Craig’s experience is grounded in building and transforming businesses to rapidly accelerate growth. He joins UC4 from BMC Software, where he worked in a senior sales role. Prior to BMC, Craig ran UK operations for Identity Software (later acquired by BMC) and also managed new business sales and key account management at Netscaler before it was acquired by Citrix in 2006. He has also worked in senior sales roles at software solutions companies including IONA, HLNT Networks, and WebPerform Group before its merger with Gomez.

UC4, which is backed by UK investment house the Carlyle Group, believes that the increasing complexity of the IT environment and emerging technologies such as virtualisation and cloud computing create a unique opportunity for the company moving forward. Craig’s appointment is the latest in a series of major investments in the business to enable UC4 to capitalise on this opportunity, building on a period of solid growth for the company. UC4 closed its fiscal year 2010 with 90 new customers and revenues of more than $72 million (USD).

Jason Liu, chief executive officer of UC4 said: “Craig’s wealth of experience in building businesses and deep knowledge in automation and systems management solutions makes him the perfect fit for driving our initiatives in the UK and Rest of World. He joins at an exciting time for UC4, as we believe our intelligent automation software is unique in the market, and intelligent management of IT infrastructure is now more critical than ever.”

Craig said: “I’m excited to be part of UC4′s strategic team as the company is clearly on an upward trend. Initially, my major focus is on the UK business; however I have big plans to significantly accelerate growth across the entire region, which I’m very confident we can achieve due to the UC4′s innovative technology and strong leadership.”

To support its ambitious growth plans, the company has recruited a new team in the UK (including pre-sales, sales, admin and sales support). Craig is based in UC4′s UK office in Reading.

The group, which employs 12,000 people across 1,300 outlets, provides catering, hospitality and facilities management services across business as well as venues from football stadiums to heritage sites.

Operational project leader Andy Baron is responsible for deploying Sostenuto across the different support functions, allowing everyone involved with the group, from suppliers to staff and chefs, to phone a single number with their queries, whether they relate to invoicing issues, staff maternity queries, or quality complaints.

“From day one, we made extensive alterations to Sostenuto to fit our business,” said Baron. “Over the years the software has been put to the test for scalability, flexibility and accessibility and passed with flying colours. Since the initial implementation, Sostenuto’s user base has grown four-fold, and the process has been seamless. Configuration is straightforward, so you don’t have to rely on consultancy for most changes, which helps keep costs down.”

“Because it is browser based, the software can be deployed with minimal disruption and is accessible from anywhere. Even more importantly, it is a platform which is tried, tested and stable.”

The IT service desk was the obvious team to take on the extended support enquiries, on the strength of strong established processes geared around a service culture.

Queries concerning a vast range of functions are directed at the central shared service desk, and then get referred to ‘super-users’ in the relevant departments. Supplier management and HR are two key operational areas which come under the umbrella of the service desk.

Elior’s bread and butter is made up of high volume contracts with venues such as football stadiums and margins can be very tight. In this context, managing suppliers effectively is a critical activity for the business’s success.

“We have had to centralise complex purchasing operations,” explained Baron. “Although we are working on a large scale, regional requirements have to be taken into account – customers in Cheshire would expect Cheshire cheese on the menu!”

“We have customised Sostenuto to allow chefs throughout the country to make enquiries regarding invoicing, pricing and delivery,” continued Baron. “They can also register complaints relating to specific suppliers or the quality of ingredients supplied. We have adapted the terminology used in the software, so that ‘items’ refers to ingredients and ‘products’ actually means ‘meals’.”

“Category managers use Sostenuto to manage supplier relationships. Having performance reports available in meetings gives them a lot more leverage.”

On the HR side, Sostenuto now allows the service desk to monitor and manage all queries relating to staff, including absence, CRB (criminal record bureau) checks, disciplinaries and dismissals, holidays and maternity.

Next to come under the umbrella of the shared service will be environmental quality queries from across the group.

“As a business, we are delighted with what Sostenuto has allowed us to achieve,” said Baron. “Personally, I really enjoy working with Sunrise as a supplier. Their support has been outstanding over the years, which gives us great confidence for the road ahead.”

Tough economic conditions make securing customer loyalty more critical than ever. Easynet standardized on BMC’s ITIL-based service assurance platform to replace the patchwork of legacy products across 10 countries. BMC’s Remedy suite now supports more than 4,000 service requests every month, seamlessly integrating customer support, change, asset and request management. With BMC Remedy, Easynet significantly reduced complexity, cut costs and increased efficiency while earning the highest customer satisfaction ratings for the escalation process for serious problems in Easynet’s history.

“By standardizing on BMC Remedy, we have an unprecedented degree of visibility into our customers’ situations, enabling us to deliver a faster, more rewarding service,” said David Doherty, CIO of Easynet Global Services. “The customer feedback has been extremely positive; they’ve noticed the service improvements, the professionalism and the enhanced communications.”

Since the implementation of BMC’s Remedy Suite, Easynet’s customer surveys show:

• Satisfaction with “escalation process for serious problems” has increased by 20 percent
• The number of customers happy with the speed and accuracy of problem resolution has increased by 8 percent and 6 percent respectively
• Satisfaction with “being updated on key issues” rose by 13 percent since the installation.

With Easynet’s promise of 99.9 percent uptime 24 hours a day in 10 countries, such dramatic increases in customer satisfaction have a critical impact on business success.

BMC’s Remedy suite has provided more flexibility to focus on critical business services. Staff productivity and consistency also increased, with Doherty’s team now able to prioritize IT support activities.

“We decided to use the BMC Remedy process to drive ITIL and best practices, as opposed to inventing new processes from scratch,” said Doherty. “We recognized that a new ITIL-based approach would empower us to improve communication and support and more efficiently track customer requests. As a result, we’ve boosted customer satisfaction and can operate more efficiently.”

“Easynet makes the power of standardizing on BMC Remedy clear. Increased productivity, efficiency and visibility have led to ground-breaking customer service advancements, ultimately driving critical business success — a powerful combination,” said Steve McCluskey, UK country manager for BMC Software.

For more information on the products used by Easynet, please visit the following links:

BMC Remedy Action Request System
BMC Atrium CMDB
BMC Remedy Service Desk
BMC Remedy Change Management
BMC Remedy Service Level Management
BMC Remedy Service Request Management

“The true challenge is not just to speed up OCR processing but, at the same time, to keep up the highest level of accuracy customers expect from OCR technology,” said Andrey Isaev, director of technology products department at ABBYY. “FineReader Engine 10 represents an ideal balance between those two basic criteria.”

The FineReader Engine SDK gives developers and integrators the tools they require to integrate a variety of recognition technologies into their applications. The ABBYY recognition platform delivers award-winning OCR, intelligent character recognition (ICR), barcode, checkmark, field-level/zonal recognition and PDF conversion for transforming scanned documents and images into searchable and editable text files. FineReader Engine 10 features the broadest language support covering 198 languages for OCR and 113 languages for ICR. The key new features and functions of ABBYY FineReader Engine 10 include:

Enhanced Fast Recognition Mode – Delivers up to 92 percent faster page throughput for European languages while maintaining the high level of recognition accuracy. It is designed to optimise processing speed/accuracy balance for good quality images.

Increased OCR Accuracy for Chinese, Japanese and Korean – Improved Asian character classifier providing a considerable OCR accuracy increase on documents in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, as well as, multilingual documents combining Asian and European characters.

New Recognition Mode for Low Resolution Scans – Delivers up to 20 percent accuracy improvement** on low resolution scans and low print quality documents (e.g. old faxes).

New Powerful API for Simpler Development – New API offers a set of pre-defined profiles for the most popular recognition tasks such as “document conversion for archiving,” “document conversion for content reuse,” “barcode recognition” and more. Profiles include optimal sets of processing parameters to start and the best OCR quality without the need for manual system tuning or a long learning curve. Manual tuning is available for specific custom solutions.

Improved Document Structure and Page Layout Reconstruction – Delivers further enhancements in the analysis of the logical structure of multipage documents via ABBYY’s second generation ADRT® (Adaptive Document Recognition Technology). FineReader Engine 10 accurately re-creates complex formatting attributes of original documents in native Microsoft® Office format — now including tables of contents, hierarchical heading structures, picture and table captions, and providing improved reproduction of footnotes and styles. The product also delivers enhanced preservation of document layouts containing background image items with text areas upon them and more accurately reproduces diagrams, graphs and charts in output files.

In addition, the SDK delivers a new Document Structure API, a unique feature-set to easily access and manipulate the document structure attributes such as headings, chapters, page numbers, footnotes, headers and more.

New Achievements in Image and Photo Processing – Enhanced ABBYY Camera OCR technology intelligently corrects image 3D distortions, ISO noise and motion blur. FineReader Engine 10 delivers new binarization technology that ensures entire text retention on the image, preventing the loss of information even in difficult cases. In addition, the solution includes a unique feature to separate colour marks and stamps from the rest of the text on an image, improving recognition accuracy.

Improved PDF Export – FineReader Engine 10 offers predefined PDF export profiles – including MaxQuality, MinSize, Balanced, and MaxSpeed – allowing integrators to achieve better quality PDF conversion projects with a smaller file size.

“Some companies want a powerful and scalable SCM system but are uncertain how many licenses they may need long term,” said Dave Robertson, VP International for Perforce Software. “Rather than pay full price up-front for a perpetual license, the subscription option makes it more cost effective for new and existing customers to add or remove licenses on an annual basis.”

Subscription licenses enjoy the full power of Perforce, including all integrations and plug-ins, software upgrades, and technical support. Upon renewal, a portion of the subscription fees may be applied to the eventual purchase of perpetual licenses.

In addition to purchase and subscription options, Perforce offers free licenses to qualifying open source projects and educational institutions. For more information about Perforce licensing, please visit http://www.perforce.com/licensing

“Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he’ll do even better at Oracle,” said Larry Ellison. “There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark. Oracle’s future is engineering complete and integrated hardware and software systems for the enterprise. Mark pioneered the integration of hardware with software when Teradata was a part of NCR.”

“Mark is an outstanding executive and a proven winner,” said Oracle President Safra Catz. “I look forward to working with him for years to come. As Oracle continues to grow we need people experienced in operating a $100 billion business.”

“I believe Oracle’s strategy of combining software with hardware will enable Oracle to beat IBM in both enterprise servers and storage,” said Mark Hurd. “Exadata is just the beginning. We have some exciting new systems we are going to announce later this month at Oracle OpenWorld. I’m excited to be a part of the most innovative technology team in the IT industry.”

An established and essential online resource for the academic, professional and research communities, ingentconnect now has a distinct and vibrantly re-energised look and feel. The new design is the second phase of the platform’s regeneration, with further releases to follow delivering additional improvements and upgrades to include; a new Publisher Statistics package, integration with an award winning search engine, enhanced ahead of print functionality, plus additional content, amounting to 3600 new titles.

Phase one of the enhancements included a release in March this year which featured early compliance with Shibboleth 2, as well as RightsConnect integration and improved Open Access support, amongst many other improvements to enhance its user experience.

It may look dramatically different, but ingentaconnect still maintains its status as a trusted and established research resource; containing 13,500 scholarly and professional publications from 255 leading international publishers, with 2.5 million unique users per month. ingentaconnect continues to be committed to ensuring visibility of publisher’s content via library technology. Partnerships with Summon, Primo Central and EBSCO Discovery Service guarantee publisher’s content is discoverable via the latest range of library products.

Louise Tutton, Chief Operating Officer of Scholarly Online at Publishing Technology commented, “We are hugely excited about this milestone in ingentaconnect’s history – the rebrand heralds the start of a new era for ingentaconnect. The rebrand is the most visible element in its evolution, but the core technologies behind our largest and pioneer platform have also progressed. With technology taking another leap forward into the world of the semantic and mobile web, Publishing Technology and ingentaconnect are committed to staying at the sharp end.” ingentaconnect mobile will make its debut in the Autumn. www.ingentaconnect.com
Publishing Technology operates across the trade and academic markets, in books and journals, print and on-line. Working with more than 500 publishers, to date, the company has operated primarily from the UK and the US, but has recently also expanded into Japan, Brazil and Germany.

For more information Publishing Technology, its products and services, please visit www.publishingtechnology.com

Simon Muderack, Tribold’s CEO said: “Working with Gen-i we see a joint drive from both their Business and IT leadership on cycle time reduction, costs of operations, and bringing more fast track products into the market. These goals are directly aligned with where Tribold EPM can bring real value to our users. We look forward to working together with the Gen-i team delivering these tangible improvements to their enterprise product range”.

About Tribold
Tribold is the world’s leading provider of Enterprise Product Management (EPM) software specifically developed for Communication Service Providers (CSPs). Tribold EPM™ is a single, integrated suite of Enterprise Product Management applications that empowers CSPs to put products at the heart of their business.

Tribold EPM™ is based on a Centralized Product & Service Catalog (CPC) and a Product & Service Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution.

Dramatic improvements in product management performance enable CSPs to drive increased profit by reducing time to market, decreased cost to market, increased quality of the product management process and increased ability to support product and service innovation.

Headquartered in London, and with offices in North America and Asia, Tribold was founded in 2003 and is privately held. For more information visit www.tribold.com.

Challenge
As a start-up, Beyond Chocolate initially managed its accounts using a tailor made Excel spreadsheet, which was extremely complex, comprising a number of different tabs.

Not only was the presentation of the accounts very unattractive and confusing for VAT inspectors, it also posed a number of limitations. It was not compatible for print and worse still, did not provide Beyond Chocolate with the opportunity to create meaningful reports for tracking trends and sales.

Solution
Beyond Chocolate started looking for a simpler and more effective accounting solution for small businesses and discovered Accountz and its range of accounting solutions for businesses, Business Accountz.

Sophie Boss, co- founder of Beyond Chocolate commented: “We considered several accounting software packages, however, Business Accountz was the only one that was compatible with Macs. This meant that there were no external costs or packages to download so we could keep costs to a minimum, which was an important factor for us. The fact that Business Accountz could provide reports instantly was also a major selling point as we needed to be able to manage our finances transparently, and in real-time.”

“We were also very impressed with the personable approach Accountz took with its customers which reassured us of the high level of support we would receive,” Sophie continued.

After assessing its needs and ensuring that the Accountz software met them, Beyond Chocolate selected Business Accountz Enterprise, to help them manage their accounts more efficiently.

Evaluation
Beyond Chocolate has been using Business Accountz Enterprise for five months and is already realising the benefits.

Sophie commented: “Business Accountz Enterprise is very easy and simple to use, which means that even without any financial knowledge you can still manage your accounts in a very straight forward way. Accountz provides training for those who wish to gain a better understanding of the necessities of handling company finances which we found very valuable.”

“Due to the online nature of our business, Business Accountz Enterprise was particularly attractive as we can now use an advanced feature to ensure that upfront payments are accounted for in the upcoming months books,” she said.

Sophie expanded: “We can also process VAT returns at the touch of a button and tailoring and creating invoices is effortless, which is perfect for an agile small business like ours.”

“One of the most significant benefits of using Business Accountz Enterprise is that we now have access to a rich database which we can use to map trends and sales, which is a cost effective way for us to measure marketing initiatives and general customer demand. We can now be very strategic, which as a small business is absolutely crucial in order to grow whilst also remaining financially stable,” Sophie concluded.

• All respondents had reviewed their licence arrangement in the last 12 months, with more than half having reviewed in the last quarter – this compares to the 2009 survey where a more relaxed approach to licences was observed and indeed 10% of respondents had never reviewed their licence situation at all. The approach to enterprise licensing remains a challenge with nearly a quarter of respondents unaware of it and a further third exploring the potential.
• The benefits of SaaS are still seen as questionable by the respondents with over 80% stating that SaaS is either irrelevant or that they are happy without it. This is broadly similar to the 2009 results.
• Meanwhile, views on offshoring are significantly polarised with around half for and half against. Public sector attitudes to offshoring continue to be more negative than the private sector, despite the current focus on efficiency and savings by the government.
• Interestingly despite Oracle’s efforts over the last year there is still a lack of real understanding around Fusion, with a third of respondents struggling to understand the nature and business benefits around it. A further 40% state they understand the technology but have not yet assessed the business impact of Fusion for their organisation.

Commenting on the research, Andy Seferta, European head of Fujitsu’s Oracle Practice said: “There is no question that Oracle technologies are still vital to keeping businesses functioning. But what has become clear for us through this research – and wider conversations we are having – is that organisations are taking a closer look at their critical applications and reviewing how they can get more out of them whether that be through simply efficiencies around licensing or more strategic options such as outsourcing and SaaS.

Seferta continued: “We fully expect the applications landscape to change over the course of the next year as organisations look at how they deliver and manage their applications; Not only to drive IT efficiencies but also to improve robustness of delivery to the business.”

Ronan Miles, UKOUG chairman comments, “It is a real pleasure to work again with Fujitsu on this survey and having back-to-back results to compare user attitudes year-on-year is very useful. The results are very interesting and reflect many anecdotal conversations we have with our members. In the current economic climate, it is very understandable that only 30% have fully considered the business impact of Fusion. However, anticipated announcements later this year should drive an upward trend that will be shown in a survey next year.”

* The report was undertaken in June 2010 by UKOUG and surveyed 135 of its members. The industry sector split was 60% private sector, 40% public sector. Full version of the report can be downloaded here – http://www.fujitsu.com/uk/services/application-services/enterprise-applications/oug-survey-results.html