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- Banks to spend a fortune on digital re-engineering
- Worldwide IT spending to fall
- Microsoft gets out of display advertising and mapping
- Sony to invest $4 billion getting sensitive
- Qualcomm denies it is about to be split
- All roads lead to an end to global roaming
- Cloud passes over central Europe
- EU gives Google more time
- Micron blames PCs for revenue shortfalls
- Museum calls for BBC Micro engineers
| Banks to spend a fortune on digital re-engineering Posted: 30 Jun 2015 05:55 AM PDT
IDC said that American banks are expected to spend $16.6 billion on hardware, software, services and IT staff to make everything a lot more digital this year. And the market analysis firm also predicts that such moves will continue at a compound annual growth rate of 10.4 percent right up until 2019. The highest growth in spending will be on software and internal IT, while services will be a factor in growth too. In five years, IDC predicts that one third of the IT budget at US banks will be dedicated to so-called "digital transformation". The banks have realised they need to say relevant to their individual and corporate businesses and that's why they're ready to splash the cash. Part of the problem is that there are heavy burdens on the banks for compliance, risk, and security. But, perhaps surprisingly, banks don't have a lot of money to spend. But they're going to spend it. |
| Posted: 30 Jun 2015 05:43 AM PDT
And it's all down to the rising US dollar. If the situation is viewed in "constant currency" terms there would have been a rise in IT spending of 2.5 percent. But we and the IT vendors live in the real world and there's no such thing as a constant currency. Gartner analyst John-David Lovelock is keen to stress that "this is not a market crash". He said that the decline is a chimera caused by big swings in the US dollar versus other currencies. "There are secondary effects to the rising US dollar," he said. "Vendors have to raise prices to protect costs and margins of their products" and that will lead commercial companies and individuals to decide whether to buy kit or not. Gartner segments IT spending into six: devices, data centre systems, enterprise software, IT services, and communications services. Of these the biggest decline is in communication services, it predicts, with a decline of 7.2 percent this year. Lovelock said that prices of PCs have risen by 10 percent or so in "currency impacted countries". He said that there are large socks of PCs in Western Europe that need to be cleared. That will delay Windows 10 inventory in the second half of this year. |
| Microsoft gets out of display advertising and mapping Posted: 30 Jun 2015 05:27 AM PDT
Instead Microsoft will focus on its growing search advertising business based around its Bing search engine. Microsoft, which employs hundreds of people in its display ad business around the world, said those employees would be offered the chance to transfer to AOL and that it was not making any layoffs. Microsoft’s MSN web portal and Bing, have lost more than $10 billion over the past five years. Chief Executive Satya Nadella has said Bing will turn a profit next fiscal year. “Today's news is evidence of Microsoft's increased focus on our strengths: in this case, search and search advertising and building great content and consumer services,” said Microsoft in a statement. Under a 10 year deal struck with AOL, the outfit will sell display ads on MSN, Outlook.com, Xbox, Skype and in some apps in major countries. As part of the deal, Bing will become the search engine behind web searches on AOL starting next year. Microsoft also struck a multi-year extension to its existing deal with AppNexus, which provides the tech platform for buyers to purchase online ads. Redmond has also signed over part of its mapping unit to Uber which will see the taxi company take over the part of Microsoft’s mapping unit that works on imagery acquisition and map data processing. Uber will offer jobs to the 100 or so Microsoft employees working in that area. Uber uses a combination of map services from Google, Apple and Baidu already and apparently has no plans to stop this. Microsoft will no longer collect mapping imagery itself, but it will continue to work with imagery providers for underlying data on its own maps. Microsoft already gets much of its map data from Finland’s Nokia. |
| Sony to invest $4 billion getting sensitive Posted: 30 Jun 2015 05:26 AM PDT
The move is seen as Sony attempting to re-invent itself out of the consumer goods market which TVs that dragged it into losses. It is the first new share issue in 26 years, and will raise $2.62 billion from a public stock offering. It will raise the rest from a bond issue to fund a boost in sensor output capacity at its plants in Japan. The deal is worth close to a tenth of its current market value, and provides the clearest signal yet that Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai is prioritising the sensor business to anchor Sony’s turnaround. The image sensors, a key high-tech component in digital cameras and smartphones, have emerged as one of Sony’s strongest lines alongside its PlayStation videogames unit, helping the company recover from a long slide in TV and smartphone sales. Sony is only just emerging from decline making loses last year. It expects a profit of 140 billion yen in the current year. The move caught investors by surprise on Tuesday, with fears the new stock will dilute per-share earnings sending the stock 8.3 percent lower at the close. Yet the company’s market value has climbed in step with its recent recovery progress, and has more than doubled since June 2014 to close to $35 billion. Developing sensors requires a consistently heavy drain on capital expenditure with Sony’s balance sheet already stretched as it restructures, selling or splitting off loss-making operations and slashing jobs. Sony had previously mentioned smaller-scale commitments to expand in sensors so the move was not that surprising. |
| Qualcomm denies it is about to be split Posted: 30 Jun 2015 05:26 AM PDT
Executive Chairman Paul Jacobs said all this intensifying industry competition was not enough to spin off his chip business from its patent-licensing business. The idea was mooted by hedge fund Jana Partners in April Qualcomm on the grounds that it would improve shareholder value. Jana claimed that the chip business “essentially worthless” and Qualcomm could make more money in the patent trolling business. Jacobs said the idea has been talked about for a long time, but he thought that the status quo had a lot of synergies and they don't really make them much any more. "Having the businesses together outweighs the dissynergies" well the business would be much heavier for a start. Jacobs said, however, that the company is always evaluating its options and that the situation could change in the future. |
| All roads lead to an end to global roaming Posted: 30 Jun 2015 05:25 AM PDT
The move is part of the old country's overhaul of the telecoms market to boost growth and innovation. Latvia, which holds the rotating EU presidency, has been spinning the idea which says that by 15 June 2017 roaming surcharges in the European Union will be abolished. The move has followed a 12 hours of talks with EU lawmakers which we assume were about global roaming but the news agencies were not that specific. The EU plans to order telecoms operators to treat all internet traffic equally and to forbid any blocking unless it is being used to counter cyber-attacks or peak period throttling. Companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Orange and Telecom Italia had lobbied to have more leeway to tap into a potentially lucrative source of revenue but Internet activists say this could create a two-speed Internet benefiting companies with deep pockets. |
| Cloud passes over central Europe Posted: 30 Jun 2015 05:23 AM PDT
IBM decided some years back that it was foolish spending billions on state of the art fabrication plants (fabs) when its one time rival Intel was beating it on all fronts. And it has concentrated on getting rid of other non-core businesses too. Now IBM seems to be all about the cloud and according to a claim it made today, startups and thriving businesses are adopting IBM cloud technology in their droves. This could be bad news for Microsoft, which seems to have decided it's a cloud company too. IBM quoted the International Monetary Fund as saying that the economy has begun to recover in central and eastern Europe. IBM said that a number of organisations across the region have adopted IBM Cloud, including in Russia, in the Czech Republic, in Slovenia and in Poland. The company did not say what type of revenue such business was generating, but if its cloud business generates as much money as IBM generates press releases about the cloud, then it's doing quite well, thank you very much. |
| Posted: 29 Jun 2015 08:48 AM PDT
It was originally supposed to reply to the EC's allegations last week, but Google has extended the deadline for it to submit its response by August the 17th. It's not unusual for the EC to grant such extensions, let it be seen as not giving the accused time to gather its senses together to make a stout defence. Google is accused of skewing search results so that when someone enters a search term it brings up its own shopping services rather than its competitors'. As we reported early today, Yelp is one of the organisations seeking for Google to learn the errors of its search methods. Google complete denies it's into skewing results and claims people are open to search where and when they will. Google lawyers want to examine documents and consider its response to the different complaints. |
| Micron blames PCs for revenue shortfalls Posted: 29 Jun 2015 07:02 AM PDT
Micron, like many other suppliers that were reliant on the X86 platform, is looking to become less dependent on the PC, by investing oin the mobile segment. One of the problems is that Micron has been somewhat reliant on selling DRAM (dynamic random access memory) for desktops – but the trend is to move away from these and if you're buying an X86 based machine, to buy a notebook instead. Analysts at Seeking Alpha com issued a report and suggested if people had Intel stock (ticker: INTC) they should sell it. In a report to its client, Seeking Alpha said: "If Micron is catching a cold from the PC market's chill, Intel must be catching pneumonia." Intel's client computing group accounts for close to 60 percent of its revenues, and although it has tried to disguise things by lumping its "disastrous" mobile sales in with its PC division. Microsoft is also heavily dependent on the X86 market for its revenues, particularly in the commercial sector. |
| Museum calls for BBC Micro engineers Posted: 29 Jun 2015 06:40 AM PDT
The BBC Micro was a very popular PC in the UK back in the 1980s and many students and adults earned their stripes by playing and using with the machines. The machine was made by Acorn and had the backing of both the government of the day and the BBC. It had significantly more features than Acorn’s earlier machine, the Atom. The TNMOC has created a classroom of the 1980s complete with BBC Micros which is popular with visitors. It has about 80 machines in the ring, but wants to keep the machines up and running. So it's asking for volunteers that have the knowhow to make the eight bit machines keep humming and singing. The TNMOC said that over the last year over 4,500 students visited its premises at Bletchley Park and used a BBC Micro. It wants volunteers to join its refurbishment team – you can find details here. |
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