British company Chloride is to start talks with Emerson Electric after rival suitor ABB. pulled out in the face of an improved £997 million offer from the US group. Emerson Electric raised its cash offer on Tuesday by more than a third to 375 pence a share, seeking to tempt the British maker of uninterruptible power supplies away from an agreed £860 million deal with Swiss ABB.

The organisation that provides IT services and high-tech equipment to the police is on course to save national policing £1 billion by 2015, according to the agency's CEO. The National Policing Improvement Agency's CEO Peter Neyroud outlined how police will achieve the savings at the Association of Chief Police Officers APA recent conference.

IBM has announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire BigFix, a privately-held company based in Emeryville, California. The move aims to accelerate IBM's efforts to help organizations more intelligently secure the enterprise by managing and automating security and compliance updates on thousands of computers globally. Financial details were not disclosed.

Worldwide IT spending is forecast to total US$3.350 trillion in 2010, an increase of 3.9% from 2009 spending of US$3.225 trillion, according to the latest outlook by Gartner.

Gartner has lowered its outlook for the IT industry from the first quarter of this year when it forecast worldwide IT spending to grow 5.3%, primarily due to the devaluation of the euro versus the US dollar since the beginning of the year. "The European sovereign debt crisis is having an impact on the outlook for IT spending," said Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner.

Microsoft is the company that wants to put a massive data storage centre in North Carolina, a state government official has confirmed. The source didn’t say specifically where in the state the Redmond, Wash., computer software and service giant wants to locate the centre, but did say that Microsoft’s plans are tied to legislation pending in the General Assembly.

Local sources with knowledge of the project, code-named Deacon, say it is a data storage centre possibly slated for the NC Industrial Center.

Source: Burlington Times News

Chunghwa Telecom has announced that it plans to set up four cloud computing centres catering to cloud computing services, testing, R&D and experimental services. CHT aims to become the largest cloud computing service and data centre provider in Taiwan.

An operational centre will be located in a building complex with a total floor area of 49,600 sq m (533,700 sq ft) near Taipei City, CHT indicated. The building complex, currently under construction and to be completed in 2012, will house the largest data centre in Asia, CHT said.

Source: Digitimes

The Government of Ghana is to secure additional US$150 million from the Chinese government to help complete the implementation of the e-government project. Mr Haruna Iddrisu, Minister of Communications said both parties had almost reached the conclusion stage of the negotiations. When granted, this would bring to a total of US$180 million concessionary loan facility from the Chinese government to finance the project, having already granted US$30 million in 2008.

AT&T will set up one more access point for its AT&T Global Network service and a super Internet data centre in Taiwan in 2011, indicating its optimistic view of Taiwan's development of the cloud computing industry.

AT &T is now operating an AGN access point on the island. Worldwide, the company has 3,800 AGN access points covering 155 markets. Also, the company is running 38 IDCs globally, with nine of which labelled as super centres. Currently, Singapore is the only host of the company’s super IDC in Asia.

Source: Cens

Software company Neusoft, the China Health Promotion Foundation, and the China Health Management Association signed an agreement of strategic cooperation on July 2 to jointly build a health information and data centre..

Liu Jiren, president of Neusoft, said that the company, the largest IT solution provider in the healthcare industry, has no intentions of operating any hospitals and healthcare institutions.

Source: CaptialVue

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Data and transaction services company Connxion Ventures has announced plans to form a JV in China with Chinese data centre operator Global Data Solutions.Under the terms of the JV agreement, Connxion and GDS will form GDS-CXN Data Services. The JV's services will combine infrastructure from GDS and data and transaction services from Connxion.

Connxion will invest up to $2.5 million in the business and establish a JV office and team in Beijing.

Source: CFO

First Tennessee Bank is taking over management of its technology operations and adding 65 jobs for functions previously outsourced. First Tennessee plans to reopen and bring in-house the management of its data centre in Maryville, Tenn., ultimately employing about 110, the company stated in a release.

Cequel Data Centers has announced the acquisition of Colo4Dallas, a provider of carrier-neutral colocation services, with highly redundant power supplies, environmental controls, and other critical infrastructure support at a 68,000 sq ft, state-of-the-art data centre in Dallas.

Colt, a provider of business communications and IT managed services, has announced the launch of the Colt Modular Data Centre, a radical new approach to data centres which redefines the method of construction and delivery of large data centre halls.

A retrofitted, 25-year-old building near downtown Akron will soon handle all text messages and mobile data for AT&T's customers from Ohio to the East Coast. AT&T officials have announced they chose Akron to house their ninth mobility centre in the country - an investment of US$120 million in high-tech equipment.

The announcement was made in the former Ohio Bell Data Center off Opportunity Parkway near downtown. The facility first opened in 1985 and handled service orders and prepared customer bills.

Source: Ohio.com

Open Solutions Canada has announced almost CD$1 million in new investments in its data centre in Vancouver, as well as new services augmenting the data processing centre’s existing offerings to the industry. Open Solutions is a provider of integrated enabling technologies for financial service providers across the United States, Canada and other international markets.

Open Solutions Canada has implemented state-of-the-art IBM / AIX systems and Hitachi storage solutions inside the data centre which will offer greater reliability and redundancy for the company’s clients..

Highwinds is making some big moves in the CDN market, as it has acquired network services provider BandCon for an undisclosed sum. At the same time, it has hired former Panther Express CEO Steve Liddell to run its CDN operations.

Fujitsu Japan's biggest IT services provider has said it plans to boost investment in cloud computing by 54% this year to beef up its operations in one of the IT sector's hottest areas. Fujitsu plans to spend US$1.1 billion or the majority of what it has allotted for its annual capital expenditure, on its cloud-computing business by March 2011.

"This field offers new challenges but it is also a business chance with big growth potential," President Masami Yamamoto told a briefing.

Source: Reuters

Here is another reason why the recovery will be muted. Gas and electricity costs will rise substantially in the years ahead and are set to hammer not only consumers but also manufacturers, further eroding their competitiveness and that of Britain as a place to do business. It is not market forces that will push up the cost of energy, but government policies, especially environmental rules, as a report from the Civitas think-tank explains today.

Source: City AM

The Western Australian Department of Treasury and Finance (DoTF) will establish a non-mandatory common use arrangement for the provision of data centre services to government agencies in the state. The A$52 million initiative will see the creation of a common panel of data centre suppliers, initially of private facility solutions including disaster recover, to meet the immediate needs of the Department of Health (DoH) and the DoTF.

Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Support, Dr Mike Kelly AM MP, has announced that Defence has signed a five year lease agreement with data centre providers, Global Switch, for a Tier 3 Data Centre facility in Sydney that will see the beginning of the Department’s data centre consolidation program.

The Department has also exercised a five year extension option to secure a long term solution to Defence’s data centre needs. Dr Kelly said the new Sydney data centre was key to Defence’s data centre consolidation strategy under the ICT Reform Program.

Fujitsu isn't new to the data centre business. For years, the company has hosted custom application deployments for customers who requested such service. Now it has invested tens of millions of dollars and is opening more of its secure data centre floor space to companies seeking professional Web, cloud computing and application colocation services.

Telx, an interconnection and colocation provider in strategic North American markets, has announced that Telarus, a premier telecom master agent and patent holder of real-time carrier quotes, has selected Telx as both a colocation provider and a channel partner.

The NSW government has shelled out more than A$1.4 million in taxpayer funds to consolidate data centres, even as there is no savings estimate. According to the state opposition, the lack of planning and poor project management, which had damaged the data centre reform program, did not surprise them.

British IT firm Computacenter said it expected to increase first-half profit by more than 10%, in line with its expectations, as its focus on higher-margin IT services paid off. Revenue in the first half grew 7%, excluding the effect of the sale of its trade distribution arm in October, the company said, while the reported growth was 5%.

Computacenter reported pre-tax profit of £18.2 million) for the first-half a year ago.

Source: Reuters

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UK-based systems integrator Prolinx has acquired consultancy outfit Five IT. The deal represents the third acquisition by Prolinx in the last 12 months. Five IT specializes in providing virtualisation services to the commercial sector. Prolinx reckons that its latest purchase is another pillar in its quest to become a leading provider of Infrastructure as a Service, building upon its expertise as a systems integrator of virtualisation, data management and infrastructure technologies.

Fortress International Group, a provider of consulting and engineering, construction management and 24/7/365 site services for mission-critical facilities, has announced that it has closed approximately US$44 million in new contracts for the six months ended June 30, 2010, an increase of nearly 300% compared with US$15 million in new contracts for the comparable period in 2009.

Data centres are becoming increasingly popular, used by banks, telecoms companies, web-hosting firms and others to house computer systems, telecoms and client-sensitive data. These buildings have some very specific requirements and as a result, different legal issues to other types of property. From our experience, it is clear that clients can save significant sums of money and avoid considerable risk by using specialist legal advisers in relation to data centre work.

Digital Realty Trust, the world's largest wholesale data centre provider, has announced that it completed the acquisition of a five-property data centre portfolio comprises approximately 919,000 sq ft located in California, Arizona and Virginia, referred to as the Rockwood Capital/365 Main Portfolio.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, one of the largest global telecommunications service providers and Dimension Data Holdings, a global specialist IT services and solutions provider, have announced that they have reached agreement on the terms of a cash offer to be made by NTT for the entire issued and to be issued ordinary share capital of Dimension Data for approximately £2.1 billion, unanimously recommended by both Boards of Directors.

A Silicon Valley start-up that claims to have the technology that can cut energy consumption in half at data centres has raised an additional US$11.25 million in venture capital. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Power Assure s announced that additional funding has come in from Good Energies, Point Judith Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. In addition, Power Assure received a US$5 million grant from the Department of Energy providing the company with US$18.75 million in total capital.

Sri Lanka's PC House, an information technology firm, will raise 630 million rupees in an initial public offering to expand its IT enabled services business and product distribution, officials said.

"We are investing about 50% of the proceeds in an internet data centre and expanding (business process outsourcing and knowledge process outsourcing services," PC House chairman Shaheedul Hijiry Mohamed Rishan said.

Source: Lanka Business Online

Companies in the United States and Europe expect to spend less on information technology than they did three months ago due to economic uncertainty in the euro zone and public spending cuts, according to a UBS survey.

Data centre transformation projects will not become widespread until 2013, according to Ovum. Although data centre transformation (DCT) projects form a key part of most businesses’ IT plans, such initiatives will not be prevalent in the mainstream until 2013 at the earliest, according to an analyst firm.

Rumours were circulating that Telecity is engaged in takeover talks with its main US rival. Shares in Telecity, Europe's largest data centre operator, jumped 7.4 to 403.3p on the back of chatter that it has been in in-depth buy-out talks. Sources suggested that Telecity has been in discussion with US business Equinix for about three months.

Data centre design and build provider Sudlows has announced it has been hired by an undisclosed UK Web hosting firm to construct its third data centre at an initial value of US$1.5 milllion (£1 million).

Though the name of the Web host was not disclosed, it did mention that it is one of the "UK's leading Web hosting companies". Located in in Manchester, the new 3,051 sq ft facility will incorporate 12,000 servers inside. The data centre will host a roster of existing high-profile UK clients including HSBC, Barclays, T-mobile and JJB Sports.

Source: The WHIR

GPX Global Systems, a provider of carrier neutral colocation facilities within the MENA and South Asian markets has signed an agreement with Kanakia Spaces, to acquire space in their exceptional new Boomerang complex, to construct GPX’s first carrier neutral Tier 4 Internet Data Center in Mumbai. Kanakia Spaces is one of India’s leading residential, commercial & retail real estate developers with extensive experience and solid operations in the Indian market.

Puppet Labs has raised a US$5 million second round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which brings the total funding for the open source configuration-management software provider to more than US$7 million. Existing investors True Ventures and Radar Partners, which participated in the Series A round, also contributed to this round. The company also announced the latest version of the Puppet software — version 2.6.

IBM has reported solid numbers across most of its business lines for the second quarter and raised full year earnings guidance.

The company said revenue came in at US$23.72 billion—shy of the US$24.17 billion expected by Wall Street analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters but 2% higher than the same period a year ago. Net income jumped 9.1% to US$3.39 billion, while earnings per share came in at $2.61, up 12.5% from the previous year.

Source: Information Week

Small technology company Lightbound plans to invest US$24 million to construct a new 50,000 sq ft data centre just southwest of Downtown Indianapolis.

Lightbound plans the new building at 650 W. Henry St., near Kentucky Avenue, and made its expansion plans known in an application it filed seeking a 9-year tax abatement with the Metropolitan Development Commission.

Source: Indy Star

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Online ticket provider Thetrainline.com has extended its infrastructure services contract with Capgemini for £15 million. Under the five-year extension which starts this year, the outsourcer will continue to provide round-the-clock support to the ticket company's entire IT infrastructure, including its online and call centre customer-facing systems.

The deal includes the running of Thetrainline's data centre in Yorkshire, where virtualisation technology will be deployed and application support provided from a Capgemini site in India.

Venture capital flowed freely into the cloud in the second quarter, as local companies that specialize in cloud computing services raked in the largest chunk of the region’s investment dollars in defiance of broader VC woes.

Three companies that offer cloud services took in US$64 million of the at least US$131 million in VC dollars going to Washington-area companies in the quarter, according to data compiled by the Washington Business Journal.

Source: Washington Business Journal

Google may be ramping up spending on data centres, though whether the money is going on new sites or upgrading existing ones is unknown. In Google's quarter two financial results (Q2 2010) the search titan disclosed that it had made US$476 million in capital expenditures, the "majority of which was related to IT infrastructure investments, including data centres, servers and networking equipment."

VMware reported strong second-quarter results and raised its revenue outlook as customers continue to use virtualisation software to upgrade data centres.

The company reported net income of US$75 million in the second quarter. Non-GAAP earnings were 34 cents a share. Revenue was US$674 million, up 48% from a year ago. Wall Street was looking for earnings of 32 cents a share on revenue of US$656.9 million.

Source: Cnet

Finland-based IT consultancy Tieto has said its net profit increased to €11.7 million in the second quarter of 2010 from €10 million in the corresponding period a year earlier. Net sales fell by 3% year-on-year to €431.5 million.

In April-June 2010, operating profit was €19.5 million compared to €10.4 million in the second three months of the previous year, representing an operating margin of 4.5%, up from 2.3%.

Source: Trading Markets

Keppel Telecommunications & Transportation has posted a 15.3% increase in second quarter net earnings to S$13.8 million. This came despite a 7% decline in revenue for the three months ended June to S$27.2 million.

With the launch of the group's data centre fund in the second quarter of this year, Keppel said it will look to expand its portfolio of data centre assets through the fund. In addition, it will seek expansion opportunities for data centres in Singapore and overseas.

Source: Channel News Asia

NTT Communications has announced that it will open premium data centres in Vietnam and Singapore and also launch a new service that enables enterprise customers to quickly establish seamless connectivity between core data centres under a major new strategy to expand business in the fast-growing Asian region.

EMC delivered a better than expected second quarter and raised its outlook amid strong demand for storage as data centres are upgraded. EMC expects IT spending to be up 3% to 5% in 2010.

The storage giant had earnings of US$426 million on revenue of US$4.02 billion. Non-GAAP earnings were 28 cents a share. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 27 cents a share on revenue of US$3.98 billion.

Source: ZDNet

The explosion of Facebook is shaping up to be major windfall for Redwood City-based DPR Construction.

DPR is building a new US$188 million data centre for Facebook in Prineville, Oregon. The 147,000 sq ft data centre is being built on 124 acres that Facebook bought for US$3.2 million in January.

Source: San Francisco Business Times

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UK mobile phone operator Vodafone has reported that group revenues increased in the last quarter. Group service revenues grew by 1.1% as all regions of the global player improved, it said in its interim management statement for the quarter ended 30 June, 2010. The company reported a revenue increase of 4.8% to £11.3 billion.

One hundred undeveloped acres in Woodlawn are on the short list for the largest single federal stimulus building project, a US$750 million data centre for the Social Security Administration. But there’s no guarantee the facility will go next to Social Security headquarters in Baltimore County. An undisclosed number of other sites within 40 miles of the headquarters are also in the running, in other counties and potentially other states.

GlassHouse Technologies, a data centre consulting and managed services firm, announced the availability of a whitepaper that outlines data centre modernisation strategies to align business needs and financial objectives.

GlassHouse's whitepaper provides organizations with key elements to consider when building a data centre modernisation strategy. Specifically, GlassHouse outlines how organizations can ensure service level tiers are in alignment with business requirements and assess their need for shared-services models, including cloud-based options.

Savvis has reported its second quarter 2010 financial results, with revenue of US$221.8 million, compared to US$219.9 million in the second quarter of 2009.

Income from continuing operations for the second quarter of 2010 was US$2.6 million, compared to US$9.5 million in the second quarter of 2009. The company reported a net loss of US$13.2 million in the second quarter of 2010, compared to a second quarter 2009 net loss of US$6.2 million.

Source: SYS CON

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SynapSense, whose technology improves energy efficiency and cuts power and cooling costs in data centres, has announced that it is deepening its relationship with GE by securing an investment and commercial partnership as part of a focus on digital energy services, the Smart Grid and ecomagination.

GE Energy Financial Services is joining with SynapSense's other investors in a combined $5 million investment for the development and market expansion of SynapSense's Data Center Monitoring, Adaptive Control and Energy Management technology.

SoftLayer Technologies, the innovative on-demand data centre services provider, has announced solid financial and operational growth through the first half of 2010.

SoftLayer provides highly automated, on-demand data centre and IT services that allow businesses to more efficiently utilize their resources and decrease their capital expenditures. The company earned US$60 million in revenue for January 1 through June 30, leading to 21 months of GAAP profitability and sequential growth.

Source: Centre Daily

iomart Hosting, a provider of managed hosting and cloud computer services, is supporting the delivery of a ground-breaking online English language learning programme to children in the Republic of Korea. iomart Hosting is working with Manic Monkey to deliver an interactive English language learning system called Little Bridge which allows children to explore a safe virtual world where they can learn the language and join an English speaking community of Young Learners.

Critical backup power systems manufacturer Active Power has announced results for its second quarter ended June 30, 2010. Revenue for the quarter was US$16.0 million, an increase of 44% from the first quarter of 2010 and an increase of 142% compared to the second quarter of 2009.

For the six months ended June 30, 2010, total revenues of US$27.2 million was 53% higher than the US$17.8 million recorded for the same period in 2009. Gross profit margin for the quarter was 27%, compared to 26% in the first quarter of 2010, and 22% in the second quarter of 2009.

StepStone Solutions, a provider of Total Talent Management software solutions, has chosen TelecityGroup to provide colocation and managed data centre services. StepStone Solutions will use TelecityGroup’s Frankfurt data centres as its primary European facility, enabling the company to maximise the efficiency and stability of its hosted IT systems and also comply with stringent European data protection regulations.

Dimension Data, the US$4 billion specialist IT services and solution provider, used its holistic systems integrator skills, technology assets, and experience to seamlessly migrate the City of Johannesburg’s (COJ’s) ICT outsourcing contract to its own platform in only one month.

Royal Mail Group, the national postal service of the United Kingdom, has signed a six-year IT contract with Capgemini UK, a subsidiary of Capgemini group, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, in a move which aims to transform its business and consumer online services, help to reduce its annual website IT costs and support expansion and diversification into a wide range of new web-based business opportunities without the delays and expense of traditional IT.

STME, an enterprise IT solutions integrators in the Middle East, has announced that it has recently signed a partnership agreement to become IBM Business Partner in the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. STME will have access to world-leading IBM servers, storage and backup technologies, resulting in enhanced delivery of premium services and helping STME realise its vision of becoming the leading datacentre infrastructure provider in the region.

Pacnet has stepped in to jointly fund a A$447 million undersea fibre cable connecting Sydney to the United States via Auckland that will double capacity along the route. Pacific Fibre and Pacnet will sign a joint build agreement with a supplier, and share maintenance and operational costs once the build is complete.

The cable was first announced back in March by Pacific Fibre, a company run by several high-profile New Zealand businessmen. Pacific Fibre's chief Mark Rushworth said at the time that financing for the project was yet to be secured.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has reported quarterly results for the quarter ended June 30, 2010. This quarter includes the results from the acquisition of Switch & Data Facilities Company, Inc. from May 1, 2010, which is referred to as the Switch and Data acquisition.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has announced that it will expand its second International Business Exchange data centre in Singapore, SG2, as a result of an increasing demand for premium colocation and interconnection services in Singapore and South Asia. This third expansion phase within the SG2 IBX data centre will add 850 new cabinet equivalents when completed in mid-2011.

Internap Network Services, a provider of end-to-end Internet business products and services, has announced its alliance with Lightower Fiber Networks, a metro fibre network and bandwidth service provider in the Northeast. Through the relationship, enterprises in buildings and data centres connected to Lightower's all-fibre network can now optimize network performance and availability through the use of Internap's Performance IP. Businesses can also benefit from Internap's managed hosting, CDN and colocation services.

Regional NSW managed service provider Verb IT is one week away from completing the fit out of the first container data centre in Australia based on HP's POD technology. Verb IT director Christopher Clifford said he spent some 20 months researching the various pod configurations on offer before deciding to take the HP route.

When Corinne Charette was appointed chief information officer of the Government of Canada in May 2009, she quickly discovered her responsibilities ran wide and deep. Charette's broad experience certainly helps, having held executive and information technology positions at Transat A.T., FINTRAC, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, KPMG, IBM Global Services and Via Rail Canada.

But the challenges are many. She spoke with GCN Editor-in-Chief Wyatt Kash recently about her focus on data centres, information management and the next generation of electronic government.

Universal Networking Services, a provider of mission-critical power and cooling infrastructure products and services has announced strategic partnership with Australian based company, Datapod.

International hosting provider, PEER 1 Hosting has announced that it has signed a multi-year colocation agreement with Capgemini Canada, a member of the Capgemini Group, a global provider of consulting, technology and outsourcing services.

DediPower, a managed hosting provider, has launched its third data centre to accommodate its rapidly growing managed hosting business which includes dedicated servers, colocation options, virtualisation platforms and Cloud based solutions.

Designed to accommodate expansion of DediPower's existing client base, which includes Virgin, Sony, ITV, the NHS, and The BRIT Awards, the new 11,000 sq ft tier 3 data facility has the capability to house 200 additional racks at 6kw each and affords FM200 fire suppression.

Cardiff University has invested £1 million in its IT network as part of an ongoing upgrade to its infrastructure. The university has recently acquired land in the city centre which it is developing into a research centre, and part of the investment will be spent on designing and building the technology part of the building.

France's Schneider Electric saw profit double due to strong growth in emerging markets and as industrial markets and data centres rebound. "We benefited clearly from our diversified end-market exposure, with the industrial market and data centres the first to rebound," said Chairman and CEO Jean-Pascal Tricoire.

The group's net profit soared by 112% to €735 million over the first half of the year. In the second quarter alone, sales increased by 18.5%, to €4.66 billion, boosted by strong sales in the industry sector.

Source: Reuters

BT Ireland has won a €3.5 million deal with Applusb, the company which runs Ireland’s NCT service, to provide the computer network for the national car-testing service.

Under the three-year deal, BT Ireland will design, build and manage the network for the NCT service. BT will provide an end-to-end managed service, which includes procuring hardware in the 46 test centres around the country and hosting infrastructure in its Dublin data centre.

Source: Irish Times