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June's news reviewed.
Friday, 20th July 2007
- Fast food chain McDonald’s unveiled plans to rollout ‘wave and pay’ checkouts at its UK restaurants. It has become the first major retailer to promise a national rollout of the near-field communication technology. McDonald’s has already run successful trials of the technology in the US.
- Business applications giant SAP admitted that staff at subsidiary TomorrowNow, an application support services provider bought by the company in 2005, had made “inappropriate downloads” of arch-rival Oracle’s intellectual property. SAP insisted it had no access to the information, but it could be forced to pay as much as $100 million to settle the matter with Oracle.
- Indian IT services giant Infosys was reported to be considering a purchase of European rival Capgemini. However, while the deal would extend Infosys’ reach into the European enterprise market there are plenty of factors that count against such a move. Capgemini would cost in excess of $10 billion and would drag Infosys’ margins downs from their enviable 30%-40% levels.
- UK CIOs were warned of an impending IT recruitment crisis. A survey by the Chartered Management Institute reported that pay rates for the IT sector are rising far slower than the UK average, diminishing its appeal to workers. Meanwhile bonus rates for IT staff are also falling. The CMI reported that resignation rates for IT jobs have risen by 1.5% since 2006.
- International accountancy group Deloitte reported that the UK financial services industry has racked up annual savings of £1.5 billion thanks to its acceptance of offshore outsourcing. Those savings are growing as the range of activities financial services institutions are willing to offshore expands. As well as call centre activity, considerable savings are being generated by offshoring transaction processing, finance and human resources, reported Deloitte.
- Pentagon officials in the US were forced to admit an embarrassing breach of security after hackers managed to penetrate their IT systems, resulting in 1,500 internal emails accounts being taken offline. Officials insisted that no classified information could have been compromised.
- Regulators gave the go-ahead for European aircraft manufacturer Airbus to install an in-flight mobile phone service on its services. Already flight operators, including Air France-KLM, BMI and RyanAir, are readying plans to go live with on-board GSM later this year.
- Richard Granger, head of the £12 billion NHS IT improvement programme announced he was to leave his job in October. Granger’s no-nonsense approach has won him few friends among suppliers during his five years as the UK’s highest paid civil servant. The programme has been dogged by delays – as well as the occasional success story.
By Pete Swabey,
pswabey@information-age.com
