ServiceNow takes aim at procurement pain points

The top-down approach to the procurement of a £360 million data platform for NHS England is said to favor incumbent supplier Palantir as fears grow the project could be making the same mistakes that led to the failure of the country's infamous £10 billion National Programme for IT.

Reports emerged recently showing that the secretive spy-tech business was making the competition, launched in April this year, a "must-win deal" following its recruitment of Indra Joshi and Harjeet Dhaliwal, key figures in NHS England's data science and AI teams.

The Post Office, a UK government-owned company, has awarded SAP a contract worth up to £2 million for software services following a misunderstanding of its SAP licences and service bundles.

A contract award notice issued last week shows the Post Office – which issues postage stamps, manages the postal service, and runs one of Britain's largest network of retailers – handed SAP the deal for implementation, configuration, maintenance, and repair services for its SAP SuccessFactors performance management system.

Customer service as-a-service vendor Zendesk has announced it will allow itself to be acquired for $10.2 billion by a group of investors led by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, investment company Permira, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

The decision is a little odd, in light of the company's recent strategic review, announced on June 9th, which saw the board unanimously conclude "that continuing to execute on the Company's strategic plan as an independent, public company is in the best interest of the Company and its stockholders at this time."

That process saw Zendesk chat to 16 potential strategic partners and ten financial sponsors, including a group of investors who had previously expressed conditional interest in acquiring the company. Zendesk even extended its discussions with some parties but eventually walked away after "no actionable proposals were submitted, with the final bidders citing adverse market conditions and financing difficulties at the end of the process."

The UK Home Office has awarded Oracle a £31.47 million ($39.5 million) contract to continue to run its HR and finance systems in the cloud.

The four-year software-as-a-service deal for Oracle's Fusion ERP system has been renewed to run from May 2022 to May 2026.

According to a tender notice, the award will provide "SaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service products for Metis," the internal name for the HR and finance system of the government department responsible for policing and border security.

Cisco's Nexus Cloud will eventually allow customers to manage their datacenter networks entirely from the cloud, says the networking giant.

The company unveiled the latest addition to its datacenter-focused Nexus portfolio at Cisco Live this week, where the product set got a software-as-a-service (SaaS) revamp.

"It's targeted at network operations teams that need to manage, or want to manage, their Nexus infrastructure as well as their public-cloud network infrastructure in one spot," Cisco's Thomas Scheibe – VP product management, cloud networking for Nexus & ACI product lines – told The Register.

Adobe-owned cloudy video workflow outfit Frame.io has apologized and promised to do better after a series of lengthy outages to its service, which became part of Adobe's flagship Creative Cloud in 2021.

Frame.io bills itself as "The fastest, easiest, and most secure way to automatically get footage from cameras to collaborators – anywhere in the world" because its "Camera to Cloud" approach "eliminates the delay between production and post" by uploading audio and video "from the set to Frame.io between each take." In theory, that means all the creatives involved in filmed projects don't have to wait before getting to work.

In theory. Customers say that's not the current Frame.io experience. Downdetector's listing for the site records plenty of complaints about outages and tweets like the one below are not hard to find.

Oracle has impressed the markets with strong revenue growth for cloud infrastructure and applications-as-a-service.

However, Oracle is still struggling to gain a larger share of the global cloud market, where it lags behind AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Big Red's total revenue for Q4, which ended May 31, hit $11.8 billion, up 5 per cent on the same period a year ago. Total cloud revenue, including infrastructure and software-as-a-service, reached $2.9 billion, up 19 percent. Cloud ERP Fusion revenue increased 20 percent while NetSuite ERP cloud revenue grew 27 per cent.

The world's governments are eager to let someone else handle their IT headaches, according to a recent Gartner report, which found a healthy appetite for "anything-as-a-service" (XaaS) platforms to cut the costs of bureaucracy.

These trends will push government IT spending to $565 billion in 2022, up 5 percent from last year, the analyst house claims. Gartner believes the majority of new government IT investments will be on service platforms by 2026.

"The pandemic sped up public-sector adoption of cloud solutions and the XaaS model for accelerated legacy modernization and new service implementations," Gartner analyst Daniel Snyder said in a release. "Fifty-four percent of government CIOs responding to the 2022 Gartner CIO survey indicated that they expect to allocate additional funding to cloud platforms in 2022, while 35 percent will decrease investments in legacy infrastructure and datacenter technologies."

IT helpdesk-turned-workflow software company ServiceNow is to acquire Hitch Works, which produces software to help organizations better use their employees' existing skills.

Hitch Works focuses on "AI‑powered skills insights", which will be added to ServiceNow's Now Platform to help customers with talent gaps by tying employee learning and development to workforce planning.

ServiceNow said the purchase is designed to help companies under immense pressure to attract, train, and retain an effective workforce.

The UK's police service is set to spend up to £50 million ($62.7 million) buying hardware and software for a legacy communication network that was planned to become obsolete in 2019.

The Home Office had planned to replace the Airwave secure emergency communication system, which launched in 2000, with a more advanced Emergency Services Network by the close of the decade. However, the legacy network has seen its life extended as its replacement was beset with delays. The ESN is expected to go live in 2026.

In a procurement notice, the Police Digital Service (PDS) said it was looking for up to three suppliers of Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) Encryption Algorithm 2 (TEA2) compatible radio devices – including handheld, desktop, and mobile terminals – as well as software, accessories, services, and maintenance for use on the UK Airwave system.