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UK organisations are lacking cloud-specific competencies and training according to new research which found that 43 per cent of UK IT professionals rate their current competence in cloud implementation and management as either poor or very poor, with only seven per cent rating it as excellent (despite the fact that 64 per cent of organisations questioned are currently using at least one cloud based service).

The findings are part of Databarracks' annual Data Health Check report, which surveys over 400 IT professionals from UK-based organisations, on the changing ways in which technology is used by businesses today. As part of this year's report, greater focus was put on assessing the impact of cloud computing on the IT job market, as well as the competency and training of employees.

Despite the lack of confidence in their cloud competency, 54 per cent of respondents have received no cloud training in the past 12 months and even more worrying is that 53 per cent have made no plans for training in 2014.

Peter Groucutt, managing director at Databarracks, says this is an issue we need to address: "These results paint a worrying picture. The survey doesn't suggest an immediate threat to jobs as a direct result of cloud computing but as businesses continue to use more cloud services there is clearly a new skillset required to manage them.

"The myth that cloud services will eventually replace in-house IT teams is largely unfounded. What we can expect to see instead is a change in the shape of the job market. Our data shows a significant reduction in tape-based backup and continued growth in general cloud adoption, with minimal job losses. IT departments are evolving. In the past, the majority of their time was spent managing internal systems and a smaller portion was spent on using those systems to support the business.

"Cloud services allow IT teams to focus the majority of their time on using technology to best serve the business. To do this successfully, they still need to be firmly backed up by a strong workforce, with an appropriate set of skills and qualifications. Training in the more commonly used cloud platforms such as VMware's vCloud and Amazon Web Services will serve particularly useful in the current market.

"Cloud services have evolved rapidly over the past decade, and their adoption is likely to continue to grow. Our report suggests that the number of organisations who have adopted at least one cloud-based service has risen to 64 per cent in the last 12 months. There is no reason cloud computing should be something for the IT department to fear, but employees must ensure that they remain relevant in today's changing market by gaining the appropriate skills and qualifications."

Britain is lagging behind Europe in training women IT professionals as only 7% of professional engineers in the UK are female and companies must take the lead in redressing the balance according to Scott Fletcher, Chairman and founder of UK cloud infrastructure specialists ANS Group.

"Private companies are beginning to take the lead in providing skills training and they should seize the opportunity to provide more apprenticeships for women in male dominated sectors. This is particularly true in the IT industry," said Fletcher.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) 2013 skills survey discovered that only 7% of professional engineers in the UK were women and that this figure has only risen by 2% over the last five years.

This compares with 18% in Spain, 20% in Italy and 26% in Sweden.

The Science and Technology Commons Select Committee is currently studying the progress of female students and academics pursuing science, technology, engineering and maths careers and hearing evidence from education providers.

"We need to increase the flow of young talent into tech and engineering industries and attracting more women is an obvious answer. Currently a large proportion of female Stem graduates (science, technical, engineering and mathematics) are choosing careers in other industries," said Fletcher.

A report published earlier this year by the Institute of Physics (IOP) found that half of all the co-ed schools in the UK did not put forward a single female student to sit an A-level in physics.

"It seems that Britain's schools have pigeon holed physics as a 'boys' subject which is a notion that needs to be eradicated immediately," said Fletcher.

Social messaging players will challenge the status quo of mobile social networking and media by creating a paradigm shift in social media that will impact several OTT giants, claims Ovum.

The firm says that the social messaging market is expanding as messaging players begin to amass hundreds of millions of users. And in 2014 we will see further acceleration in user growth, together with a widening in the scope of social messaging services.

According to Ovum's latest Social Messaging 2014 Trends to Watch report, services such as Line and WhatsApp are mobile first services and are changing the way the consumer interacts with social media - be it messaging, voice, games or utilities and widening the possibilities of the type of social services that can be accessed on mobile.

Neha Dharia, Analyst, Consumer Telecoms and author of the report says, social media as an industry is undergoing a major transition, one the key drivers of which is the rapid proliferation of social messaging services.

Social messaging apps are mobile centric services are intuitive and viral in growth have the ability to reach a wider audience. As new services get added on to messaging apps, we can expect these services to evolve into mobile media platforms which large user bases.

"In addition, we expect social messaging to slowly but surely start to generate revenues, which will assist in the evolution of social messaging players' offerings from messaging apps to holistic mobile media platforms," Dharia says.

This shift has been driven mainly by mobile-first services due to more consumer accessing social services through mobile devices. The mobile internet used on variety of mobile devices is rapidly taking off in developed and emerging markets alike and will form the basis of the internet in the future.

Extreme Networks has named Westcon Group EMEA Top Distributor of the Year for high revenue growth across the region. The vendor's Global Partner Conference, staged in the Eden Roc Hotel on Miami beac, was the first public event introducing the 'New Extreme', marking the beginning of its integration with Enterasys.

Westcon has been an Extreme Networks Distributor Partner in EMEA for over a decade. And from 2008, when the resale of Extreme took place in just five EMEA countries, Westcon has grown revenues by over 60%, and is now reselling Extreme Networks portfolio of products across 20 countries via a network of over 120 resellers. 

"Westcon has helped partners across EMEA drive sales revenues for Extreme with value added programmes and support as market opportunity for data networking continues to grow; and align closely to Extreme's ethos," commented Roland Richter, Extreme Networks EMEA VP Sales.

David Grant, Senior Vice President Europe, Westcon Convergence, said: "I would like to thank the Westcon Extreme team who work relentlessly to ensure that we are strategically aligned with Extreme. I look forward to another successful year with Extreme Networks, and welcome the opportunities ahead working with the combined organisation."

TDAzlan has extended its TDCloud services portfolio through a strategic partnership with Box, the provider of secure file sharing and document collaboration services.
 
Box's collaboration services will be available as part of Azlan's overall Cloud Services portfolio, giving resellers the ability to offer customers access and sharing of content from anywhere and on any device.

The agreement with Box gives enterprise and SMB customers access to a wider range of cloud services. Box serves more than 20 million users at over 180,000 businesses worldwide, including 97 percent of the Fortune 500.

HP shares rose after PC sales only fell 2% yr/yr in FQ4 and its enterprise group sales bounced back. EMEA fourth-quarter revenue of $10.3bn was down 4% year-over-year, or down 5% in constant currency. The Q4 EMEA environment remained tough, it says, although sales declined less year over year than in Q3 and it saw growth in Germany and other pockets of Western Europe. Full year EMEA revenue declined 9%

In the Enterprise Group, where revenue growth was 2%, it bounced back after eight quarters of decline. HP saw improved sales execution, a strong Hyperscale quarter and stabilisation in blades, complemented by revenue growth in networking and storage, it says.

Overall margins were pressured by competitive price environment and an unfavourable mix. "Looking forward we are focused on improving our channel performance, driving cost savings to improve operating margins and bringing new innovations to market in converged infrastructure," says CEO Meg Whitman (below).

"Our blade business recovered as the benefits of our targeted segmentation, and efforts to improve operational excellence paid off. We saw improved sales in our mainstream server business but we need to improve our pricing discipline and profitability." HP Networking grew in EMEA, and it is looking for momentum in wireless LAN and will focus on driving innovation in software defined networking.

"In the server business, we strengthened our go-to-market. In just the last six weeks of the quarter, I think we were more focused on market segmentation, and we did a better job with the channel," says Meg Whitman.

Jobs are still being lost, however as the restructuring programme is on track. So far, 24,600 people exited. The current plan is to end FY14 at the high-end of the anticipated range: somewhere between 33,000 and 34,000 people.

Security firm Accumuli has bagged Bracknell-based EQALIS, a Big Data analytics specialist, for £1.9m.

The EQALIS product portfolio complements Accumuli's security incident and event management (SIEM) solutions and will strengthen the company's big data monitoring and analytics capabilities, it says.

EQALIS provides solutions that enable organisations to gain visibility of data across the IT estate, including monitoring, managing and delivering actionable intelligence on security and operational risks.

The company won the Splunk UK, Africa and Ireland partner of the year award for the last two years, and the only Splunk authorised training provider in the UK. In addition, EQALIS is a leading partner for Prelert, Puppet Labs and App Dynamics, which assist enterprises with anomaly detection, system change, application and infrastructure performance management.

Gavin Lyons, CEO, Accumuli, said: "The key to successfully mitigating IT security threats, detecting incidents and responding to breaches is the ability to access and analyse large quantities of data in real time across an organisation's entire IT assets. This level of intelligence and visibility enables companies to prioritise actions, respond to incidents, improve processes and enhance controls.

"Big data monitoring and analytics is now intrinsically linked with security and operational excellence and EQALIS has been addressing these challenges for the last six years."

BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions is to relocate its IT retail division from Bristol to Basingstoke in a consolidation move that better aligns the company with trends in managed print, unified communications and enterprise software solutions, as well as bringing product integration benefits according to Russ Pettifer, Head of Technology Solutions.

"Making the move from Basingstoke to Bristol is the best decision for our technology vendor partners and end user customers," he said.

"By bringing these teams together we can improve communication between all departments for a more efficient and cohesive service delivery. We can make the whole division easily available to partners and customers who want to experience our breadth of capabilities and benefit from our technical expertise to solve their day-to-day business challenges."

Smart wearable device shipments including smart watches and glasses will approach 130 million by 2018, 10 times higher than estimated this year, claims Juniper Research.

Its report notes that this change in adoption levels can be attributable to heightened consumer awareness of wearable technology and new product launches. It also observes that with the emergence of major players and other key stakeholders, there is a much more focussed approach towards 'wearable computing'.

Juniper's latest report contends that the market attractiveness of wearable technology has led to the emergence of a host of players and competition is expected to intensify.

However the report notes that, as of now, wearable devices represent a 'nice to have' and not a 'must have' for consumers. "Even though wearables are relatively new in terms of market maturity, it is clear that the market, for example the smart watch in particular, will be - as per smartphones - a somewhat crowded affair", said report author Nitin Bhas.

The report notes that there are a number of social and legal barriers to the deployment of wearable devices. However, not all of these hurdles will apply to every device, or indeed, every type of device. Issues such as privacy commonly arise if the wearable device (eg smart glasses) has a camera and gives the appearance of filming at all times. In the case of Healthcare wearables, the most relevant issue is the storage of confidential and personal vital health information by these devices.

As more wearable products are rolled out, Juniper expects that governments will in turn seek to develop regulatory frameworks to legislate their use, both from a privacy and data protection perspective.

Other key findings:
• Juniper Research has revised upwards the adoption of certain wearable devices to reflect the latest announcements from vendors and the heightened consumer awareness of wearable technology.
• Mobile fitness wearables will begin to diversify into new mHealth areas.

As part of an SMS fundraising service Core Telecom has raised over £200 for children's charity Dreams & Wishes.

In August the company set up the service to provide a quick and easy way for people to donate to the charity. The service provides three keywords to text to the given number, which range in value from £1 to £10, and has been useful in furthering the fundraising efforts.

Mahmood Mazhar, CEO of Core Telecom, said: "Dreams & Wishes is an amazing charity that works to fulfil the dreams of seriously ill children. We are passionate about our support of them and it is a pleasure to be able to provide the SMS service for them and others to also choose the support them.

"No matter how big or small the donation, it all goes towards making dreams come true and we will continue to support the charity however we can."

Core Telecom has worked with closely the charity since its beginning in 2011 and provides both financial and professional support on a regular basis, including recently revamping the charity's website.

Dreams & Wishes' chairman, Tony Curtis said: "Core Telecom's continuing support has been vital to setting up the charity and helping to continue its work. The SMS service makes it so easy for people to donate and the response for the Mount Kilimanjaro climb has been fantastic."