BA purge
British Airways has chosen the consolidation route to slash its IT costs by £50m per year. Consolidation (moving, to a single server, several applications that formerly ran as discrete services on separate servers) has allowed BA to remove 100 file and print servers, cut its printer count from 800 to 70 and reduce its contractor base. The company's IT21 programme was initiated following the September 11 attack on New York and other conflicts. BA purged its IT infrastructure and found 40 redundant systems and 550 desktop applications. The IT21 team is now considering further cost-cutting projects such as voice/data consolidation and moving away from its Sun Solaris (Unix) servers to Linux and Microsoft.
Free speech
Free calls between company branch offices and teleworkers is promised by a new service from UK telco Inclarity. The managed service converts voice calls into data and sends them over the company Lan and out through an ADSL broadband connection. This eliminates the cost of calls because data is carried free on broadband. International calls or calls to national non-ADSL phones can also be made at reduced costs, the company claims. The system requires VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phones or standard phones connected to the network through a special voice-to-data converter. www.broadbandtelephony.co.uk
Blade partners
Sun Microsystems and Oracle have announced a partnership aimed at promoting cost cutting through the use of blade servers, which can be racked together in higher densities than conventional standalone servers. A powerful system can be created using Oracle's Real Application Clusters software, which can allow several blades to act together as a single virtual server. To mark the start of the initiative, Sun launched two Sun Fireblades based on Intel Xeon chips, marking another step in the company's move towards lower cost chips rather than the UltraSparc processors it currently uses. www.sun.com/lowcost/feature/index.html
Defra defers
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is planning a £850m outsourcing project. The move forms part of the e-nabling Defra programme that started in 2001, and suppliers are now being invited to tender for the contracts by June 9. In a written statement, Alun Michael, the minister for rural affairs, admitted that the cost of the outsourcing has leapt by £500m over the past year, but claims that this reflects the "transformation of the department". The move is expected to meet resistance from the Public and Commercial Services Union representing Defra's 600-strong IT staff. www.defra.gov.uk/ebus/enabling
State support
The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) has finalised a framework for broadband that should make it easier and cheaper for any organisation funded by the state sector to buy broadband. The framework avoids the need for a time-consuming formal tender process and uses nationally negotiated rates. OGC says these will be an average of up to 20% lower than standard rates.
"The idea was to get a broad spectrum of suppliers," says the OGC, which says the suppliers should be able to connect any UK location.
www.ogcbuyingsolutions.gov.uk/
Very high Wi-Fi
Everest's 17,388ft-high base camp now has a Wi-Fi internet cafe. It has been established by Tsering Gyaltsen, grandson of one of the sherpas on the first ascent of Everest, 50 years ago next week. Climbers can rent a Wi-Fi PC card to connect to the internet.
In an email from Everest base camp to Online, Tsering Gyaltsen explains that Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC), an environmental organisation for the Khumbu region of Nepal, needed income following the end of government and WWF funding.
"Realising the importance of such an organisation in an area like the Khumbu, which entirely depends on tourism and being a local inhabitant, I felt obligated to help SPCC," Gyaltsen writes. His firm, Namche Technical Services, is training SPCC staff to run the cafe. The organisation will receive a large portion of profits for three years, then take ownership of the cafe.
The wireless technology, donated by Cisco, is working in temperatures as low as -17C. "We planned for the cold weather, so it did not create problems. For the Cisco radios, we designed thermocol enclosures to keep them warm," says Dileep Agrawal, managing director of Nepali ISP Worldlink.
The internet connection is provided by satellite. "Unfortunately, the base camp is a glacier that is constantly moving, inappropriate for a satellite dish pointed at a geostationary satellite," says Agrawal."So, we installed the dish a few kilometres away on a stationary hill called Kalapatthar." Cisco Aironet radios link the base camp and Kalapatthar.
The news of Everest's first ascent by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay was relayed by means of a coded weather report radioed from an army station to Kathmandu. In 1990, Sir Edmund's son Peter phoned his father in Auckland from the summit of the mountain, using a walkie-talkie connected to a satellite phone.
www.linkingeverest.com
