Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

All the top stories from August 2008

Troubled networking equipment giant Alcatel-Lucent appointed ex-BT CEO Ben Verwaayen to replace CEO Pat Russo, who stepped down earlier this year along with chairman Serge Tchuruk. Dutch national Verwaayen was vice-chairman at Lucent in 2002, and during his time at BT led the firm’s revolution from ‘copper and switch’ telecoms provider into a supplier of IP-based services – most evident in the roll-out of the company’s 21CN IP-based network. The Paris-headquartered company has struggled to stem losses and rekindle growth since its creation from the 2006 merger of France’s Alcatel and the US’s Lucent.

Six thousand IT workers were told they faced the sack following the £7.9 billion purchase of Dresdner Bank by Commerzbank. The impact of the merger between Commerzbank, Germany’s second-largest bank, with Dresdner, the country’s third-largest, will put a total of 9,000 full-time jobs at risk, most of them back office, control and production unit and investment banking roles. The carnage is expected to spill over into the bank’s London arm, Dresdner Kleinwort, with 1,000 positions at risk – half the bank’s London workforce.

Transport for London (TfL) fired Oyster contractor Transys, taking the opt-out clause of a 17-year contract with the company, following a series of system-wide failures of the RFID ticketing system. A TfL spokesman reportedly claimed that the contract cancellation and system failures were “purely coincidental”, adding that they were aiming to save money by offering the contract to another company. However, if the transport company wants to keep the Oyster brand it will have to buy it from the snubbed operator. A Transys insider told The Sunday Times: “If we can’t come to an arrangement with TfL, they will have to issue a complete set of new cards.”

The most recent Oyster failure occurred on 25 July, with stations across the capital forced to open the ticket barriers and let floods of commuters through for free. Two weeks before that the system corrupted the cards of 40,000 customers, forcing many to pay higher fares. Transys’s main shareholders are HP/EDS and Cubic.

Application infrastructure provider Citrix imposed significant price rises on customers, becoming the latest in a string of technology vendors to drive up prices over a six-month period. In a leaked internal memo, the US-headquartered company explained that the comparative weakness of the dollar was driving up the cost of doing business abroad. While the products themselves are bought in dollars, the costs of educating and training its resellers were in local currencies.

Software giants Oracle and SAP have also announced sizeable price rises for their products and services. The escalating cost of software and support comes against a back-drop of increased pressure on IT departments to cut costs.