Good times, bad times
Who was firing on all cylinders, and who stalled in the channel this week?
Good times
Australia
The fact that Australia have slumped to woeful defeat in four of the past five Ashes series has put enormous strain on UK relations with our cousins down under.
But one IT channel wizard from Oz is hoping his latest venture will be as big a hit in south Wales as it has been in New South Wales. Australian serial IT entrepreneur Scott Frew has recently set up a London base for Iasset, a firm delivering a cloud-based renewals platform.
His intention now is to expand across EMEA.
Sounds like a plan to us. On the way you might even find some countries the Baggy Greens could still beat in a test match.
Petrolheads
The recent US Formula 1 Grand Prix may have seen Lewis Hamilton bag his third world championship. But the Stevenage speedmeister was not the only winner, with Manchester-based IT provider BitSol Systems snagging a deal to supply and manage the event's track safety camera system.
The UK tech firm has worked at the race in deepest Texas for the past two years, and has previously also won a deal with the Moto GP racing championship. BitSol claimed it wants to take its services into other sporting events.
Cloud
When gazing up at the sky, it is difficult to see clouds and think of them as aggressive, world-dominating entities, but in the IT world, this is exactly what they are. And there is no escape.
According to Synergy Research, the world is set to be "dominated" by cloud, with giants like AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google accounting for over half the market already, which was worth more than $21bn over the last four quarters. Fear the fluff!
Bad times
Youngsters
The IT skills gap is set to get significantly wider in the coming decade as swathes of current staff retire and today's kids pursue careers as pop stars or social media sensations. That is according to CompTIA boss Todd Thibodeaux, who said shows like The X Factor are partly to blame.
"People think ‘I can do that' [sing on The X Factor], but no, you can't," he said, crushing thousands of youngsters' dreams. Rumours his next plan was to reveal the truth about Father Christmas to nurseries across the country remain completely made up at the time of publication.
IT workers' piggy banks
Two IT companies were named and shamed last month for failing to pay certain employees the minimum wage.
We Love Laptops neglected to pay £1,079.07 to three workers, according to a government list, and Printer Cartridge Solutions didn't pay one member of staff £1.096.19.
The latter blamed a local college's admin error regarding an apprentice, and the former's boss Urmash Fatania told CRN in no uncertain terms what he claims happened.
"We took somebody from the Job Centre. They weren't employed with us, they wanted training with us. I thought ‘I'll help you out, we'll train you'. But he flipped the coin and said ‘I'm an employee' and reported us to HMRC for not paying him. But we weren't going to pay him in the first place!
"We're not going to take anyone from the Job Centre ever again," he fumed.
Well that's us told.
IT 100
Some palms may well be sweating in the IT world after VMware chief Pat Gelsinger predicted half the ‘IT 100' will disappear. As industry consolidation continues, and the recent Dell-EMC deal is a perfect example, it is inevitable that some of the well-known names that make up this Top 100 list will be swallowed.
The old adage ‘get big, get niche or get out' still applies. But of course, on the other hand, the remaining 50 per cent who make it through this predicted cull, won't see it as a problem at all. Quite the opposite.