NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 8 October
08-10-2009
by Emmet Ryan
Colgate-Palmolive invest in Dublin | Irish IT spend to hit EUR2.9bn
Communications Minister Eamon Ryan presented the Communications Regulation (Premium Rate Services) Bill to the Dail on Thursday. The bill will impose rules on premium rate phone service providers and aims to provide for greater regulation of the industry. The new act will affect products such as mobile phone ring-tones, wallpapers, games and other subscription services. The aim of the new legislation is to protect those vulnerable to accidentally signing up to these services, particularly children or elderly people.
Staying with ministerial announcements, Tanaiste Mary Coughlan has announced that Colgate-Palmolive is investing EUR4.6 million in its Support Service Organisation in Dublin. The investment, which is supported by the Government through IDA Ireland, will be used to develop information technology for the company's global finance operations at its Citywest business campus. The operation employs 90 people in Dublin.
IT spending in Ireland this year will reach EUR2.9 billion, according to a new IDC study commissioned by Microsoft. The study says that from the end of 2008 through to the end of 2013, IT spending will grow 0.4 percent a year, compared to GDP growth of -1.3 percent a year. The report also found that IT-related activities will generate EUR4.8 billion in taxes this year. The software sector was cited as the main influence behind the growth, which should see the number of those employed in IT rise by 8,000 over the next four years.
Brown Thomas has reduced the time it takes to back up a full server from 1.5 hours to just 15 minutes using Acronis. The fashion retailer, which has stores in six Irish cities and towns, was facing increasing volumes of data and slower back-up times. Brown Thomas selected Acronis software to create back-up images of its servers, which control everything from point of sale through to merchandising and human resources applications. Using Acronis, Brown Thomas says it can bring a replacement server online in less than an hour should an existing one fail.
Xerox has made the ColorQube 9200 series available in Ireland .The ColorQube is a high-speed solid ink multifunction system, which Xerox claims cuts the cost of colour pages by up to 70 percent compared to traditional colour lasers and reduces waste by 90 percent.
Salesforce.com and Cisco have developed a new combined contact centre solution called Customer Interaction Cloud. The new service brings together Salesforce.com's Service Cloud 2 with Cisco's Unified Communications service. The combined effort is designed partly to help SMEs make better use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Mobile software firm NewBay has announced that over 10 million subscribers are now using its LifeCache Social Networking solution. The software lets subscribers communicate with their social networking friends across a host of online communities, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace and Bebo. Mobile operators such as O2, T-Mobile and Orange currently use NewBay's service.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 