Bloomberg reports that Sprint and T-Mobile U.S.A. are close to a merger whereby Sprint would acquire T-Mobile U.S. for $40 a share (up 17% from the current $34), valuing the company to $31bn. Deutsche Telekom (DTAG), which holds a 67% stake in T-Mobile U.S.A., would receive 27.5% in cash, 27.5% in Sprint stock and retain a 12% stake in T-Mobile U.S.A. T-Mobile U.S.A. had 2013 revenues of $24.4b[...]

The new deal between Hartlepool Council and Northgate Public Services (PS) shows how old-style local authority partnership contracts can evolve. This, is a low risk deal for Hartlepool Council, unlike other local authority partnerships of yester-year that failed to deliver.  For a start, Northgate has provided the Council’s IT services since 2001 and it has already established a presenc[...]

Amazon Web Services has launched Amazon WorkSpaces, a public cloud-hosted standard virtual desktop offering. The offering mirrors the IaaS Amazon EC2 offerings of Amazon Web Services, with shared IT infrastructures, multi-tenancy, fast provisioning and opex models. Amazon Workspaces features include: A choice of different CPUs, memory, storage Storage is attached to each virtu[...]

Capgemini Group, through its Mobile Solutions (MS) unit, has briefed us on its recent mobile device management (MDM) offering, called Mobile Secure, launched with SAP and Amazon Web Services in May 2013 Capgemini MS has designed this offering to be as affordable as possible: the offering is marketed at a price of €1/$1.11 per device per month. It is based on SAP Afaria (acqu[...]

NelsonHall is currently conducting a report on virtual desktop services and BYOD. The market is shifting from virtual desktop services to services that support choose your own device scenarios. Enterprise mobility, however, remains strictly confined to smart phones and to some extent to tablets. Traditionally, there were two main end user outsourcing offerings in the market:[...]