Among the rhetoric of Oracle OpenWorld, the announcement of its autonomous database - with the unbelievably dull name of 18c - did merit attention. Available in the cloud (and very much pitched against AWS and its database offerings like Redshift) 18c promises to be self-tuning, self-provisioning and self-healing, enabling it to run in an automated way.

If it can remove the need for manual database admin, the database ought to be a fine example of how machine learning enabled technology can make substantial changes to how businesses – and individuals – operate. "If you eliminate human labour, you eliminate human error," states Larry Ellison. 18c is also designed to be used with Oracle’s freshly announced highly automated cybersecurity, to stop data theft.

These products showcase how machine intelligence could be used within mainstream technology, with an immediate impact on productivity and the scope to alleviate the pressure on overburdened IT departments. It also brings skill requirement assessments and the redeployment of staff to higher value tasks closer to hand – but that’s a positive move.

After 15 years at CGI, 4 years of which were as President for CGI UK operations following the acquisition of Logica, Tim Gregory is retiring from CGI.  Tim was appointed President of the combined UK operations in 2012, after leading the merger of the two businesses and grew CGI’s UK business by 34%, winning a number of major long term contracts. Prior to the Logica acquisition Tim was President for CGI’s Europe and Australia business. Tim has enjoyed a 30 year career span in the technology business across multiple sectors and geographies.

In addition to his role in CGI Tim serves on the CBI Public Services board, the TechUK Board and is an active member of the Tech Partnership Board that seeks to inspire new talent and the development of new skills in the Technology sector.

Great track record and I will watch with interest the next chapter of Tim’s life. I suspect this will be ‘plural’. We wish Tim well. 

Steve Thorn assumed the role of President for CGI UK in 2017 -  having been with Logica/CGI some 25 years.

The way I read it, London-based startup, Blend Media, aims to become a one-stop shop for brands, agencies and publishers looking to add 360°/VR content to the marketing mix. To do this, Blend Media has built a content management and licensing system for 360°/VR content, and a marketplace for content creators.

Founded in 2015, Blend Media recently raised a further £1.5m in a seed funding round backed by Hambro Perks, I2BF Global Ventures and existing backers ITN Productions managing director, Mark Browning, and Paul Cooper, partner at M&A advisory firm Clarity. This brings total funding to date to £2.6m.

360°/VR content is the place to be and it looks like Blend Media wants to put itself at the heart of the industry. Good on them!

It’s painful times for Datatec, which says first half underlying EPS will slump 84-92% to between 1 and 2 US cents (six months ended 31 August 2017). Headline loss per share will be between 5 and 6 US cents, down from 9.1 US cents in the comparable period last year.

The primary root cause of this performance was the Westcon subsidiary, which continued to experience disruption “as a result of the final SAP implementation in EMEA”. Additional headwinds came in the shape of finance charges, amortisation expense and effective tax rate – all of which were higher than last year.

Revenue for Westcon in Europe was down $30m to $730m for the period.

Elsewhere in the Group, reseller and services provider, Logicalis, delivered revenues of $694m (down from $757m) and flat gross profit. There was no detail in today’s trading update on Europe/the UK specifically, but we may learn more once the full H1 results are out in November.

Redcentric is hoping that its new chief executive, Chris Jagusz, will breathe new impetus and integrity to the troubled company after the FY17 accounting scandal delivered an operating loss of £3m (see Redcentric chief executive to resign and work your way back).

Having held the reins for two years at Azzurri Communications until its £48.5m acquisition by Maintel in August last year, Jagusz has experience in leading a communications-focussed managed service provider. Though some will note he led Azzurri to a buyout after years of consecutive, though it has to be said shrinking, losses under his tenure.

Jagusz’ heritage looks very much telecoms and managed services with previous senior roles at SSE Telecoms, Daisy Group and BT going back to 1988. Though Redcentric sold its network assets to CityFibre in September 2016, it maintains a long term £4.5m dark fibre leasing arrangement to serve its customers fixed line connectivity needs for the foreseeable future, whilst selling mobile voice and data also remains a big part of its integrated managed services play.

We wish Jagusz luck – Redcentric’s challenge going forward is engineering a return to profit whilst minimising any reputational damage from ongoing Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Financial Reporting Council (FRC) investigations. Redcentric was keen to highlight its new leader’s “track record of delivering growth and business transformation". We can’t help but wonder which of those two is the more immediate priority, but guess we will have a better idea when the company releases its interim results at the end of November.

The Insurtech scene is exploding. Willis Towers Watson recently reported that in Q2 2017 Insurtech funding volume increased 248% over the year to US$985m, with 64 transactions. In 2016, US$1.7bn was raised, and that figure was 42% up on the previous year.

A recent “Insurtech” arrival is London-based, FCA-regulated PremFina which offers insurance brokers their own branded premium financing service, also offering finance options for the purchase of insurance premiums. The cloud-based service can be used to convert up-front premiums to monthly instalments, generating finance fees for PremFina and presumably more business and a more predictable cash flow for the broker. The round, led by Rakuten Capital and Draper Esprit Plc raised US$36m in equity and debt.

An interesting wrinkle, no doubt. But this doesn’t look like anything more than a fairly conventional finance play. At the sharp end of the Insurtech world, with so much going on in terms of Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things and Machine Learning, you would have thought that there are substantially better returns (albeit with higher potential risk) available elsewhere.

Growth slowed for PwC Consulting LLP in its FY17 (see PwC consulting practice invests in cloud & digital for previous year’s results). Revenue grew 5% to £3,598m (that compared to 11% growth the year before, though that was boosted by the acquisition of Strategy&). Though PwC made a handful of acquisitions over FY17, they wouldn’t have had the same impact. Operating profit was, essentially, flat. Distributable profit per partner was down 8% to £652K (following a 5% decline in FY16 as well), but total staff remuneration was up 5%, in line with revenue growth, to £1.6b. Despite that the employee engagement figure – which measures commitment, pride, involvement, effort, and other indicators - declined from 78% to 72%.

Of the service lines, consulting and tax were the strongest performers; consulting grew revenues by 7.2% to £772m. The consulting practice has been concentrating on extending its partnerships and alliances, as well as investing in emerging technologies. One highlight of the year was the agreement with Cambridge-based Featurespace allowing wC to offer the technology to its customers to combat real-time financial attacks (see Featurespace in useful alliance with PwC UK).

Technology investment is also a feature across the other practices – in other words, PwC is doing a good job of demonstrating the application of digital technology in their own business. For example, the ‘Deals’ practice invested in Brainspace, enabling the use of AI in forensic investigations, and in Seal technology, which uses machine learning to review large volumes of contractual documentation. Meanwhile, the ‘Tax’ practice acquired Data Ignition, a platform for continuously monitoring end to end transaction data in multiple territories for clients, and providing real-time data visualisation and picking up on errors.

Regulatory compliance is a nightmare which only gets scarier. Not surprisingly, the tech sector is waking up to the opportunity and developing tools to help organisations navigate their way through the morass of rules and regulations that vary industry by industry and country by country.

Such is London-headquartered (though Africa-focused) startup Libryo, which is developing a platform which aims to help law firms automate some of the legal research work associated with regulatory compliance. Libryo recently raised $1m in a seed funding round backed by Seedcamp, Innogy, Force over Mass Capital, NextLaw Labs and angel investors. This brings total funding to date to $1.2m.

According to media reports, Libryo has expanded from five to 50 countries, 45 of which are across Sub-Saharan Africa and serviced by its office in Cape Town. Founded in 2015, Libryo reportedly fired up revenues of £150k in its first year of operation and aims to reach £2.5m in the next couple of years.

Libryo targets compliance advisors such as law firms and consultancies, as well as GRC (governance, risk & compliance) software vendors, i.e. aims to make the advisors more efficient. That seems a smart business model to me.

To understand more about ‘regtech’ in the Financial Services sector, you really should read our recent bulletin, Regtech - A Big New Opportunity, available exclusively to subscribers of our FinancialServicesViews research stream. The disenfranchised should contact our Client Services team (info@techmarketview.com) for further information!

Roc Technologies has secured £10m in investment from the British Growth Fund (BGF) to help power further growth.

The cash will in part be used to fund its acquisition of Chelmsford-headquartered City Change Management (CCM). CCM provides project management services for complex business and IT transformation projects, with recent customers including Gatwick Airport.

Roc will also use the funding to support further organic growth, which was more than 90% in 2017. Accounts up to the end of March 2016 show the company had revenue of £15.8m (operating profit of £1.8m), up from £8.2m in 2015.

Roc provides services to support business process, project delivery, and technology transformation. As it continues to grow we’ll see it invest to improve its own operations and infrastructure and keep an eye out for additional acquisition opportunities.

Silwood Technology (silwoodtechnology.com) produces Safyr, software which enables companies to navigate the complexity built up over years of using, and abusing, large ERP and CRM systems. Multiple versions of SAP, Oracle and Salesforce systems, often customised, poorly documented and badly governanced, result in many tens of thousands of data tables and a major challenge when people actually want to find, use and re-purpose data.

The looming arrival of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) increases the intensity of this problem, as data mis-use could lead to substantial fines. Customer data is often distributed across thousands of data tables, with the same data stored in many places, often with no certainty that all the relevant data has been identified.

Safyr uses the metadata within the large systems to map, navigate and dissect the data held. The software also provides more than just an “interface” spewing out all possible data for the analyst to wade through. Safyr provides clearer information as to the location of the data and identifies relationships, with additional features in the latest version enabling the filtering of irrelevant attributes and offering improved reporting.

“Shadow IT” and the popularity of Microsoft Dynamics and particularly Salesforce have exacerbated the GDPR problem as systems which could contain personal data proliferate throughout a business. The use of Safyr appears to offer a significantly quicker, and much more cost-effective route to track down all relevant data across an organisation and add new safeguards to comply with the new regulations. The alternative is to employ, or sub-contract, a platoon of expensive data analysts.

This small, Ascot-based company, with a prestigious customer list including Boeing, BP and RS Components looks to have developed a product that should prove very useful in the scramble as companies get ready for GDPR.

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We’re looking forward to welcoming some 200 leaders from the world of UK tech to the fifth annual Evening with TechMarketView tonight. We’ll be gathering from 6.30pm this evening at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) at 66 Portland Place, London, W1B 1AD.

This year the event, run in association with Sage, is themed Unlocking the Intelligence. We have an exciting evening of future-gazing planned, covering a vast spectrum of trends and issues that we believe will fundamentally determine the prospects for the UK tech market over the next several years.

If you’re free this evening and would like to come, it would be worth contacting our event coordinator, Tina Compton (tina.compton@tx2events.com, 020 3137 2541), to see whether any spaces have become available at the last minute. Tickets cost £425 for TechMarketView research subscription clients and Little British Battlers (£525 for everyone else). There are more details on the event here or see the booking page here.

For those of you that are coming, a reminder that the dress code is business attire and we kick off with a drinks reception at 6.30pm followed by the analyst presentations from 7pm. See you then!

It was wonderful to be able to present the future vision of the younger generation – as part of our ‘one night only’ KidsViews section at the TechMarketView Annual Presentation & Dinner (Oh what a night!). Huge thanks go to Weydon School in Farnham for giving us access to their Year 7s. The 12-year olds came up with some fantastically creative visions of 2035, involving many robots, some exciting transport and travel options, and lots of use cases for technology implants!

In this latest research note from TechMarketView – Future 2035: Preparing for change - we further explore the children’s view of how technology can support their life expectations, discuss what is driving their thinking, and talk about the likelihood of their, sometimes seemingly far-fetched ideas, becoming reality. We also explore how far barriers to the adoption of such technologies are being slowly knocked down. And ask what all this means for tech suppliers as they evolve their businesses to align with possible future scenarios.

TechMarketView subscribers can download the report now. Last night’s attendees will also receive a copy. If you are not yet a subscriber and would like to find out more, please contact Deb Seth.

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Thank you so much to everybody who joined us at RIBA last night for the fifth annual Evening with TechMarketView, we hope you enjoyed ‘Unlocking the Intelligence’ as much as we did. We’d particularly like to express our thanks once again to our sponsors Sage, without whom the event wouldn’t have been possible, and to tx2 Events for their flawless event management.

After a warm welcome from TechMarketView’s Managing Director Tola Sargeant, we heard inspiring words from Alan Laing, Sage’s Managing Director UK & Ireland, and were treated to KidsViews– a look ahead to 2035 through the eyes of today’s 12 year-olds - by TechMarketView Chief Analyst Georgina O’Toole.

Then it was down to business with Kate Hanaghan, Chief Research Officer, and Angela Eager, Research Director for Enterprise Software & Application Services, analysing trends in the sector and warning traditional SITS suppliers that complacency could be fatal. This was followed by TechMarketView’s public sector expert Dale Peters and financial services guru Peter Roe debating the trends in these key verticals, notably their success or otherwise at Unlocking the Intelligence.

We also heard two contrasting stories of SME success as our very own Martin Courtney interviewed Christian Nagele, now at Autotask but formerly CEO of erstwhile Little British Battler (LBB) CentraStage, and Paul Evans, CEO and co-founder at Great British Scaleup Redstor, about their respective experiences of ‘selling out’ and ‘scaling up’.

And finally, TechMarketView Chairman Richard Holway MBE closed the show with his take on what the future holds – we can look forward to an abundance of AI, transportTech and Missions to Mars amongst other things!

…and finally

If you attended the event last night you should receive an email with a link to download your copy of the slides later today. TechMarketView subscription clients can download the slides here (70MB file)

Delighted to report that Sherry Coutu CBE has been voted The Most Influencial Woman in UK Tech 2017 by Computer Weekly.

I’ve known Sherry for decades - since her days founding iii (Interactive Investor) in 1994 until its sale in 2001. I’ve then seen her go on as a highly successful angel investor and NED in high-profile companies like LinkedIn, London Stock Exchange, Raspberry Pi, Zoopla as well as Cambridge University.

Sherry was the author of the game-changing Scale-Up Report in 2014 and the subsequent founding of the Scale-up Institute.

On top of that, I commend her unfaltering work in establishing Silicon Valley Comes to the UK and Founders4Schools.

I read of many of these awards and often yawn. This time I cannot think of a better person to get the accolade Most Influencial Woman in UK Tech than Sherry. 

Earlier this week, Atos announced it is set to make an interesting acquisition, adding 800 staff to the fold, and expanding the company’s cybersecurity and communications-related IP. Expected to close end of December this year, the acquisition is of Vienna-headquartered Siemens Convergence Creators GmbH (CVC). CVC offers software-based solutions in the fields of communication networks, service and customer management, public safety and security, multimedia infotainment, and space technology.

Originally, CVC was an internal R&D solutions partner for Siemens Business Units. In 2016, it was carved out as an independent Siemens BU with its own IP resources and an external customer strategy. CVC does not have a presence in the UK; locations are Germany, the US, and Central and Eastern Europe (with delivery centres in Croatia and Romania). However, CVC’s capabilities in mission critical systems and secured networks will be useful for Atos globally. The communications and media products portfolio of offerings looks compelling, particularly as the ‘internet of things’ matures, offering functionality like high image quality on bad networks, and secure professional mobile radio for the emergency services. In the publication European Business, CVC’s CEO is quoted as saying “the best way to predict a future is to build it yourself, and that is what we are doing”. The culture fits with Atos’ recent increased emphasis on its science and engineering capabilities (see Atos technology leap drives H1 success).

The potential for Atos UK to penetrate the telco market is interesting – as we do not believe the UK business has much of a presence in that vertical currently. Other high-growth markets in which CVC is active include satellite and civil airplane manufacturers and operators.

Citrix’s turmoil shows no signs of abating as news of significant layoffs, restructuring and closing of facilities comes through. The reason given is that the move is “consistent with its previously-announced plans intended to accelerate the transformation to a cloud-based subscription business, increase strategic focus, and improve operational efficiency.”

The financial cost will be approximately $60m- $100m, of which $55m to $70m will be related to employee severance. The human cost, albeit different, will be higher of course.

In its most recent results, for Q2 (see Citrix contending with accelerating subs/SaaS shift), CEO David Henshall said demand for SaaS was rising faster than expected so the company had to be more aggressive and accelerate its own efforts. The restructuring and layoffs are part of that. However, the turmoil goes back further, as illustrated by the sudden departure of CEO Kiril Tatarinov in July after c.18 months in the top seat and further still as it split the business last year.

What’s curious about the latest moves is that ShareFile is apparently one of the product areas where people are being laid off: “repositioning and optimizing ShareFile for the enterprise market”. Yet much of ShareFile revenue is from SaaS, the very area where Citrix is seeing growth and wants to accelerate. Curiouser and curiouser – and a story where there are bound to be more chapters before too long. 

It would seem, based on the number of tweets/retweets, that the most memorable part of my short ‘…and finally’ presentation at the TMV Evening last Thursday, were my quotes of tweets from President Putin and Elon Musk on the threats posed by AI.

The whole debate has escalated since. Elon Musk, over the weekend, warned that the point when AI  would overtake the human race was ‘coming soon’. Just like Douglas Adams believed, in the ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’, that us mere humans were actually controlled by mice, Musk believes we are really all taking part in a huge computer game. To take the analogy to another level, the WSJ said that Musk was warning of a future where humans were the ‘house cats’ of our robot overlords. Their words, not mine.

Then we had Google’s launch of the Google Clips. This little camera - which costs c$49 - will recognise anyone (incl your pets) and start a short video stream. Just like Amazon’s Alexa, it is always on. Sounds innocent? So do you really want a video stream of your teenage daughter bringing her latest boyfriend home? Or, God forbid, your wife? Even The Independent reckoned it was ‘creepy’. Mind you, Google has form here with ‘creepy’ devices. Google Glasses reached their nemesis when people were found to be wearing them in public conveniences.

The opportunity for AI to wreak real damage on society is clearly huge. Conversely, AI will both improve productivity and therefore (hopefully) the living standards of everybody. But Musk is completely right in warning of the dangers we all face. 

I’d hazard a guess that London-based startup, FINDoC, has as its primary target market French people living in London, given that its most popular searches are for French Dentists in London, French Osteopaths in London, French GPs in London, et al. This is not surprising given that co-founders Xavier Bernal (CEO) and Sylvain Vuillen (COO) appear to be French. Founded in 2016, FINDoC has raised €1.4m in a seed funding round led by Fuel Ventures.

FINDoC is yet another medical professional marketplace to connect the ailing with the curers. It joins a long line of similar platforms already well established in the UK, including Your.MD, i-GP, Doctify, and the ‘elephant in the room’, Babylon Health, which has been firmly embraced by the NHS (see Hunt announces expansion of digital services in the NHS). FINDoC is free for patients and aims to eke out a living by charging medical professionals to list on its platform.

I think FINDoC’s best chance of success would be to play on the ‘find me a medical professional who can speak xxxx’ theme (not just French, of course), or perhaps to locate medical professionals who are most appropriate for specific religious groups and the like (though I suspect they tend to know who these are anyway). In any event, the founders may need to rethink the FINDoC brand as it is already far more than just finding a ‘doc’.