Month in review
- Reduce text size Decrease text size
- Increase text size Increase text size
- Print article Print
- Jump to comments Comment
- Share this article Share
- Email article to a friend Email
A round-up of November 2007's biggest stories from the IT sector.
Prime minister Gordon Brown had to issue an embarrassing public apology after HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) admitted a massive data protection breach. Two compact discs, containing the personal details of 25 million child benefit recipients, were lost in the post after being sent – twice – in the unregistered mail by an HMRC employee.
IBM became the latest technology giant to snap up a business intelligence vendor.
It agreed to acquire Canadian performance management specialist Cognos for $5 billion – its largest ever deal. Many believed further consolidation in the business intelligence market had been inevitable following the acquisition of Hyperion by Oracle and of Business Objects by SAP.
The growing threat of ‘cyber espionage’ was underlined by two reports released in November. Firstly, security vendor McAfee published a virtual criminology report, which found that more than 120 countries are using the Internet to spy on others. Secondly, MI5 head Jonathan Evans wrote to 300 UK executives and security chiefs warning them that their intellectual property is under threat of theft from “Chinese state organisations”. According to The Times, Shell and Rolls-Royce have already suffered ‘virtual attacks’.
Computer problems at the London Stock Exchange threw the FTSE index into disarray. A technical glitch in its real-time data distribution system, Infolect, resulted in the index appearing to have climbed by 2% when in fact it had fallen by 1.3%. The LSE took the unprecedented measure of extending trading by an hour after its connectivity issues emerged.
Competition in the white-hot virtualisation market intensified as technology heavyweights Oracle and Sun Microsystems both unveiled their own virtualisation products. Both Oracle VM and Sun xVM are based on the Xen open-source hypervisor, first built by XenSource which is now part of application delivery vendor Citrix.
Software giant Microsoft unveiled plans to meet its burgeoning demand for data centre space by opening a new facility in the frozen plains of Siberia. The company has recently begun work on two $500 million facilities in Dublin and Chicago, as its demands for data centre space
continue to increase.
Siberia’s abundant power supply makes it an ideal environment, the company said.
UK banking giant Royal Bank of Scotland launched one of the UK’s first trials of mobile debit payment technology, as a precursor to a public pilot to be launched next year. The bank’s staff will use Nokia phones enabled with short-range wireless Near Field Communication (NFC) technology and MasterCard’s ‘wave and pay’ PayPass contactless technology, in order to make cashless transactions valuing £10 or less.
