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O2 forced to pull out of ESN mobile network bid processO2 has been forced to pull out of the bidding process to supply a 4G broadband network for the emergency services for commer-cial reasons. O2 was one of just two providers remaining on Lot 3 of the Emergency Services Mobile Communications Programme, the procurement process for the new Emergency Services Network (ESN). Its exit from the framework means that EE has now become the presumptive supplier-elect.

Met Police failed on cyber crime, according to top fraud officerFraud and cyber crime ran rampant in London over the past decade because the Metropolitan Police Service was “not very good” at detecting it, according to the head of the Met Police’s fraud team. The Met’s detection rate for fraud was almost zero in 2013, detective chief inspector Gary Miles told a confer-ence in London on 9 June.

Nationwide quick off the mark with Apple Watch banking appNationwide Building Society is promoting its digital credentials with the launch of a banking app for the Apple Watch, which it developed alongside IBM. Users can quickly check their account balance on the app by swiping the screen. According to a Nationwide survey, people are more likely to check their account balance (44%) while on the move than check their work email (34%) or update their diary (34%).

BT’s EE takeover poses a serious risk to competition, says CMABT’s planned multibillion-pound takeover of mobile network opera-tor EE represents a clear and present danger to competition in the UK communications market, according to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which has referred the bid for an in-depth investigation following an earlier consultation.

Apple confirms UK launch of Apple Pay iPhone payments serviceA quarter of a million locations will accept Apple Pay payments when it launches in the UK next month. Apple confirmed the planned UK availability of its contactless iPhone payments service and announced that eight UK banks will support it and 250,000 retail locations will accept it at launch. Users of the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Watch will be able to pay for goods and services through contactless terminals.

❯Catch up with the latest IT news online

THE WEEK IN IT

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http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247791/O2-pulls-out-of-ESN-mobile-network-bid-process















http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247897/Met-Police-failed-on-cyber-crime-says-top-fraud-officer












http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247893/Nationwide-quick-off-the-mark-with-Apple-Watch-banking-app















http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247815/BT-EE-takeover-a-serious-risk-to-competition-says-CMA












http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247777/Apple-confirms-UK-launch-of-Apple-Pay-iPhone-payments-service-in-July-2015



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Use of open data breaks out of startups and LondonData most used by open data companies

THE WEEK IN IT

Addison Lee supports business with MuleSoft API managementMinicab firm Addison Lee has used application programming inter-face (API) management technol-ogy from MuleSoft to enable it to keep up with competition and offer improved services to customers. The technology is helping it provide a more integrated service.

Pressure on AWS to power more datacentres with green energyAmazon Web Services (AWS) is under renewed pressure to increase the amount of renewable energy used to power its datacentres by 2020, despite assurances about its progress in this area.

Boots cuts 700 jobs in bid to restructure and improve techBoots has announced it will increase its focus on customer needs by investing more in its technology and digital initiative, resulting in the reduction of 700 back-office staff.

Bias means regulators could clamp down on comparison sitesA Channel 4 Dispatches investiga-tion that revealed comparison web-site Confused.com looked at only nine accounts from companies that pay it commission could put the regulatory spotlight on the grow-ing number of businesses offering financial advice and services.

Government not doing enough to prevent cyber attacks, say CTOsThree-fifths of UK chief technology officers (CTOs) believe the govern-ment is performing poorly in edu-cating and protecting firms from cyber attacks, a survey of more than 200 executives has revealed.

Local government blind to internet of things savings A study has suggested that local government still remains unaware of the opportunity presented by smart city technology and how it can be used to deliver more cost-efficient public services. n

.❯ International police operation arrests cyber fraud gang.

❯ DWP extends trial of Universal Credit digital system.

❯ DDoS attacks starting to resemble APTs, warns Imperva.

❯ Vodafone launches home broadband service.

❯Catch up with the latest IT news online

Source: Open Data Institute

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http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247285/Open-data-use-breaks-out-of-start-ups-and-London

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247793/Addison-Lee-supports-business-demands-with-Mulesoft-API-management










http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247896/Pressure-grows-on-AWS-to-power-more-datacentres-with-green-energy








http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247819/Boots-cuts-700-jobs-in-bid-to-restructure-and-improve-tech








http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247911/Regulators-could-clamp-down-on-comparison-sites-as-Confusedcom-bias-is-revealed










http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247812/UK-government-not-doing-enough-to-prevent-cyber-attacks-say-CTOs








http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247803/Local-government-blind-to-internet-of-things-savings








http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247900/International-police-operation-arrests-cyber-fraud-gang

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247921/DWP-extends-trial-of-Universal-Credit-digital-system

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247883/DDoS-attacks-starting-to-resemble-APTs-warns-Imperva

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500247889/Vodafone-launches-home-broadband-service



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CIOs must bite the bullet with legacy IT to transform the businessCIOs need to convince CEOs that spending more on IT is the only way to digitise the organisation, writes Cliff Saran

Businesses need to use technology to be more customer-centric, according to analyst organisation Forrester Research. Vice-president and group director, Laura Koetzle,

urged delegates at the recent Forrester Forum in Lisbon to make the customer the centre of everything the business does. Opening the forum, Koetzle said: “You have to get away from IT gravity. Focus on the business agenda to win, serve and retain customers.”

Traditional businesses are struggling to compete with internet companies, with CEOs unprepared to invest in digitising their businesses to the same extent as the big technology providers.

DER Touristik Online head of development, Sascha Alexander Mai, told the forum his company is “scared” of Amazon. “We are waiting for the day Amazon goes into tourism,” he said.

Addressing delegates during a session on digital transforma-tion, Alexander Mai said Amazon’s use of technology enables it to grow its number of customers. “Their main key performance indicator is growth and 75% of all products purchased online are purchased through Amazon. The amount of money you have to spend is ridiculous,” he said.

Assassinating legacy applicationsBut some IT leader are starting to recognise the need to spend more on IT to achieve business transformation.

During a keynote presentation at the Forrester event, former chief technology officer of Portugal Telecom, Manuel Rosa da Silva, said CIOs need to simplify their legacy IT – and claimed to have spent $10bn on technology over the past few years.

“Things get a lot more complex – but our legacy holds us back. Hiding all this legacy is like putting on cosmetic cream to hide wrinkles. Unless you take a machete to your legacy and kill appli-cations, you won’t get anywhere,” he said.

Rosa da Silva created a “007 team” at Portugal Telecom, with a “licence to kill” legacy applications. The team’s key performance indicators comprised the number of applications it took out.

But Rosa da Silva warned that it takes a lot of hard work and expense to simplify complex IT: “We spent more on IT than on telecoms,” he said. The investment is significant, given that the company is a telecoms provider, but Rosa da Silva said he wanted to create a simpler company, for which there were no shortcuts.

ANALYSIS


http://www.techtarget.com/contributor/Cliff-Saran

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/How-to-support-digitization-through-project-management

http://searchcloudapplications.techtarget.com/news/4500247423/Legacy-application-modernization-takes-careful-thought


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Using cloud to simplify ITPortugal Telecom’s web portal takes in more advertising rev-enue than Portugal’s national television network, but Rosa da Silva said he was happy to run the infrastructure on the cloud. “Portugal Telecom is currently negotiating with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft Azure to put its entire advertising portal into the cloud,” he said.

He said cloud helped to simplify the organisation: “As a telco, Portugal Telecom has a sophisticated IT team – but I go and look at AWS and they are at least four or five generations ahead.”

According to Forrester principal analyst Michael Facemire, when developing software, organisations need to behave more like software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers.

“Software used to take 18 months to build. The challenge today is to get applications out in two to four months. Software is approaching a zero-day event,” he said.

Facemire urged companies to create software such that it can be updated rapidly. “Amazon updates software 100 times a day. Build minimum viable product and use analytics to measure feed-back. Use data to make product decisions and you become closer to customers,” he said.

Developing for digitisationFacemire advised CIOs to invest in the IT team’s skills. “Make sure you have JavaScript, it is incredibly valuable,” he said.

According to Facemire, JavaScript enables developers to create an entire enterprise system in one programming language, using open-source tools and frameworks.

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Applications written in Java or .Net generally rely on what is referred to as the model-view controller architecture for their user interface. Facemire said the event-driven model used in JavaScript is more flexible, enabling IT to link microservices, third-party ser-vices and existing enterprise service buses.

He added that using open-source tools – such as Node.JS and Nginx – can help organisations create SaaS-like systems that are easier to develop.

Facemire urged CIOs to assess the impact of services such as Cortana from Microsoft and Apple’s Siri, which are creating new application areas based on inference, to suggest products or topics to the user. n

Manuel Rosa da Silva set his 007 team to seek and destroy legacy applications


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Why your organisation should align its outsourcing to digital business goalsBusinesses need to adapt their outsourcing strategies to keep pace with the digital revolution, writes Karl Flinders

Automated nappies, smart shoes and autonomous cars are just a few of the IT-enabled products and services busi-nesses are developing in the digital age – but what does

this mean to the IT department?Lots of outsourcing – but a different type of outsourcing, accord-

ing to Gartner. At the company’s annual outsourcing event in London, keynote speeches and presentations were dominated by the speakers’ emphasis on the need to digitise the business – and the sourcing challenges that brings.

The Gartner Sourcing & Strategic Supplier Relationships Summit 2015 opened with the announcement that 2015 is all about digital business. Gartner analyst Helen Huntley began her keynote with figures demonstrating the rapid onset of digital business expected over the next few years.

According to Huntley, CIOs said that, in 2014, 22% of revenue was generated by digital products and services – and this will reach 41% by 2019.

‘The next Kodak’: digitisation and disruptionShe said most companies don’t even know who their main com-petition will be in a few years’ time, with new entrants arriving with little warning all the time.

Several Gartner analysts referred to the demise of film giant Eastman Kodak when warning businesses about the importance of harnessing digital technology. The once-mighty company that brought photography to the masses filed for Chapter 11 bank-ruptcy protection in 2012. Simply, it failed to react quickly enough to the rapid changes in its market brought on by digital technology.

ANALYSIS

“We are already past the digital business era and in the

autonomous business age”Ruby Jivan, GaRtneR


http://www.techtarget.com/contributor/Karl-Flinders

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The prospect of becoming “the next Kodak” must be a fear for any business leader, said Huntley.

CIOs will play a critical role as the delivery of any digital prod-uct requires significant integration work. But at a time when the importance of IT and the CIO to the business is on the rise, the CIO controls less of the IT budget.

Gartner’s research showed that, in 2015, business departments will control 38% of the IT spend – rising to 50% in 2019.

It is not only the purse strings the CIO will have to relinquish but a lot of development as well. In fact, when it comes to digital busi-ness development, only 15% of CIOs expect their organisations to undertake it in-house.

But, despite the loss of control of finances and development, 2015 will be the “time in the sun” for CIOs, because IT enables all digital business, said Huntley. IT and the business now work together more than ever, with a relentless pace of change.

‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads’Guest speaker Peter Hinssen, an author and entrepreneur, took the digital theme further. He reminded an audience that grew up watching the Back to the Future films that, when Marty McFly and Emmett “Doc” Brown set the dial on the DeLorean car for the future, the date was October 21, 2015.

“We are in the future,” Hinssen told the audience.He said businesses have to adapt because, with current models

– including sourcing – they cannot keep up with the pace of change and react to threats from previously unknown competitors.

“You must think like a startup, not a structure,” he said.

ANALYSIS

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Emmett “Doc” Brown and the customised DeLorean

car: His flux capacitor technology was aligned to

business goals


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Hinssen said that, if CIOs are to be involved, they will have to “start swimming the other way”.

Sourcing will be more critical than ever and CIOs and their pro-curement teams will have to learn new tricks. The large IT ser-vices giants that have served businesses for years will claim they can undertake the digital work as well as the current enterprise IT services – but CIOs must look beyond them, said Hinssen.

Two-track outsourcing teamsSimilar to the concept of two-speed IT – where businesses com-bine the need to develop IT to meet customer demands quickly and support the legacy core IT at the same time – businesses need two different approaches to outsourcing in the digital era, said Gartner.

Analyst Ruby Jivan gave Gartner’s take on what it calls “bimodal sourcing” – running different teams to procure services to support the different speeds of IT. Jivan said Gartner found 25% of CIOs have bimodal sourcing models in place and another 30% have started implementing it.

She said all organisations will have to adapt to bimodal sourcing eventually, just to stay in business: “If sourcing does not change, IT will fail.” She said CIOs are unable to keep in-house skills rel-evant. “We are already past the digital business era and in the autonomous business age.”

According to Gartner, 42% of CIOs admit they do not have the right skills in-house to allow them to keep up; and over half (51%) say they cannot react quick enough to change.

Jivan said sourcing teams need to split in two. The first – which she described as “mode one” – will support core legacy systems and their modernisation. This is the larger of the two with knowl-edgeable staff working with enterprise suppliers. Meanwhile, the “mode two” team will deal with lots of small suppliers using agile techniques. This team will have a deep understanding of the busi-ness needs and will be able to react to changing requirements quickly. It will probably sit with the business.

IT’s future in augmentation, not separationShe said these groups must work together so the mode one team can ensure the IT is ready for what is coming from mode two.

But Robert Morgan, director at sourcing consultancy Burnt Oak Partners, said there should be greater emphasis on integrating business knowledge into the existing IT recruitment teams, rather than separating them.

“There are probably only a few clients large enough to have separate teams but, for most, it is not feasible,” said Morgan. “It is about augmentation, not separation. It could also be quite divisive and create a ‘them and us situation’,” he concluded. n

“there are probably only a feW organisations large enough

to have separate teams”RobeRt MoRGan, buRnt oak PaRtneRs

ANALYSIS

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❯CIOs face both opportunity and threat as organisations embrace digital technology


http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Why-the-CIO-should-loosen-the-grip-on-enterprise-IT

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Why-the-CIO-should-loosen-the-grip-on-enterprise-IT

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240216358/The-Digital-CIO-How-digital-technology-will-change-the-role-of-IT-leaders


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UK’s best-selling train booking website on track with AWS cloud migration plansCTO Mark Holt tells Angelica Mari about the major cloud migration and mobile initiatives ahead at Thetrainline.com

The 200-strong IT team at Thetrainline.com is led by chief technology officer (CTO) Mark Holt, who started the job in early 2013 with the remit of improving the IT supporting

customers in planning, booking and managing their rail journeys.Despite being head of an IT function, Holt does not like to

talk about technology deliverables, but rather customer-facing products, of which technology is a core component.

“I would like to be able to say people are looking at our mobile experience and our web experience and saying it is a brilliant cus-tomer experience,” he says. “I want people to be saying, ‘I love Thetrainline app and website’ – that’s what we have to deliver over the next 12 months.”

Moving to the cloudTo deliver that customer service vision, the fundamentals have to be in place, so a major cloud migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a top priority for Holt’s team this year.

The migration will see the main Thetrainline.com website and supporting services, as well as all development and test

INTERVIEW

Holt: “I want people to be saying, ‘I love Thetrainline app and website’ – that’s

what we have to deliver over the next 12 months” U

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http://www.techtarget.com/contributor/Angelica-Mari

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240236212/How-AWS-remains-resilient-and-enterprise-focused

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environments, moved to the AWS cloud. The project is consid-ered an accelerator for several innovation initiatives the firm has in the pipeline, and the migration will be in three waves, with the first already under way.

“The migration is going to take a lot of time, but it’s a change that will bring huge productivity benefits and it’s going to enable us to get on a very exciting innovation roadmap,” says Holt.

“Amazon is innovating in the cloud infrastructure space much faster than everybody else – and we’re able to adopt those inno-vations much faster than we could in our own datacentre, so it’s a very big and very exciting change for us.”

Holt says his team is going through a “cloud remediation” stage, looking at the various areas of the technology stack, understanding what would be compatible with the new set-up

and remediating those that are not – or at least having plans in place to do so.

“There are old versions of operating systems that we call sin-gletons, where you can only have one instance of a particular application, and old pieces of technology like BizTalk that we’re in the process of replacing,” he says.

Mobile and analyticsA significant change Holt has overseen is around creating an in-house mobile development capability, which was previously outsourced. The team now releases a new version of Thetrainline.com’s app every three weeks, supported by extensive analytics work.

“We bring customers into the office every week - and the user experience, product management and development teams sit with those customers and walk through an experience that we’re looking to launch, or just look at the way people use the existing application and ensure that what we are releasing is what people want,” says Holt.

“We’ve got really good insight into the behaviours of the peo-ple on the application, which features are important to them and which are not. That’s been a huge change, and we do the same on the mobile web, and on the desktop web.”

The company mixes qualitative insights from customers with quantitative insights from an analytics toolset that includes Adobe products, Omniture’s SiteCatalyst and New Relic Insights, an application that manages and optimises the user performance of the Thetrainline.com web and mobile set-up.

INTERVIEW

“amazon is innovating in the cloud infrastructure space much

faster than everybody else – and We’re able to adopt those

innovations much faster than We could in our oWn datacentre”

MaRk Holt, tHetRainline.coM


http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240237511/Enterprise-mobility-is-now-all-about-applications


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“The customer-centric qualitative insights are huge in ena-bling us to improve the product,” says Holt. “The quantitative insights are also really important, and we use those to drive the business. We put in place metrics to, for example, see exactly how many times a new feature is being used and we really think through that process beforehand, before we put something out there.”

According to the CTO, data analytics doesn’t need to be all that complex. “As soon as it gets complicated, you’re in trouble,” he says.

“As long as you think through the way you’re collecting data, you can do some amazing data mining with the appropriate tools

and really drill down to what’s actually going on in the applica-tions to give you insights.

“The area where it gets more complicated is where you are trying to drag together disparate data sources from lots of dif-ferent areas, and trying to gain insights from them – and we’re starting to do that.”

Holt says Thetrainline.com has a dataset based on website use that exceeds 22 million customers a month. The company can mine for information but all the data comes through the same channel, so doesn’t require a lot of cleansing.

“But what we do eventually is embed the analytics into the clusters, so the data analyst is sitting next to the development

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Holt says it can get complicated when bringing together disparate data sources

from lots of different areas, and trying to gain insights from them


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team, who is sitting next to the product manager,” he says. “It’s not some department far across the other side of the office – it’s part of the culture of what we’re trying to do.

“The qualitative and quantitative insights are making sure we’re making good quantitative decisions. That is a key part of the culture we’re trying to build and a culture we’re starting to develop here.”

Improving the travel experienceThetrainline.com is also looking to improve the travel experience through initiatives in fulfilment and mobile ticketing. About 35% of the tickets Thetrainline.com sells come through channels

other than ticketing machines, including web and mobile. To cater for that increas-ing demand, the company is involved in a trial with several train operators.

The company offers mobile ticketing for advance purchase on Virgin Trains, CrossCountry, Greater Anglia and First Hull Trains services. Since October 2014, it has also worked with the rail industry to pilot walk-up barcode tickets that are valid on train ser-vices in three areas in the north of England in conjunction with Virgin Trains East Coast, Northern, First TransPennine, Virgin Trains and First Great Western.

As part of the trial, tickets are “interoperable”, which means that a barcode ticket issued by train operating companies (TOCs) and retailers are accepted on other TOCs’ trains and by gates at different stations, and can also be inspected by differ-ent scanning systems.

“Passengers get a mobile barcode that the guard on a train can scan or which can be scanned at a gate, and that whole experi-ence is delivered through a mobile device,” says Holt.

“You can turn up at the station with the ticket on your phone, walk onto the train, the guard turns up, looks at your phone and scans it with their handheld scanner. That whole experience is completely seamless and doesn’t require paper tickets of any kind.”

The pilot is going well and is now considered business as usual for some of the participating train operators, says Holt. A further roll-out on Virgin West Coast to Manchester is being consid-ered, and London is under review. n

This is an edited excerpt. Click here to read full article online.

❯Amazon reveals user adoption trends and boasts of a million customers

“the mobile ticketing experience is completely seamless and doesn’t

require any paper tickets”MaRk Holt, tHetRainline.coM

INTERVIEW


http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240214917/Royal-Mail-recruits-data-scientists-to-support-70m-barcode-drive

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500243384/CIO-interview-Mark-Holt-chief-technology-officer-Thetrainlinecom

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240234601/AWS-reInvent-2014-Amazon-reveals-user-adoption-trends-and-boasts-of-a-million-customers


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New technologies create new jobs demanding new skills and training

In the past week, HSBC and Boots the chemist have, between them, announced thousands of job cuts, each citing the growth of digi-tal. They are not alone – in recent months Sainsbury’s, Standard Chartered, Lloyds Bank and others have said similar things.

Such announcements have led to fears of a digital cull of jobs as companies increasingly automate parts of their business with technology. It was ever thus. Throughout the history of business technology, doom-mongers have warned that IT is going to eliminate thousands upon thousands of jobs, leaving millions out of work. You might have noticed that it never happened.

That’s not to say that technology doesn’t have an effect – clearly hundreds of thousands of UK workers have lost jobs as a result of digital transformation in the past 30 years. But warnings of subsequent employment crises simply haven’t come true. New jobs have been created, often as a direct result of new technologies, needing new skills.

However, one recurring trend has been the time lag between the loss of old jobs and their replacement with new ones. Fears of a digital scrapheap for old jobs are unfounded, but nobody seems to be learning from history.

It is obvious that many current roles will no longer be needed as companies – and governments – make better use of technology and automate more functions. There is no doubt that people will be put out of work as a result. We know with absolute certainty this will happen.

So why does nobody plan ahead to ease this digital transition? The emerging jobs cull is not a failure of employment, it’s a failure of training. Where do all those HSBC and Boots workers turn to for help in gaining the new skills they will need for the digital economy that replaced them?

Companies and the government share responsibility for making access to training easier. Employers shedding jobs through digital transformation should be encouraged – forced? – to offer training opportunities to affected staff.

The UK’s current high employment levels risk masking the real threat from the gap between digital culling jobs and creating them. The UK needs to plan ahead to help affected workers to bridge that gap with training for the new skills they will need. n

Bryan Glick, editor in chief

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required for statutory purposes, such as population and school place statistics. The information used to shape decisions affect-ing the capital is therefore largely based on data collected by cen-tral government departments, such as the Department for Work and Pensions.

As The Economist recently observed, to a large extent London operates as 33 separate islands. Add to that the many public sec-tor organisations that serve the capital, from the Metropolitan Police to the London Fire Brigade, and there are simply dozens of organisations holding their own siloed data.

Like a jigsaw that has never been put together, London has all the pieces, but no one can see the big picture.

Unprecedented demandThis is no trivial problem. London must serve a rapidly expanding population. The city surpassed its 1939 peak of 8.6 million residents earlier this year, placing unprecedented demands on infrastructure and public services. Significantly, many of the obvious ways of responding to that demand – shared services, predicting where problems will occur to intervene early, and carefully targeting resources – all require joining up, analysing and acting on data.

The barriers to doing so are well known. There are technical hurdles in the form of different data standards and IT. There are legal obstacles, with each public sector body commissioning its own legal advice to come up with different interpretations of the same laws. There are skills barriers, as councils struggle to recruit

OPINION

T here is one thing about the UK’s approach to smart cities which is baffling – why are local authorities rushing to add technology to give them additional data, when most

haven’t even put in place the most basic mechanisms to use the data they already have?

Take London, for instance. City Hall has done great things for open data with the London DataStore. Yet remarkably, it does not systematically collect data from London boroughs, other than that

If London wants to be a smart city, it must learn how to use dataNew York City’s model for using data analytics is an example of how London could become a more joined-up, efficient city, writes Eddie Copeland



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data analysts. There are also cultural challenges – quite simply, some local authorities have not woken up to the fact they can do more in collaboration than alone.

It would be easy to conclude overcoming these barriers is a non-starter, but my report for the Capital City Foundation argues that’s false.

Instead, the answer lies in a model found 3,500 miles away.

London needs a Mayor’s Office of Data AnalyticsLondon should establish a Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics (Moda), inspired by a team of the same name created under mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City.

Moda would be a small group of data analysts, based in City Hall, who could combine, analyse and seek insights from (non-personal) datasets sourced from all London boroughs and public sector organisations. The team would be led by a chief analytics officer, reporting directly to the Mayor of London.

As has been consistently proved in New York, by overlaying data from multiple different sources, analysing past data trends and

seeking patterns and correlations, Moda would be able to help improve areas as diverse as public service delivery, emergency response times, tax enforcement and education.

A London Moda could use data to tackle “beds in sheds” (illegally converted outbuildings) and improve food safety inspections, identify empty homes, help businesses decide where to set up shop, and fight tax and benefits fraud. The list of potential applications is essentially limitless.

The data that Moda collected would also be made available to London’s boroughs and public sector bodies, enabling them to combine it with their own department’s data to improve decision-making.

This process would be based on a strict principle of reciprocity – organisations could access Moda’s data on the condition they first shared their own. To those who claim such data sharing is not permitted – if it can be done in the most litigious society in the world in the US, it can work here, too. It just takes the political will and leadership to do it. n

OPINION

Eddie Copeland is head of the technology policy unit at

Policy Exchange.

This is an edited excerpt. Click here to read full article online.

“if data sharing can be done in the most litigious society in the World, it can Work here, too”

eddie coPeland, Policy excHanGe


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DevOps – the practice of blending the tasks performed by the application development and systems opera-tions teams – will shift from a niche approach to appli-cation development and deployment, into the main-

stream over the next 12 months or so, according to Gartner.In fact, so appealing will this grassroots philosophy prove,

Gartner predicts a quarter of Global 2000 organisations will take up DevOps, creating a software tools market forecast to leap in size by 21.1%, from $1.9bn last year to $2.3bn in 2015.

The research organisation expects such interest across the board. Until recently, DevOps was employed mainly by cloud providers or early adopters in the financial services or telecoms worlds simply wanting to experiment. But now adoption is start-ing to spread more widely – at least in pockets, if not on an enter-prise-wide basis – into other sectors ranging from manufacturing and retail to pharmaceuticals and life sciences.

Despite take-up on an “upwards curve”, Ben Saunders, DevOps and continuous delivery practice lead at IT consultancy Xceed Group, points out that a lot of organisations remain sceptical.

Not only is the movement “still in its infancy”, says Saunders – meaning people are unsure whether it will be just another IT industry flash-in-the-pan – but there is also no single agreed defi-nition as to what it means. “So a key challenge for a lot of people is just where to start,” says Saunders.

He describes DevOps as being about enabling application devel-opment and operations groups to work together, tackling issues as they emerge, rather than leaving it all to deployment time.

(Continued on page 18)

DevOps spreads into mainstream corporate IT

For rapid software projects that require successive releases, combining development and operations teams can cut time and raise quality,

writes Cath Everett, but usually it needs substantial cultural change

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Case study: Marketing agency DigitasLBi adopts DevOps for Renault-Nissan Alliance

Global marketing and technology agency DigitasLBi is one year into a three-year programme to create a global customer engagement portal for the Renault-Nissan Alliance. After using DevOps internally, the alliance made it a key requirement in its request for proposal.

“It was an agile-based programme of such pace and scale that it needed a particular approach,” says Adrian Le Grand, service delivery director at DigitasLBi. “DevOps was a good answer as the key issue was speed. I can’t imagine how we could have done it any other way.”

The agency was familiar with DevOps, having used some tenets informally on smaller projects elsewhere. But this was the first time it formally adopted the organisation. As a starting point, two DevOps enthusiasts – one a Java developer and the other an architecture specialist from the firm’s managed hosting and infrastructure group – were asked to form a virtual team to co-ordinate configuration and deployment management and release.

The team comprised six people – three programmers and three from the infrastructure group – but members varied as they were rotated in and out as required. “DevOps is a grassroots thing and so probably a bit difficult to manage from the top down, but we were keen to leave it that way,” says Le Grand. “To stand a chance of success, you have to get your key technologists interested and let them lead – although you also have to be a bit careful that it doesn’t turn into a sandpit.”

One important consideration was ensuring the team had a shared understanding of how development, testing and deployment pro-cesses worked: “They’re not processes in the same way as in ITIL,” says Le Grand. “It’s more a set of principles or guidelines that you need to monitor, reflect on and correct – for example, keeping environments as uniform as possible, so there are no surprises in production.”

Uniformity in technology – which includes infrastructure automation tools such as Chef – is important to ensure consistency. But Le Grand points out that large amounts of change were inevitable, particularly in regard to team roles and ways of working: “For some peo-ple, it’ll look like you’re giving them more work or asking them to do things they’re not used to, which can seem daunting if they’re work-ing to exhilarating timescales,” says Le Grand. “So it’s important to articulate the value – that is, ‘We’ll be doing it much faster, there’ll be fewer surprises, less stuff will break and hopefully the quality will be better.’”

Overall the chance to develop new and marketable skills has put a “bit of a spring in people’s steps” and the response has been “pretty enthusiastic”, he says. “I would certainly use DevOps again on projects of this type,” Le Grand concludes. “But in a few years, it’s likely that projects will all be this type – that is, big agile ones where you need to build constantly changing products and platforms quickly. So yes, I think DevOps probably is the future.”



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“It’s all about sharing and team cohesiveness so that you can develop at pace,” says Saunders. “The idea is that the operations team feeds back any problems about how the application is behav-ing to the development guys, so they can make sure they’re creating the best possible solutions.”

And it is pace that is at the heart of DevOps, Jay Lyman, research manager at 451 Research, says: “It generally starts with speed, time to deploy applications, time to market, competitiveness.”

Demonstrate the benefits of DevOpsBut as organisations continue down this route, he says, they often discover that, as their activities become more efficient and responsive – at least partially due to increased levels of pro-cess automation – they gain significant cost savings, as well as human resource benefits.

“Organisations, and large enterprises in particular, want to attract and retain talent – but if they’re viewed as fuddy-duddy, they won’t appeal to or keep the cool kids,” says Lyman. “And there’s real demand for this kind of expertise.”

But that’s not to say that everything will be rosy in the garden when adopting a DevOps approach. The key challenge for many is change management and simply getting staff to buy into the con-cept – particularly on the operations side, as this is predominantly a grassroots developers’ movement.

“There’s always resistance at first because people don’t like change, especially if they think it’ll have a negative impact on them,” says Xceed’s Saunders. “So if you say to a tester, we’re going to automate a test case, the fear is that they’ll automate themselves out of a job.”

This means it is important to dem-onstrate the benefits of a DevOps approach, for example by pro-viding staff with metrics from a pilot project to show the amount of time saved. Giving the whole team incentives in the form of a joint bonus if they get a project out faster can help too.

But it is important to bear in mind that DevOps is not appropri-ate for all kinds of development. For example, given that it gen-erally goes hand-in-hand with agile, it is well-suited to creating composite web or mobile apps that are continually updated, have lots of small releases and short delivery timescales.

Using it to build monolithic batch mainframe programs, or even traditional client-server ones such as Microsoft’s Excel, would prove a mismatch of styles. Nonetheless, Lyman says: “DevOps is here to stay as it represents the new way of doing things”.

While he acknowledges there will probably be resistance, he also believes that the benefits – in terms of responsiveness, such as when apps don’t work or sites go down – means that it will start to become a requirement.

“Once rivals start using it, organisations will have to respond and so I think it’ll be around to stay,” Lyman concludes.

BUYER’S GUIDE

“organisations, and large enterprises in particular, Want to attract and retain talent”

Jay lyMan, 451 ReseaRcH


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Case study: Postcode Anywhere“DevOps is the future,” believes Mike Cook, CIO of cloud-based address management services supplier Postcode Anywhere.

“As the technology industry increasingly goes towards much quicker release cycles, the business inevitably has to change to deliver what users want – and using traditional waterfall methods, you’d struggle to support that,” he explains.

The organisation – which was set up in 2001 and whose cus-tomers include Tesco, Manchester City Football Club and Fiat – started adopting a DevOps way of working in early 2014.

The move came as part of a wider review of all the firm’s busi-ness processes to support higher rates of business growth and took 12 months in total. During the first stage of the initiative, the IT department “isolated” a series of cross-functional product development teams, identified their roles and introduced them to agile software development methods.

“Agile is a good fit with DevOps,” says Cook. “It’s not inherent, but it goes hand-in-hand as they’re both about making quick deci-sions and ensuring collaboration and good communications.”

Team members were then asked to apply for the positions of product owner, who acts as the voice of the customer; and scrum master, who makes sure the team stays on track in delivering results on time.

“You’ve got to ensure the right people are in the right roles. The aim is to help with scalability and so the people piece is absolutely key – it can’t be overstressed,” says Cook.

But just as crucial in a cultural change project of this type is helping staff from both the development and deployment sides

understand their role in the process, how it will affect their jobs and how it will benefit them. The aim is to ensure they buy into the situation and do not feel threatened.

The second step was to create a project team to ensure every-one was aligned with company goals. A full-time project manager and assistant were taken on to “ensure that messages were cas-caded down and everyone was on the same page strategy-wise, from the board to the development teams,” says Cook.

The final step was to standardise toolsets by introduc-ing Atlassian’s Jira issue and project-tracking software, and Confluence’s team collaboration package.

“The pricing wasn’t prohibitive and it’s very simple to use,” says Cook. “It’s fundamental to ensure your toolset is adopted prop-erly, as very complex tools will slow you down.”

The change has been hugely beneficial in helping Postcode Anywhere achieve its goals. The time to produce software releases has now plummeted from six months to two weeks, for example, which has greatly minimised business risk.

“There’s always a risk when you press the ‘run’ button, but if you can break things down into lots of tiny risks, rather than a single big one, the danger of brand damage is minimal compared to what it would have been,” says Cook.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of all, however, has been creating a more motivated and happy IT department.

“Because you devolve responsibility for decision-making to the team and are no longer dictating to them, personal empowerment is massive and really helps with job satisfaction – and that really is positive,” Cook concludes. n

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There is more to big data than Hadoop, but the trend is hard to imagine without it. Its distributed file system (HDFS) is helping businesses to store unstructured data in vast volumes at speed, on commodity hardware

at previously unimaginable costs.But there are downsides. The MapReduce programming model

that accesses and analyses data in HDFS can be difficult to learn and is designed for batch processing. This is fine if applications can wait for answers to analytical questions, but if time is impor-tant, MapReduce can hold them back.

Matt Aslett, research director for data platforms and analytics at 451 Research, says that, while Hadoop opened opportunities to process data that had previously been ignored, applications such as fraud detection, online advertising analytics and e-commerce recommendation engines need a more rapid turnaround.

“Batch processing is OK, but if it takes an hour or two, it’s not great for these applications,” he says.

Spark, the open-source cluster computing framework from the Apache Software Foundation, promises to overcome some of these problems. “With Spark and in-memory processing, you can get the response down to seconds, allowing real-time, responsive applications,” says Aslett.

“Interest in Spark has been bubbling under for a while, but now there is huge interest. Part of that is because Hadoop provid-ers are getting behind it, possibly to complement Hadoop batch processing, enabling more in-memory for real-time applications. Cloudera is an early company to push it and see it as potential long-term replacement for MapReduce.”

Apache Spark accelerates big data decision-makingSpark, the open-source cluster computing framework from Apache,

promises to augment Hadoop batch processing, writes Lindsay Clark

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Spark was born out of a research project at the University of California Berkeley’s AMPLab. In 2009, PhD student Matei Zaharia developed the code that went open-source in 2010. In 2013, the project was donated to the Apache Software Foundation and switched licence to Apache 2.0.

In 2013, AMPLab recorded Spark running 100 times faster than MapReduce on some applica-tions. In 2014, Spark became an Apache top-level project.

Spark was developed as part of the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack, enabled by the Yarn resource manager accessing HDFS data. It can also be used on file systems apart from HDFS.

But there is cause for corporate users to be cautious of Spark, steeped as it is in open source.

Chris Brown, big data lead at high-performance computing con-sultants OCF, says: “Big data is still a new concept – we’ve never come across a customer that asked us to do anything with Spark.

“There are a couple of issues. Firstly, Hadoop is still imma-ture: There are not millions of customers, there are thousands. Secondly, open-source projects like to move on quickly, whereas businesses want production environments to be stable and not change things at the same rate.”

Nonetheless, Spark is finding a home alongside proprietary software. Postcode Anywhere, a provider of address data to popular e-commerce and retail websites, has been using Spark internally for more than a year to help understand and predict customer behaviour on its platform, enabling the company to improve its service.

Spark’s speed and flexibility make it ideal for rapid, iterative processes such as machine learn-ing, which cloud-based address management services provider Postcode Anywhere has been able to exploit. CTO Jamie Turner says Postcode Anywhere’s main services are built on a Microsoft .Net framework, and incorporating open-source code took a while to get used to.

“This is our first foray into anything open source,” he says. “You tend to see quite a lot of volatility in code base. You see bugs com-ing in and then disappearing between different distributions.

“We knew that, for what we wanted, SQL systems would not work economically, in terms of licences; and technically, in terms of scale. But open-source technology is not well documented. What you save in licensing costs, you spend in manpower trying to understand it.”

Machine-learning capabilityPostcode Anywhere is now developing its internal use of Spark’s machine-learning capability as a service for clients wanting to better understand and predict customer behaviour.

Although the performance benefits of Spark in-memory are not disputed, not all applications run 100 times faster. OCF uploaded the Hermann Hesse novel Siddartha on both HDFS and Spark in-memory to compare the time to count the words in the 700MB file. Hadoop was able to complete the task in 686 seconds; Spark could do it in 53 seconds, or 13 times faster.

(Continued on page 23)

DATA ANALYSIS

❯Databricks talks up a storm about its Spark cloud

offering in an effort to distinguish the data processing engine from MapReduce and

the Hadoop stack


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DATA ANALYSIS

Case study: Postcode Anywhere analyses data to spot poor customer experiences

Address validation service Postcode Anywhere uses freely available data to help e-commerce websites identify customers’ locations and auto-complete address forms. CTO Jamie Turner says: “We are selling someone else’s data, which could, in theory, become a commodity. The difference with us is the quality of service and usability of the technology.”

Founded 15 years ago, Postcode Anywhere is still trying new ideas to improve its service. One of them is to predict when customers will have a service issues, and to take pre-emptive action. Developed in-house, the system is written in Scala and exploits Spark machine learning using NoSQL database Cassandra and Elasticsearch queries. The front end is written in C# on Microsoft’s .Net framework.

Postcode Anywhere tries to capture as much information as possible about customers and their experience using the service. This includes account information, usage variations, errors, support cases augmented with other data such as IP addresses, indicating loca-tions, as well as the mobile network carrier, network connection and customer operating systems.

By analysing this data, the machine-learning model figures out which factors, in combination, could signal a negative experience.“You can find out what is significant without making an early determination based on what your thoughts are,” says Turner.Building these models to predict when a customer is likely to have a bad experience allows Postcode Anywhere to take steps to improve

the situation. This could mean presenting a customer with new content, placing a new product on a particular page, reducing pricing, or a service call to the customer.

“It offers enormous benefits and makes a real difference,” says Turner. “It gives us a heads-up to when things are going well and when they aren’t. It is about defending against possible problems.”

Postcode Anywhere is developing the system as a commercial product, called Triggar, designed to help companies better understand and predict their customer experiences. This could assist with defensive action, as it is currently used – and could even pinpoint oppor-tune moments for upselling.

Such an approach would be impractical without Spark, says Turner. “It is unique in giving us the scale and the speed that we want. Other approaches are either slower, or going to cost more.”

The system runs on racks of commodity Dell hardware and currently works through a terabyte of data every few days.Turner adds: “It’s not insubstantial, but not really big data. We are looking at bigger engines like Cassandra, Elasticsearch and Spark so

it can scale to petabytes, because that is what likely to happen as soon as a project really gets cracking.”



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But Spark does not only offer performance benefits in-mem-ory. Disk-based analysis is also improved dramatically. Last year, Databricks, founded by Spark’s initial developers, broke the world record in sorting 100TB of data on disk.

Spark used 206 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud machines to complete the task in 23 minutes. The previous 72-minute record was set by Hadoop MapReduce using 2,100 machines: Spark proved three times faster, using just 10% of the machines.

This has implications for the way data scientists work in busi-ness. Spark will not only enable applications to perform data anal-ysis in-memory at a faster rate, it can transform the productiv-ity of data scientists querying data and building algorithms from disk-based data.

Zubin Dowlaty, vice-president and head of innovation and development at big data consultancy Mu Sigma, says that, although IT departments can use Spark and HDFS to work on new datasets with new programming tools, the hardest thing to change is the mindset.

“They need to shake themselves up with respect to the agility these new tools provide,” he says. “They need to shake up the business to think bigger. Computation can really scale now, so you can do much more. But the leadership is not coming from the CTO, it is coming from the CMO or other c-suite executives.”

Underpinning in-memory analytics and machine learning while boosting the productivity of data science, Spark promises much for IT departments grappling with big data. But the question remains: Will their business peers understand the value of these new applications and approaches to data science? n

DATA ANALYSIS

Postcode Anywhere CTO Jamie Turner: “Spark offers

enormous benefits and makes a real difference”


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It is all too easy to think that when the network becomes increasingly sluggish, an infrastructure upgrade is needed to maintain speeds acceptable to your users.

More often than not, the problem is not that your users spend too much time downloading cat videos, but more likely that there are serious bottlenecks in the network that can and should be dealt with before bringing out the chequebook for new equipment.

Consistent slowness in the network is difficult to pinpoint and sometimes more than one problem may be occurring at the same time. It is important to start looking at a few likely suspects.

The all-too-obvious answer is to see bandwidth as the problem, but with investigation, it is often not in a local-area network (LAN) environment, where a high amount of band-width is available. More likely, the problem lies in the wide-area network (WAN), where capacity is more finite and expensive.

Problems with slow networks in a WAN environment are more likely to result from not employing quality-of-service (QoS) software, according to Networks First principal consultant Jason Peach.

“Rather than throwing more bandwidth at the problem, using more intelligent analysis to optimise bandwidth is often a better


When using the network feels like wading through molasses, finding the cause can be a difficult process, writes Rene Millman

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way to solve a bandwidth contention – the problem in any network scenario – LAN, WAN or WLAN [wireless local-area network], for example,” he says.

End-to-end latency – the delay that happens to a packet end to end from the PC to the server – and any errors causing re-transmission on the network will also degrade application performance and slow the network.

“An incorrectly configured network or network port can also affect throughput efficiency of a particular network path, affect-ing users,” says Peach.

SolarWinds head “geek” Don Thomas Jacob says a robust network-monitoring tool will check the health and status of network devices. “When monitoring your routers and switches with simple network management protocol, you achieve visibil-ity on route flaps, packet loss, an increase in round-trip time and latency,” he says. “It also provides lots of other useful information, such as letting you know if the device central processing unit or memory use is too high.”

Packet lossT-Systems lead delivery solutions manager James Meek says poor network performance is characterised by packet loss, which can be measured in a number of ways. “Having determined that packet loss is occurring, it is necessary to understand whether this is due to a lack of buffering when traffic bursts occur, a poor queuing strategy or a lack of bandwidth,” he says.

While on multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks, it is possible to prioritise important traf-fic, such as voice and video, over less important traffic such as web browsing and network backups. Meek says that even with internet protocol QoS, it is still necessary to provision sufficient network bandwidth to avoid congestion.

When networks collideInternet connections are increasingly becoming performance bottlenecks for organisations, mainly because of bandwidth that is not controlled properly.

Peach says: “Given that most organisations have traditionally employed centrally located ISP [internet service provider] ser-vices and firewall boundaries, perhaps a more distributed ISP branch-level set of ISP internet connections would be a possible solution for improving internet access generally for all users.”

With more branch-level internet connections, internet traffic does not need to go directly across the corporate WAN, compet-ing with corporate traffic on the same MPLS link, says Peach.

“However, this throws up the problem of managing all the dif-ferent network connections and ensuring that the right amount of firewalls, email and web security is in place,” he adds.

This approach lends itself better to hosted cloud services for user device-based web and email filtering, says Peach. “Even though it is expensive, a cloud-based web-filtering solution could work out more cost-effective than simply employing additional corporate-grade WAN bandwidth to tackle this problem,” he says.


❯Auto retailer TrustFord picks Kemp’s virtualised load

balancers to deliver high availability and performance

across the network.


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Another common bottleneck is between the wireless LAN control-lers and the core network. “This issue is likely to become more prev-alent as customers move towards the latest 802.11ac wireless network implementations,” says Peach.

Bad planningCiena Agility senior director Mitch Auster says most network bottlenecks come about because of ineffective planning and forecasting and that this is a particular challenge when a wide variety of specialised, high-touch – Layer 3 to 7 (L3-7) – equipment is deployed deep in the metro network.

“Since this equipment is expensive, operators try not to over-provision it,” he says. “However, as users become more mobile and services become more on-demand, the likelihood of spikes in resource demand and bottlenecks grows.”

From a network design standpoint, it is recommended to locate these functions in a small number of larger, metro/regionally centralised datacentres, and using low-cost-per-bit, efficient and easily reconfigurable packet-optical transport to aggregate and express the traffic between users and these content centres.

“This enables economies of scale and the L3-7 resource pool can be sized for the aggregate peak demand, as opposed to each far-flung L3-7 device having to be individually sized for the local peak demand,” adds Auster.

If bad planning can cause bottlenecks, then perhaps it is up to network architects to design out such issues.

Emulex senior manager Matt Walmsley says that during archi-tecting cycles, it is prudent to plan for increasing traffic lev-els and diversity of applications and services.

“This will inform the selection of high-speed intra-network node

links (for example, 10GbE, 40GbE, 100GbE) and server-network links (10GbE, 40GbE), or at least allow for their later inclusion as bandwidth upgrades,” he says.

Walmsley adds that traditional network architectures can also take advantage of various technologies to build high-performance and load-sharing – or even load-balanced – links that provide reliable, high-performance routing of traffic and help to shape and prioritise different traffic types over the network.

Does virtualising the network help or hinder?Avaya European Union networking sales director Stuart Greenslade says that for anyone running legacy networks, it might be time to consider virtualisation, software-defined networking (SDN) or fabric technology, which will give the network much greater simplicity and flexibility, and thus reduce the likelihood of network bottlenecks.


“as users become more mobile and services become more

on-demand, the likelihood of spikes in resource demand and

bottlenecks groWs”MitcH austeR, ciena aGility



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“For example, many network professionals virtualise the net-work to create fewer operational overheads and add more func-tionality, which is a win-win for the company and its users,” he says. “Cutting the number of moving parts in the network enables service agility and allows the oppor-tunity for a faster response time for applications.”

But SDN, network functions virtualisation (NFV) and the general move to virtualised infrastructure may hinder efforts to combat network bottlenecks. Virtualisation has led to distributed applications in a datacentre, creating more east-west traffic.

Transactions that were previously handled by a single host may now be split across multiple hosts in a datacentre or distributed between an on-premise host and a host located at a different location or a cloud provider.

Gigamon Europe marketing director Trevor Dearing says: “For accurate monitoring of application performance, more vis-ibility is required into the various interactions between hosts. These interactions can lead to more traffic duplicates as switched network packets are captured from different locations in the network.”

Dearing says the use of new network virtualisation or SDN in a datacentre to create logical networks means issues could be

hidden behind new encapsulations that the operational tools can-not decode.

Walmsley remains upbeat about SDN and NFV, which will underpin self-optimising networks infrastructure that can inte-

grate and respond to applications in real time rather than just be a pre-dictable, fast but relatively separate data transport.

But he warns that such changes bring some complexity, and the requirement to monitor and under-stand the “who, what, where, why and how?” of the network and applications will only increase the need for comprehensive application-aware networking mon-itoring and historical data capture.

All hail the self-optimising networkNetwork bottlenecks could become a thing of the past as embed-ded automation becomes part of the network. Alcatel-Lucent enterprise director of network solutions marketing Joe Raccuglia says this automation would provide more self-configuration, self-attachment, automated reconfiguration with adds, moves and changes of not just applications, but servers and other devices connecting into the network.

“This technology will inevitably move from the datacentre envi-ronment out towards the enterprise campus network,” he says. n


“for accurate monitoring of application performance, more

visibility is required into the interactions betWeen hosts”

tRevoR deaRinG, GiGaMon


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Virgin Money wants to remove the bollocks from financeVirgin Money claims it is not in the business of emasculation – but says it is determined to use technology to rid the finance sector of bollocks.

The challenger bank claims technology that allows bank cards to have personal details on the back and pictures of the Sex Pistols on the front will remove the nonsense in the industry. Mmm, right. Tenuous.

Thirty eight years after Virgin Records first signed John Lydon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and John Beverley, Richard Branson is using the band’s notoriety with credit cards emblazoned

with the artwork from the Pistols’ 1977 album Never Mind the Bollocks and the cover art of the punk rockers’ seminal single, Anarchy in the UK. Virgin Money chief Jayne-Anne Ghadia, said: “We don’t want anarchy in banking – but we do want change. And we want to get rid of the bollocks in banking and to be simple, open, transparent and fair.”

Downtime is struggling to see the connection, but suggests the Financial Conduct Authority could take a leaf out of Branson’s book and tell the fellows down in the square mile: “If you step out of line again we will put your bollocks on pikes and parade them on London Bridge.” n

DOWNTIME

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