Cross Channel: Work In IT? Maybe It’s Time To Move North

Welcome to Cross Channel, a weekly round up of the most pertinent stories from our sister site ChannelBiz, where you can find out all the latest developments, views and strategies from the world of the channel.

IT wages are growing faster in Northern England

Research suggests the wage gap between IT workers in the north and south of England is closing. Professionals in the North West, North East and Yorkshire are now paid 12 percent less than their counterparts in the south, compared to 17 percent in 2009.

Median pay for IT professionals in the North jumped by 4 percent over the past year, from £35,827 to £37,256, while pay in the South contracted by 0.3 percent, from £42,356 to £42,205.

Accountancy firm Brookson says workers in London and the South East are reliant on the health of the financial services sector.

Read the full story

Cloud infrastructure spending in 2016 jumps 16.2 percent

Total spending on IT infrastructure products – servers, enterprise storage and Ethernet switches – for deployment in cloud environments will increase by 16.2 percent in 2016 to $37.4 billion, said analyst IDC.

Public cloud data centres, at 18.6 percent annual growth, will account for the majority (62.5 percent) of this spending. Overall spending on IT infrastructure deployed in off-premises cloud environments (public and private) will reach $28.4 billion in 2016.

Read the full story

Pulsant supports Scottish charity with cloud services

Hybrid cloud provider Pulsant is supporting the operators of Scottish charity Aberlour Child Care Trust.

The cloud platform will be hosted in Pulsant’s data centre in Edinburgh and uses the latest HP servers, Cisco networking and VMware virtualisation technology, that are deployed on top of the company’s 10Gb network.

Ros Dowey, IT manager, Aberlour, said: “Our key systems at our head office in Stirling were on old hardware and we decided the best way forward, in terms of cost, security and resilience, would be to move to a hosted platform.

Read the full story

Micro Focus acquires another American data firm

British firm Micro Focus has acquired GWAVA, an enterprise information archiving (EIA) specialist. This is the third North American company acquired by Micro Focus in less than a year. The deal also quickly follows Micro Focus’ recent “merger” with HPE’s software business.

The latest acquisition of GWAVA broadens Micro Focus’s portfolio in the high-growth areas of mobile, social, cloud and big data, addressing the growing governance needs of customers as part of their compliance, privacy and regulatory reporting requirements, said the company.

Read the full story

How much do you know about the cloud? Try our quiz!