agency for Yorkshire and Humber), Sheffield Council, Barnsley Council, Rotherham Council and Doncaster Council that has attracted over £90m of funding from European Union, for example.

Since its inception in April this year [2009] Digital Region has contracted Thales UK to build a network offering a minimum guaranteed 25Mbit/s broadband service to business and residential customers, with 97 per cent of the region’s population expected to get the service by July 2012.

“Let us be clear that even without Digital Region, South Yorkshire will get its next generation, very high speed, 21st century network – because the future is digital.

But, without our intervention, it might just have to wait until the 22nd century to get it. There is no reason to suppose that, left to its own devices, the telecoms market will favour South Yorkshire," said Phil Coppard OBE, chief executive of Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council at the Digital Region partnership’s launch.

"Without Digital Region, South Yorkshire, or at least large parts of South Yorkshire, as in so many other national investment decisions, will be at the back of the queue,” he added.

"Digital Region has had to spend years going through all sorts of hoops to convince the authorities that this is a reliable thing to do," said Johnson. " It makes South Yorkshire look pretty good but it is not an easy option."

Gartner research vice president Scott Morrison points out that DSL based Ethernet in the first mile is also a viable alternative to high speed fibre for many businesses in the UK depending on how close they are to the local telephone exchange.

"BT is not the only provider of these Ethernet solutions in the UK, and as such, this represents a competitive alternative to fibre, both for internet and for MPLS connectivity," he said.

BT has said the NGA network will cover 40 per cent of homes and businesses by 2012, though Point Topic says that only 35 per cent is possible according what the telco has revealed of its plans so far. The cost of the NGA rollout may well prove a barrier to its breadth, with recruitment and other issues similarly affecting BT's ability to deploy the network in a short space of time.

“There are issues over BT finances, and NGA rollout faces cost and capacity problems as well,” said Johnson. “In a way it is much more expensive to try to implement NGA faster rather than steadily roll it out over a period of many years."

"They [Point Topic] are saying that there is potential demand for NGA outside the areas that have already been announced," countered a BT spokesperson. " Since we [BT] have only announced the exchange areas covering the 1.5m premises we'll be taking NGA to next summer, that is not surprising. We will be bringing NGA to 40 per cent of the UK by 2012 but Point Topic does not have information about which exchange areas we'll be deploying it to because we have not [yet] announced the vast majority of them."

BT's latest financial results saw 'another quarter of progress' according to chief executive Ian Livingston.

The troubled Global Services Division, which paid an 'impairment' charge of £280m in the previous quarter, saw revenue dip slightly by 3 per cent.

"These figures are more or less in line with the situation seen in the first quarter, and with BT's own expectations," said Gartner's Morrisson.

"Improvements in profitability have come from cost reduction, which is necessary, but of course, creates short-term concerns about how well BT can serve its customers while it is in the midst of its transition."

Councils must reconsider their IT strategy

Nicola Brittain — 2009-11-12T07:45:00.000Z

Nicola Brittain, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 07:45:00

Tight budgets have made local authorities consider strategies such as consolidation and outsourcing

There is growing debate about which model of IT provision local authorities should adopt to increase efficiency and output in the face of the tightest budgets in five years.

Cardiff Council last week claimed a UK first, with a 15-year partnership with Indian IT services firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The deal will see strategists from both the council and the supplier working together from the authority’s premises.

Using offshore providers has traditionally been politically sensitive for local councils, but such a deal suggests attitudes may be changing.

New models

The partnership marks a new engagement style between the public and private sector, according to Brian Woodford, director, public sector at TCS UK, who said there will be increased focus on efficiency and how risk is managed, as well as a complete analysis of alternative service models.

“It is not a traditional buyer/supplier relationship and will see the public sector taking the best bits of the private sector,” he said.

“The deal was largely about efficiency. We also offered a cost-effective solution.”

According to a report last week by consultancy Deloitte, local authorities should retain control of their technology strategy and management of suppliers rather than outsource their entire IT operation.

And John Serle, editor of the annual IT Trends report from user group Socitm said there can be problems with such partnership models because the two parties do not have an equal investment in the organisation.

“The supplier has not put in money, so is unlikely to take ownership of the project,” he said.

“A partnership in the traditional sense rarely comes out of agreements such as these. But there are examples, such as BT’s partnership with Liverpool Council, that have seen technology suppliers invest in the project and end up owning it.”

BT will have invested £84m in new technology for Liverpool Council by the ti me the contract ends in 2017.

Serle said that only 10 per cent of local authorities currently outsource all their IT with examples being Milton Keynes, Lincolnshire and Birmingham City Council.

But he anticipates an increase in full outsourcing in 2010 and argues with Deloitte that there can be problems with this model, but that many of these are related to inflexibility once a deal has been set up, and can be avoided.

Addressing overcapacity

Serle said one area that will come under increased scrutiny is the considerable overcapacity in local authorities.

“There are 30,000 people involved in government IT – imagine giving those 30,000 people a common agenda and pooling the resources. Enormous changes could be made in terms of systems analysis and design,” he said.

One way of achieving efficiency would be for local councils to partner and share technology and staff.

This model has been adopted by several local councils in the US, where developers in the authorities create applications for the provision of services and share them via the internet. The same is also being done in parts of Europe.

Cultural conservatism

However, there is a reluctance to follow such a model here because it is not part of the culture of local councils, according to Serle.

“It takes incredible political courage to make big decisions,” he said.

“By way of example, there is an assumption that every school must have a headteacher – but why? It is costly and arguably unnecessary.”

Serle believes that as a result of the difficulty of making such big decisions, many more councils will opt for full outsourcing as a way of cutting costs regardless of the problems it can cause.

Another way in which local authorities can reduce their costs would be by publishing their information on the internet.

People put all sorts of personal data on Facebook and other social networking sites, but seem reluctant to have government data published, according to Serle.

“Wouldn’t it be valuable, for example, to be able to access medical records on the web following an accident on a skiing holiday? This idea has a practical application,” he said.

In addition, some of the more innovative local authorities, such as Birmingham, are believed to be looking into software-as-a-service solutions from companies such as Google, and could reduce their storage spend tenfold, according to some experts.

“When local authorities are given a budget to replace desktop PCs and laptops, they need to take a fresh look at how best to spend their money – and they are beginning to realise this,” said Serle.

“We will see some big changes in local government IT management in 2010.”

Ringing the changes at TalkTalk

Angelica Mari — 2009-11-12T07:45:00.000Z

Angelica Mari, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 07:45:00

CIO David Cooper tells Computing how his team is coping with the challenge of separating systems from the telco’s former parent, Carphone Warehouse, while integrating recent acquisition Tiscali

TalkTalk’s chief information officer (CIO), David Cooper, is now busier than ever as the company – which has become the UK’s largest broadband provider – embarks on an ambitious project to revamp its IT.

Since joining the firm in the summer, Cooper has overseen the integration of recently acquired internet provider Tiscali, as well as TalkTalk’s spin-off from parent Carphone Warehouse – both are major IT programmes.

The integration of Tiscali – bought in May for £236m – requires enhancement of the TalkTalk core platform Trio to accommodate new functionality such as IPTV, as well as other undisclosed products and price plans.

Tiscali’s point-to-point architecture dates from the start of the decade, according to Cooper, so the migration requires careful analysis and planning – with a view to enabling new features, migrating customers and shutting down old systems in favour of a more robust structure.

“In addition, Tiscali faced some IT issues in the past and worked pragmatically to fix them, resulting in some discontinuities between the systems we are repairing this now,” he told Computing.

The new features added to TalkTalk’s Trio platform are inherited from Carphone Warehouse and based on technology provided by customer relationship management (CRM) vendor Chordiant Software, billing specialist Single View and integration specialist Tibco.

The systems consolidation, which is expected to be completed within 18 months, will enable the company to free up space at its two datacentres for new initiatives.

“There are various new products and services coming up, so that will probably mean a growth in our IT footprint,” said Cooper.

The datacentres are currently managed by IBM, under an infrastructure IT services deal that includes servers, storage, desktop, network and site management.

The separation from Carphone Warehouse is another key project for Cooper, involving the detaching from the parent company of common systems such as sales and logistics.

“This is a fairly major project as TalkTalk grew out of Carphone Warehouse, so there are a lot of shared systems. However, our core system Trio, which supports services that include CRM and billing, was developed as a totally separate new solution for TalkTalk while we were part of Carphone,” he said.

According to Cooper, software and hardware specifications of many of TalkTalk’s systems, such as its billing platform, make it difficult to introduce new technologies such as the cloud to some areas of its IT setup.

“The technical specifications are limited but these are determined by the vendors – until that changes, some applications can’t be run in the cloud. We are working around that by consolidating and simplifying our setup, but it will take a while,” said Cooper.

“Our strategy is about changing things very rapidly, but big infrastructure changes take more time. So we have a number of cycles running, with agile development at the front end and an architecture that supports that slower rate of change for the fundamentals,” he said.

TalkTalk is also revisiting its outsourcing contracts, which include deals with Indian suppliers Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Patni and Tech Mahindra.“We already use a lot of offshore services. We won’t reverse that, but we will move to a more outcome-based approach,” said Cooper.

“It all started off as a lot of ‘body shopping’ – buying in people resources as and when needed – which is OK to get started, but we want to move to a position where suppliers are paid based on what they actually deliver. We have some of that and it is working well. When you give [suppliers] ownership and responsibility, they are normally successful.”

The IT reorganisation at TalkTalk will see it changing its relationship with the vendors – it will expect them to have a better understanding of its business. The firm’s in-house IT team will be expected to have a similar understanding (see below).

Cooper expects his department to have carried out a “dramatic simplification and consolidation” of its technology setup within 18 months, making it easier to run, more flexible for the launch of new products and more cost-effective.

“I don’t think anybody would have predicted TalkTalk would be in this position a few years ago – we are the same size as BT in terms of residential business, which is an immense achievement,” said Cooper.

“We can work to bring our systems and processes together and there is a huge opportunity in that space. In fact, we will be so fleet of foot that BT will face a considerable challenge.”

How Cooper set about building a new team of motivated IT professionals

David Cooper joined TalkTalk as chief information officer (CIO) this summer from mobile operator Hutchinson 3G, where he was IT director, chief technology officer and later head of operations and technology.

As well as leading two crucial IT projects for the company, Cooper has had to use his leadership skills to bring in staff from different areas of the Carphone Warehouse group to create his own team. “Some of my IT staff were working in different areas of Carphone such as AOL and TalkTalk, and I have had to work out where the natural synergies are,” said Cooper.

While formal succession planning has not yet been introduced, Cooper joked that his recent car accident highlighted the need for management continuity within the team.

“It is all about putting the right people in the right places so that if I am suddenly not around, it will carry on. Within a year, our aim is to be able to deliver everything the business needs – we will have the structure, career roadmaps and teams in place,” he said. “My team will be sustainable – we should be able to survive if someone leaves.”

According to Cooper, the key leadership skill is to communicate well and gain trust from staff.

“This is a bit like the Army – people will follow you, but they want to believe you know where you are going, that you know how to get there and that you have the experience to do it,” he said.

“It is dangerous if staff get mixed messages, or they can’t see the end of a project. But it takes a little while for everyone to buy into the sort of management style that is required to deliver this.”

Future IT leaders do not need to be steeped in technology, said Cooper, who holds a physics degree. However, they must be able to solve problems, to think laterally, analyse technical detail and put it into a business context.

Although IT professionals should always look after their own careers, Cooper said that one of his goals as a CIO is to offer a stimulating working environment. “If [staff] want to move internally, we will plan for it and find someone to fill their positions. If they want to move on elsewhere, they will – but we try to make this an exciting place to work, somewhere people will choose to stay.”

Open data initiative gathers momentum

Tom Young — 2009-11-12T07:45:00.000Z

Tom Young, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 07:45:00

The government’s long-touted scheme to improve public services by opening up state data is finally yielding tangible results

After years of talk but little action, the government’s plan to open up state data online is finally gathering momentum.

Last month, the Cabinet Office set up a beta version of www.data.gov.uk with more than 1,000 datasets for developers to test the potential for re-using information. Currently, the site can only be accessed by registered developers, but the government hopes to open it to the public next month.

In addition, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, brought in by Gordon Brown earlier this year to oversee the project, recently met the Cabinet to update them on progress reportedly leaving them in awe.

At a recent conference hosted by IT industry body Intellect, Stephen Timms, the minister for Digital Britain, said: “More datasets will go up between now and the beginning of next year and we will look to increase the number on [the www.data.gov.uk site] every month.”

The move was recommended by the Power of Information Review in 2007 but developers had been skeptical of the government’s commitment to the project after slow progress in making information available.

However, this is changing. The government’s renewed commitment to the project has been mirrored by increasing enthusiasm among developers keen to show what they can do with the data.

Emma Mulqueeny, who is supporting several government departments in putting information online, ran two events in recent months called Rewired State where developers were given government data and asked to develop applications using it.

The results were impressive (see box) and included an application that provides information on local bus routes as well as timetables when a postcode was entered.

“The following weekend Boris Johnson announced a 10-year, £20m project to do the same thing,” said Mulqueeny.

“The sooner more data is online, the sooner these developers can get working and it will cost the taxpayer virtually nothing,” she said.

This is a message often trumpeted by developers. And the same developers have long accused Directgov of trying to control information when it should just publish it in its raw form.

Emer Coleman, who is heading up a project at the Greater London Authority to put London’s information online, has the same view.

“The word from developers is clear get the information out there, in whatever form it is in, and they’ll figure out a way to use it,” she said.

Many are worried that bureaucratic concerns over how to release data, in which format and on what platform will lead to a delay in publication, meaning more multimillion-pound government projects will be launched when the same job could be done for free.

There is still a degree of coercion required to encourage government departments to make their information available it needs a transparency that is anathema to many civil servants in Britain. But people are coming around and the benefits could be huge, according to Coleman.

“Not only will it transfer costs out of the public sector but it will allow people to make more informed decisions about the effectiveness of various local services as the public sector enters a huge fiscal squeeze,” she said.

How open access to state data might benefit society

Creating applications that use raw government data can throw up interesting results. Here are a few examples of tools created by developers:

One developer, Tom Taylor, used transport and central government data to create a “newspaper” for anyone moving into an area. It offers information on transport, health, education and crime in one document based on a postcode entry.

Another application, created by Sam Smith and known as Jobcentreproplus, informs users of all the local jobs near their postcode.

A project picked up by the government’s Central Office of Information saw two teenagers develop an application that plotted a safe route to school based on crime data.

Another developer created a postcode-based application that gave users information on local bus routes and timetables.

One developer mined Companies House data to create Companies Openhouse, a system that made all the Companies House data available 24 hours a day. (Currently, this information is only available during office hours.) The system also made the data more searchable.

From ancient to virtual worlds

Dave Bailey — 2009-11-11T15:59:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, Computing, Wednesday 11 November 2009 at 15:59:00

In a bid to increase business, brands are looking to connect to web communities and community-inspired content. The results can be spectacular

The notion that your customers are only 10 seconds away from your competitor’s web site still holds true. But while the server and network infrastructure needed to deliver a web site that stays up 99.999 per cent of the time is one aspect of delivering a good online experience, the phrase “content is king” is equally relevant, and just as important for customer retention.

Would a better way to engage customers be by spicing up that dowdy site with some visually stunning graphics, tied into standard e-commerce transaction middleware?

For visually stunning graphics, read virtual worlds, whose genesis can be traced back to the multi-user dungeon program MUD, which originated in 1978 at Essex University. But it was many years before what people now think of as a virtual world was realised – a 3D, immersive world, available 24/7 via a web connection.

So the question for businesses is how big is the opportunity to monetise commercial web sites by introducing a virtual world of online activity?

UK firm Rezzable is one company pushing the boundaries of virtual world technology, both technically and in identifying how such a business model could work.

“There is a convergence with content delivery that is creating a new opportunity, and a lot of effort is being focused on making this happen now,” says chief executive Jon Himoff.

Such content delivery will span the web, TV and mobile devices, and Himoff believes the internet is not a destination any more – just a place to engage with brands.

“We can see that all the content delivery pieces will come together, but currently it is very fragmented,” he says.

Such fragmentation is something Rezzable is addressing with the launch of its first brand, Heritage Key. This aims to draw together various content delivery mechanisms to see if such a virtual environment boosts visitor numbers.

Himoff describes Heritage Key as “the first solid example of a do-it- yourself immersive, virtual online grid”.

“We’re starting to deliver projects for customers that make the most of this technology and we’re hosting it for them as well,” he says.

The first site Heritage Key has worked on is a virtual museum that allows users to explore King Tutankhamun’s tomb in a digital Valley of the Kings (see http://heritage-key.com), which Rezzable had previously set up in Linden Labs’ Second Life environment.

Second Life is a 3D virtual world running on a compute grid that also offers “tools for business, educators, non-profits, and entrepreneurs to develop a virtual presence,” according to its creators.

Himoff says Rezzable previewed its King Tut Virtual area on Second Life earlier this year, but decided to move to its own grid infrastructure. He says the main reasons for the move were integration and costs.

“Second Life is a closed platform but we use OpenSim [a 3D application server used to create virtual environments] that is open source and free,” he says.

Himoff says this gave Heritage Key a lot of options when configuring the software, hosting it, and integrating it with the Drupal content management system, which is also open source.

“The costs are dramatically lower and we can host more concurrent visitors on our servers,” he says.

Heritage Key is the first of what Himoff calls a content-oriented community, bringing together differing content strands. This includes Flickr, for people to share pictures, and also Facebook and Twitter for people who want to interact with each other, as well as providing information about their own experiences in the virtual world.

However, the community will be focused around a type of content that Himoff admits site owners “will have to interest [users] in,” and which would become the foundation of that community.

“Within this picture, one of the things we find interesting is the migration of user-generated content, which has a lot of issues about copyright infringement,” he says.

“There is also all the management of this user-generated content into a kind of mature version of that, which we think of as community-inspired content.”

Himoff added: “We looked at this in terms of the marketing opportunity, because everyone wants to visit an ancient world site physically, but not just turn up and see a bunch of rocks.”

A common problem for popular ancient world tourist sites in real life is access and sustainability, which a virtual world helps to address – even if it can never entirely replicate the experience of actually being there.

In the case of the actual site of Tutankhamun’s tomb, Himoff points out that currently the tomb is closed, because wall paintings have been attacked by bacteria transported onsite by tourists.

“They are spraying these paintings with penicillin because they have this weird fungus on them,” he says.

“Remember – these places were never meant to be opened. They are extremely dry, and so when the tour buses show up and everybody sweats all over the place, the walls act like a sponge, since they have never been exposed to that much moisture.”

Himoff says that in 20 years’ time, the only way people will be able to see the tomb could be through some kind of virtual world.

A further example of Heritage Key’s thinking around community-inspired content is another virtual world it is working on, which will soon go live: Stonehenge, the prehistoric monument in Wiltshire.

Himoff says that a virtual site can build on the many theories about what functions the stones performed.

“It fitted with our idea of community-inspired content that needs a catalyst to boost site visitors and interactions between them,” he says.

“Our view is that there are three levels of content. First, traditional commissioned content. Then there is curated content, where you look at the web and pull back information. Finally there is computer-generated data and content, where all the content is put together.”

If the virtual world concept works for real-life historic sites, then growing a community adds value and makes the site more interesting, generating a critical mass online.

“We’re seeing that around Stonehenge, where we’ve connected with some of the community members, researchers and writers, as well as people with more extreme views as to what Stonehenge is all about,” says Himoff.

“The upshot is all kinds of information that you would not have had you just gone to Wikipedia, or you just went to Stonehenge and walked around with the audio guide.”

So how do sites such as King Tut Virtual and the Stonehenge virtual world cross over to the harsh world of retail trade, online brands and e-commerce?

Himoff says brands need a more relevant way to connect to communities on the web.

“The nature of cost-effective online advertising is about reach and making it cheap – but actually, brands need to find better ways to spend more to participate in the right online communities,” he says.

Brands need to work with quality online communities and take a more active role in supporting new content and media events, says Himoff.

“For example, we have co-creation programmes where we make unique content for brands, which has more relevance for them, and will get those brands above what I call the noise level of today’s standard web sites,” he says.

Heritage Key is aiming to create content-rich, visually stunning, immersive 3D spaces, which offer visitors lots of options for interactivity and engagement, while cross-linking between online and real worlds, and pushing the boundaries of virtual worlds.

How firms are exploring the money-making potential of virtual worlds

As online sales continue to climb, firms looking to differentiate themselves from the competition are increasingly examining virtual worlds.

But there is a distinction to be made between revenue from virtual goods and revenue from physical goods bought through a virtual world.

For the former, investment bank Piper Jaffray predicts global sales of virtual goods to be more than $2.2bn (£1.3bn) this year, rising above $6bn by 2013.

As an example of the latter, PC vendor Lenovo launched its “e-lounge” virtual showroom earlier this year. Based on Nortel’s Project Chainsaw – also known as web.alive – Lenovo’s virtual world is constructed using Epic Games Unreal Tournament application programming interfaces and engine, seen by many experts as better than Second Life’s OpenGL graphics interface.

Users can wander through the lounge, check out Lenovo’s product range and interact with anybody else on the site, although buying a product links back to Lenovo’s conventional web site.

Letting users buy virtual goods is one way of driving revenue, but the new generation of customers exposed to games, social networking and other 3D online environments is likely to be attracted to retail brands that are able to sell physical items through a virtual world.

Inevitably, there are potential drawbacks to running virtual world e-commerce environments as an adjunct to standard web sites. Perhaps the biggest challenge is how to report to real-world administrators about what virtual customers are doing.

Although conventional middleware can be interrogated about standard online transaction behaviour, tracking how virtual customers behave inside a virtual world and mapping that to their purchasing decisions will be a whole new task for marketing executives to tackle.

Six steps to greater datacentre efficiency

Doug Washburn — 2009-11-10T13:23:00.000Z

Doug Washburn, Computing, Tuesday 10 November 2009 at 13:23:00

Forrester Research offers best practice advice

To help IT professionals improve datacentre management while cutting costs and improving reliability and resiliency, Forrester Research offers the following tips:

Rationalise your application portfolio

The datacentre and its expensive and energy-consuming IT, power distribution and cooling equipment exists to support applications. And it’s not uncommon for applications to be severely under-used, which snowballs into IT infrastructure capital and operating expenses. Datacentre managers should liaise with users on the phasing out of severely under-utilised applications.

Consolidate and eliminate under-utilised servers

Datacentres are plagued with “dead” servers, or those with utilisation levels below six per cent, consuming power, cooling and space resources. Eliminating and consolidating these servers will free up capital and operating costs, and extend datacentre life by freeing up power, cooling and space capacity.

Increase your server virtualisation ratio

While nearly every organisation admits to virtualising servers, the savings potential from virtualisation is often not fully realised. Forrester finds that mature virtual production environments usually have about 30 virtual machines – and coupled with advanced automation tools, this could reach 50, without undermining service-level agreements.

Enforce “virtual first” policies for new applications

By stipulating that all new applications must run on virtualised infrastructure, you will benefit from improved disaster recovery and business continuity; rapid — or even automatic — restart of applications after an IT failure; and when used in conjunction with data replication between datacentres, it can restart applications at a recovery site following a primary site failure.

Increase storage utilisation and reclaim storage capacity

Storage environments are plagued with low utilisation rates and highly redundant data. IT professionals should consider thin provisioning and data deduplication technologies to improve utilisation and reclaim storage capacity.

Optimise your datacentre temperature

While manufacturers of IT equipment have set the allowable high-end temperature at 27°C, most datacentres are too cold, operating at 8°C to 20°C. With 60-70 per cent of datacentre energy consumption going to power and cooling, this represents a significant operating cost. Under supervision, turn up the temperature in your datacentre. For example, one IT manager took his datacentre temperature from 20°C to 23°C and recorded a 12.7 per cent reduction in energy use.

Doug Washburn is an infrastructure and operations analyst at Forrester Research.

Several Forrester reports are available free of charge to Computing readers by visiting www.forrester.com/computinguk.

Case study: Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust

Lisa Kelly — 2009-11-10T11:45:00.000Z

Lisa Kelly, Computing, Tuesday 10 November 2009 at 11:45:00

Consolidation opens up money-making possibilities

Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust (NHT) has consolidated IT systems at its datacentre to the extent that it is able to explore the possibility of renting out spare capacity.

In 2004, the mental health trust had a server room that was straining to serve the needs of some 7,000 users. “It was more of a broom cupboard than a server room. When it got warm, the smell of silicon was not good,” says Steve Wilkes, systems manager, corporate IT health informatics service, at the trust.

By 2006, the trust had a purpose-built datacentre where all devices had a dual-power supply, and it was equipped with a sophisticated under-floor cooling system designed by Wilkes.

“The datacentre is cool, stable, with guaranteed power and biometric access control to ensure security,” says Wilkes, but he wanted further improvements.

“We are a mental health trust so don’t do blood and bandages. A lot of our work is documented, such as clinicians’ notes, and we have 23TB of critical data across the trust that needs managing and protecting,” he says.

Virtualisation was the next step, and after experimenting with the technology, VMware was rolled out for production systems.

“Nearly 85 per cent of our server estate is virtualised, and we plan to do a further 10 per cent by Christmas. We have consolidated and simplified our datacentre,” says Wilkes.

Direct-attached storage was replaced by a storage area network (SAN) based on NetApp technology that works with the virtualisation software. The move has cut management time for Wilkes and seven systems engineers by 70 per cent.

Instead of 16 cabinets housing 170 servers, the Nottingham datacentre now has two cabinets housing the SAN, two cabinets with the virtualisation technology and three cabinets with Citrix servers.

Meanwhile, a sister site at the Rampton Hospital (above), which is connected to the Nottingham datacentre and mirrors data, has consolidated 50 servers to 12 VMware servers and six Citrix servers.

The result is a much greener datacentre.

“We have halved our requirement for cooling and power, but the real benefit is we have made available half the capacity we formerly used by freeing up storage space,” says Wilkes.

This opens up the possibility of “offering services for disaster recovery capability to like-minded trusts as a potential revenue stream,” says Wilkes.

Although no decisions have yet been made, Wilkes says this opportunity could enable the trust to meet the requirements of the government’s cost improvement programme, which demands efficiency savings of between 3.5 and five per cent per annum.

Irrespective of this happening, Wilkes has a datacentre that is flexible and easy to run.

“Life is easier for us,” he says. “If we roll out a new package on one server, we can check if it works and roll it out across the server estate. We have a manageable datacentre, which allows us to easily restructure, swap-out and scale up and out. This in turn gives us more free time to perfect the monitoring side of things so we can be more proactive.”

The evolution of the datacentre

Lisa Kelly — 2009-11-10T11:44:00.000Z

Lisa Kelly, Computing, Tuesday 10 November 2009 at 11:44:00

Lisa Kelly talks to three IT leaders from three very different organisations about the huge changes they have brought to their datacentre operations, and their plans for the future

Mark Ridley, director of technology at recruitment web site Reed.co.uk, is exploring the possibility of moving datacentre systems to the cloud to improve efficiency, reduce costs and increase flexibility.

“Reed has experienced an evolution of the datacentre rather than a revolution. We have come a long way since 2000 when we had a server room rather than a datacentre, to the point where we are now using virtualisation technologies and contemplating cloud computing for our 2010 upgrade,” says Ridley.

Reed’s original datacentre was rudimentary and “not an outcome based on a lot of thinking”, admits Ridley, but his appreciation of the power of the web and what it could do for the business led Ridley to focus on web application development, while a third party was brought on board to run the datacentre.

“Development, some of which was outsourced, was brought entirely in-house as we realised we had to invest more in online job posting, while Attenda became our hosting partner. Our core strength is development and understanding why and how the business wants to do things, but we have outsourced the datacentre to experts so we can access technology we couldn’t otherwise afford,” he says.

Ridley regards Attenda as a partner rather than a supplier, but investigates alternative providers as part of Reed’s hosting re-tendering process, which it undertakes every three years.

“Our last refresh was in 2007, but two years into the contract, we began looking. In the past we found we quickly hit our headroom for the server we had implemented, but this time we are not in that position thanks to the flexibility of virtualisation technology, which was introduced in 2007,” says Ridley.

Investment in standardisation of processes, procedures and platform has helped lower datacentre costs for Reed and improved performance. “Guidelines and policies are followed so there is a great deal of consistency of service, and Attenda knows how to deal with any incident,” says Ridley.

Attenda architects work with Reed to identify new areas where virtualisation can be employed.

Currently, Ridley is working with the supplier to implement a new VMware-based virtual server to run its StrongMail email system.

“We send about 25 million emails a month and StrongMail has improved our email delivery rate from 90 to 99 per cent. This has improved the efficiency of our datacentre as sending 2.25 million emails that don’t reach their intended recipient wastes processing power. We are always looking at ways to improve processes and energy efficiency and using a virtual machine to host the StrongMail box would make further energy savings,” says Ridley.

A green and efficient datacentre is important to Ridley, who is always looking for ways to cut his power bills.

“By ensuring good performance, you need fewer servers and less power. For example, a badly coded application will require high bandwidth and many servers,” he says.

In the past, Ridley has brought in-house any servers that are freed up at the end of its three-year contract with Attenda to run the company’s development environment, but now he benefits from using virtualisation.

“We bought three new HP DL380 servers and created a brand new, swanky virtualised environment that uses half the energy required by our old inherited servers,” says Ridley.

Over the years, the firm’s datacentre strategy has evolved. "In the early days, we wanted to own all the kit. Pre-2007, we owned the storage and firewalls, but now we make use of the common infrastructure shared across Attenda clients. This gives us access to superior kit, for example the storage area network (SAN) that uses virtualisation technology from VMware. We buy chunks of storage, which is cheaper and better performing than if we had to invest in dedicated storage,” says Ridley.

Non-ownership reduces management costs and increases access to external skills so Reed can concentrate on its technology priorities, he says.

“If a disk drive fails at 3am, we don’t need to know about it unless there has been a degradation of service affecting our service level agreements. A good hosting company has someone who lives and breathes storage and there is no way we would have that expertise on hand at Reed. We need to focus on development,” says Ridley.

Reed’s database cluster and web servers, however, have dedicated hardware and are run within a ring-fenced area in the Attenda hosting environment, but Ridley can foresee this changing based on his positive experience of virtualisation.

“Because our web servers and database are so critical to what Reed is delivering, we did not want to opt for a shared infrastructure. However, virtualisation and shared applications will change the way we buy datacentre power. I can envisage a cloud computing model where we say how much power we require without worrying about hardware. In the past I have had to trundle with a server in a white van across London, but that need not happen now,” says Ridley, who is looking at cloud computing for the 2010 datacentre upgrade.

“In the future, we will not be looking at the provision of IT as physical boxes, but the provision of a service to a client as a unit of computing power, and the expectation will be that it comes on just as water comes out of a tap when it is turned on,” he adds.

Cloud computing will especially benefit businesses such as Reed that are subject to spikes of demand, Ridley believes.

“Our busy time is the New Year, when many people look for new jobs. In the past, a big burst of activity has meant our developers had to throttle the number of people coming through to the site. With cloud computing we would be able to simply phone up and order more computing power for January,” says Ridley.

Cloud computing could also lead to shorter datacentre contracts. “We will not be tied into hardware costs – the hardware will belong to our hosting provider,” he says.

Another advantage, Ridley foresees, is not having to make guesses about the economy three years in advance and how it will affect use when ordering computing power.

“With a cloud computing model within the datacentre, IT provision will become more timely, efficient and easier to budget for as it will be aligned with what the technology group does with the business,” says Ridley.

Read our case studies to find out how Bolton Wanderers FC and Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust manage their datacentres

Six steps to greater datacentre efficiency

To help IT professionals improve datacentre management while cutting costs and improving reliability and resiliency, Forrester Research's Doug Washburn offers the following tips:

Rationalise your application portfolio. The datacentre and its expensive and energy-consuming IT, power distribution and cooling equipment exists to support applications. And it’s not uncommon for applications to be severely under-used, which snowballs into IT infrastructure capital and operating expenses. Datacentre managers should liaise with users on the phasing out of severely under-utilised applications.

Consolidate and eliminate under-utilised servers. Datacentres are plagued with “dead” servers, or those with utilisation levels below six per cent, consuming power, cooling and space resources. Eliminating and consolidating these servers will free up capital and operating costs, and extend datacentre life by freeing up power, cooling and space capacity.

Increase your server virtualisation ratio. While nearly every organisation admits to virtualising servers, the savings potential from virtualisation is often not fully realised. Forrester finds that mature virtual production environments usually have about 30 virtual machines – and coupled with advanced automation tools, this could reach 50, without undermining service-level agreements.

Enforce “virtual first” policies for new applications. By stipulating that all new applications must run on virtualised infrastructure, you will benefit from improved disaster recovery and business continuity; rapid — or even automatic — restart of applications after an IT failure; and when used in conjunction with data replication between datacentres, it can restart applications at a recovery site following a primary site failure.

Increase storage utilisation and reclaim storage capacity. Storage environments are plagued with low utilisation rates and highly redundant data. IT professionals should consider thin provisioning and data deduplication technologies to improve utilisation and reclaim storage capacity.

Optimise your datacentre temperature. While manufacturers of IT equipment have set the allowable high-end temperature at 27°C, most datacentres are too cold, operating at 8°C to 20°C. With 60-70 per cent of datacentre energy consumption going to power and cooling, this represents a significant operating cost. Under supervision, turn up the temperature in your datacentre. For example, one IT manager took his datacentre temperature from 20°C to 23°C and recorded a 12.7 per cent reduction in energy use.

Doug Washburn is an infrastructure and operations analyst at Forrester Research. Several Forrester reports are available free of charge to Computing readers by visiting www.forrester.com/computinguk.

Case study: Bolton Wanderers FC

Lisa Kelly — 2009-11-10T11:44:00.000Z

Lisa Kelly, Computing, Tuesday 10 November 2009 at 11:44:00

Bolton Wanderers transfers security to the cloud

Bolton Wanderers Football Club has tightened network security and taken pressure off its datacentre by moving web security into the cloud.

The club switched from having on-site hardware for its web security, which it found time-consuming to maintain and update, to using so-called security-as-a-service from ScanSafe.

“We moved our email security to the cloud model when we chose Mimecast and wanted to do the same with web security, and take costs and management out of the datacentre. Hardware has a single point of failure and if there are power outages, there are procedural issues about getting back up and running, which we were happy to relinquish,” says Dave Atkinson, IT director at the Premier League club.

However, the club’s core system is its electronic point of sale (Epos) system for tickets and Atkinson plans to keep it within the datacentre.

“I want to keep the Epos system close to me in an environment I can control, but in time it will become more cost-effective to move information and applications into the cloud,” he says.

He points out that 95 per cent of the club’s 130 users are onsite.

“We are not an organisation scattered over the world and administration takes place at one site. Currently, there is no justification to throw more applications into the cloud, but things change,” he says.

The ScanSafe technology has “enriched the user experience”, says Atkinson, which means his team is faced with fewer support queries and is able to focus on other projects. It also means the datacentre’s network is better protected.

“The Anywhere feature enforces uniform security policies on home users and roaming workers. It means that if someone takes a laptop home on Friday night, they are not going to infect the local area network on Monday morning,” says Atkinson.

The need to protect the network is paramount.

“If we suffered a denial of service attack, for example, it would impede our ability to transact with our customers and cost us money,” he says.

Taking “more tin out the network” and investing in virtualisation technology has decreased power consumption, but improving manageability of the datacentre and ensuring business continuity are Atkinson’s main concerns.

“We are moving towards a greener datacentre, but protecting the datacentre is key. Any organisation considered to be in the public eye [is a potential target] and we have to ensure that data is in more than one place at any time. Virtualisation has made onsite recovery management and replication a lot easier,” he says.

Atkinson’s plan for the datacentre is to ensure that “the organisation and systems can grow at the same pace”.

“We have room for growth over the next five to seven years. You don’t want to be going back to the board every two years and asking for extra investment,” he says.

“You don’t know what’s around the corner, so you must ensure the datacentre is able to adjust quickly to any change in business trends.”

Don't be afraid to break the rules

Bryan Glick — 2009-11-12T07:45:00.000Z

Bryan Glick, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 07:45:00

The public’s growing enthusiasm for technology gives IT professionals an opportunity to reinvent their role in business and society at large

I want to break the rules. Why don’t you join me?

Specifically, I intend to break my own rules. In fact, I broke my first rule with the first word of this column. In my nine years as a Computing journalist I was always taught, and in turn taught others, never to use the word “I”. Readers don’t want to know about the writer they want to know what the writer knows.

These days, with the rise of the self-obsessed blogger, use of “I” is endemic. But for the purpose of this article, let’s ignore that for now.

You see, for once this column is about me, so it’s difficult to avoid the personal pronoun. The reason it’s about me is because this is my final, valedictory scribbling before I leave Computing for pastures new. And if the departing editor can’t break his own rules, what has the world come to?

What a nine years it has been. In my first month, I wrote about the collapse of dot com darling Boo.com, and gurus everywhere said: “The internet? Pah! It’s just another fad.” I guess you would agree that things have moved on a lot since then.

Let me tell you what has changed most for me. Before I became a journalist, I worked in the IT industry. In those days, whenever I met someone new in a social situation, the inevitable moment would arise in conversation when they would ask me what I did for a living. I would say: “I work in IT.” They would say: “Oh,” and spot someone else to speak to.

As a journalist, things got better. “I’m a journalist,” I would answer. “Really? How interesting,” they would reply. “What do you write about?”

“Technology.”

“Oh…”

But recently, things have changed. “Technology? That must be interesting,” they say, before telling me how cool their iPhone is, at which point I say: “Oh…”

I once wrote a column in defence of geeks. The world needs geeks, I said. Geeks nodded appreciatively. Everyone else said: “Oh…”

But now, everyone is a geek. Even my mum enjoys texting away. Everyone loves technology OK, we’re not quite at the stage where they all love technologists too, but hey, it’s a start.

However, those in IT need to consider why everyone is a geek. To me it’s clear: non-geeks are developing new technology. They have made it easy to use, fun, fashionable sexy, even. The most talked-about IT is the simplest a junior programmer could write an application that publishes 140-character messages onto a web site. Apple managed to become an iconic brand by making products for people who didn’t like technology. It’s about technology without all that complex geekery that IT used to imply.

And yet, I bet if I walked into most IT departments, I would be confronted with complexity. Much of that is the legacy of historic IT purchasing, but it’s also a legacy of historic IT thinking. Complexity is good, it keeps techies in a job. But it doesn’t make users like you much.

We are near a time when IT-savvy users can create their own applications or access someone else’s in the cloud, bypassing the IT team altogether. And what a waste of the skills and ideas in the IT department that would be.

Technology is changing the world. But are those in IT still stuck in their old ways? It is time for IT to come out of the datacentre. It is time to break the rules.

More comment at http://editor.computing.co.uk

We should all mind our own business

Computing — 2009-11-12T07:45:00.000Z

Computing, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 07:45:00

The privacy of our electronic footprints should be a defining political issue of the internet age

Perhaps good old-fashioned, face-to-face conversation will make a comeback, now the government is pressing ahead with its plan to oblige communications providers to retain details of all our electronic interactions.

While most people can understand the argument that mining such data helps law enforcement and security services, it is nonetheless a proposal that sticks in the throat for many.

During Labour’s tenure, the concept of the surveillance state has been introduced with almost as much stealth as the snooping itself. The Tories, recognising public unease, promise to “roll back the surveillance state” and stop the trend for big government databases. If they win power, it will be interesting to see whether or not such intentions are watered down in the harsh reality of tackling the UK’s national security challenges.

The privacy of our electronic footprints should be a defining political issue of the internet age.

But unlike the free, open and collaborative nature of the internet that has contributed to this problem in the first place, it is a challenge that is being addressed in a closed and authoritarian manner. As such, it becomes an easy brick to hurl at an unpopular government, when it could and should be an opportunity to demonstrate an understanding of the way the relationship between state and web-enabled citizen is changing.

If the government is to open up its data, it seems beyond churlish to want to obtain and exploit so much of our own.

Personal information – including personal communications – is just that: personal. And

technology is emerging that will allow us to securely manage our personal electronic footprint. It is not beyond the realm of innovation for this to be done in a way that allows the authorities to obtain our approval for access as and when required under suitable conditions – rather than the blunt instrument of total centrally directed retention.

The government should explore and invest in such technologies, for its good as much as our own.

Disabled users will be in Windows Seventh heaven

David Banes — 2009-11-12T07:30:00.000Z

David Banes, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 07:30:00

Microsoft’s latest release provides some much-needed help for users with special needs, says David Banes

The release of Windows 7 has been widely welcomed as a big step forward from Vista. But the benefits extend beyond obvious improvements, as it greatly enhances accessibility for disabled users.

The new Windows 7 On-Screen Keyboard (OSK) is resizable, with integrated word prediction. The old OSK was too small to be functional for many users. The ability to choose how much of the screen it fills is very user friendly, particularly when you combine it with a touch-screen device.

The magnifier now has a full-screen mode as well as a lens, allowing you to view a part of the screen at any one time. It is easy to use and quite readable at up to 200 per cent. This is now a great way to introduce levels of magnification to users without requiring any additional software. Display settings are now much easier to change and reset.

Voice recognition is a much-improved feature, facilitating easy creation of individual user profiles. For those unable to use a mouse or keyboard, a hands-free mode can also be used.

Windows 7 also comes with drivers to support tablet, touch and multi-touch interfaces – particularly important for those with learning disabilities – or unable to use a keyboard and mouse.

If there is a disappointment in Windows 7, it is that Narrator – the entry screen-reader in Windows – has not had much of an overhaul. But Microsoft can look towards its support of open-source NVDA software as an alternative approach. NVDA is free and available in a number of languages.

Windows 7 is faster while also offering a smaller footprint, making the uptake of some of these new technologies easier as well as cheaper for users.

The new compatibility wizard takes you through a step-by-step process to get software working with some simple changes. It is particularly helpful with older adaptive technology or legacy software.

Windows 7 is a giant leap forward for “non-standard” users real progress at last for the UK’s 10 million-strong disabled community.

David Banes is development director of national disability and computing charity AbilityNet

Something to shout about

Kate Hanaghan — 2009-11-12T06:45:00.000Z

Kate Hanaghan, Computing, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 06:45:00

Whatever your firm’s motive for going green, be vocal about what you manage to achieve

The Smart 2020 report by The Climate Group estimates that IT represents two per cent of the world’s human carbon output, mainly as a result of the huge energy requirements of systems such as datacentres, distributed networks, telephony and, of course, the multitude of related devices and equipment.

But has the recession killed off green initiatives? No, of course not. However, in the grand scheme of creating a more sustainable business, the majority of activities over the next year will centre on the “greening” of the IT function. Furthermore, it is most likely that these actions will be driven by the need to create energy-efficiency savings for the financial wellbeing of the organisation – so this is not primarily about saving the planet.

But carbon reduction is valid whether it comes as a by-product of a drive to lower energy spend or whether it is planned upfront as part of an environmentally aware business case. If you’re getting greener, it’s worth making some noise about it – whatever the real driver of those improvements.

Recently I have been amazed by those vendors that fail to be explicit about what environmental improvements they have been able to achieve within their own organisation. Although we often hear vendors talking about “drinking their own champagne”, green IT is an area where this is particularly compelling.

It gives them the opportunity to demonstrate their infrastructure capabilities, but also their commitment to, and understanding of, the sustainability challenges organisations face. And for those vendors who do not have relevant customers yet, it is a way for them to demonstrate what they can potentially do for you.

Broadly speaking, there is a mixture of expertise that has grown up within the vendor community. For example, technology-led firms such as HP and Fujitsu have been producing and refining the performance and maintenance of hardware over many years. And then there is consulting expertise that has been developed over a much shorter period of time – for example, Atos Origin and its relatively new Green Accounting offerings.

However, vendor offerings are evolving rapidly at the moment, so push companies to keep you informed of improvements or additional capabilities. If you are a UK IT leader, you will be aware of the Carbon Reduction Commitment, the country’s climate change and energy-saving scheme. It is critical that you know as precisely as possible what your energy consumption and carbon output is – how can you improve if you do not know what you consume?

This is where vendor carbon reduction tools and methodologies can really help – although their capabilities vary considerably.

Delivering IT services to support a sustainable organisation – using IT to reduce the other 98 per cent of carbon emissions not produced by IT – is a big hidden opportunity to engage with broader organisational agendas for change. Greening the IT function is just the first step to proving how beneficial sustainability can be in terms of its impact on the bottom line, on people and on the environment.

If you are ambitious and have a passion for sustainability, consider how you might expand your role to become a sustainability leader within your organisation.

Kate Hanaghan is senior analyst at Bathwick Group. Bathwick’s recently published Sustainability Study is available at http://bae.bathwickgroup.com/bsi

Get ready for the next 40 years

Computing — 2009-11-05T08:00:00.000Z

Computing, Computing, Thursday 5 November 2009 at 08:00:00

IT leaders would do well to reflect on the innovations that they, as the corporate enablers of internet business, must adopt

When it comes to birthdays, the internet is a bit like the Queen – it is fortunate enough to have two.

For some purists, the birth of the internet came on 2 September 1969 when a connection was first established between two computers on the US Arpanet network. But for populists, the 40th birthday came last week, on 29 October, the anniversary of the first exchange of data between those two systems.

For most of us, 40 is a milestone that generates much reflection, and a redefinition of what we always meant by “middle age”.

For the internet, 40 is certainly a marker of a growing maturity, but any mid-life crisis is felt far more acutely by those established industries that have seen their business models radically changed by the online revolution.

While downloads – both legal and illegal – transform the entertainment industry, and online advertising decimates areas of publishing, every other sector should be assessing the pace of change and wondering how it will affect them.

There will be no getting away from it – 40 years is just a passing moment in a revolution that will yet transform business and public life more than even the industrial revolution.

As more big public sector IT projects struggle, there can be little doubt that the fragmented, open, collaborative nature of the web is the likely architecture that must and will underpin public service delivery through technology.

And as the financial services sector tries to avoid the scale of change that many of its recession-hit consumers demand, you can be sure that at some point, new models of banking that provide greater transparency will emerge, enabled by the opportunities and experiences of the internet.

It is almost a cliché already to say that when it comes to the internet revolution, you ain’t seen nothing yet. IT leaders would do well to reflect on the innovations that they, as the corporate enablers of internet business, must adopt to keep their organisations at the forefront of inevitable change.