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A series of causeways built on the wartime orders of Churchill in the 1940s are playing a vital part in the roll-out of high speed fibre broadband for a number of Orkney Islands' communities. The new fibre optic cable has been installed along the Churchill Barriers, rather than laid underwater.

More than 4,700 households and businesses are now able to access the new fibre broadband network thanks to the Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband programme.

The village of Burray is the first place off the mainland to benefit. The high-speed technology is available now to the north part of the village and, in the coming weeks, coverage will be extended to the village centre.    

The roll-out is expected to reach an additional 500 Orkney homes and businesses by Christmas in communities such as St Mary's and St Margaret's Hope.  Areas already offering services include Kirkwall, Stromness, Finstown and Harray.

Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) is leading the £146m project in the region. It's funded by the Scottish Government, the UK Government, HIE and private sector partner BT, with engineers from BT's local network business, Openreach, delivering the project on the ground.

Stuart Robertson, HIE's Director of Digital, said:  "Building a fibre optic network across the Highlands and Islands presents its own unique stories. 

"In Orkney, history is playing its part. The Churchill Barriers, built to protect the fleet at Scapa Flow, have allowed us to run the main network cable from Kirkwall to Holm, to Burray and on to St Margaret's Hope. For Westray, we laid around 28km of subsea cabling across the Bay of Tuquoy.

"By the end of next year we will have taken access to fibre optic based broadband in Orkney from zero to at least 76 per cent of premises. Nowhere is forgotten and in addition to this first phase we, and our colleagues in Community Broadband Scotland, are already looking at ways to reach further."

Robert Thorburn, BT programme manager, said: "It's brilliant to be using a unique engineering feat from the 40s to deliver the latest 21st century technology to some of Scotland's most remote communities.

"Churchill ordered the barriers to be built to keep the Germans out after a U-boat sneaked into Scapa Flow and sank the Royal Oak. Now we're using them to let the whole, wide world in at high-speed.

"In terms of the overall programme, more than half of the current, planned work in Orkney is complete. With the main fibre spine almost all in place, work continues to build the local green cabinets which bring services to homes and businesses."

Avnet has collected the 2015 EMEA Distributor of the Year Award from RSA, The Security Division of EMC.

The award was presented in early November to Avnet at the RSA EMEA Partner Council in Abu Dhabi, UAE. It recognises Avnet for its commitment to RSA and its proven ability to help add value to RSA's security products to transform them into business solutions for end-users.

Dieter Lott, vice president business development at Avnet Technology Solutions EMEA, said: "As our Security and Networking Division enters its second year, this award is testament to the great work that the Avnet TS EMEA and RSA teams are doing together, and demonstrates our commitment to security."

Roberto Llop, Director EMEA Channels at RSA, added: "Avnet enjoyed impressive business development in its first year as an EMEA distribution partner for RSA.

"We look forward to leveraging even more the quality of Avnet's security teams and distribution partner networks for the delivery of our advanced security solutions."

Avnet has been working with RSA since 2011 in the US. In Europe, the solutions are offered in the UK, Benelux, France, Italy and Spain.

Conquest Hospital in East Sussex is working with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise and Khipu Networks to provide a network infrastructure that offers enough capacity to support the next generation of medical equipment and services.

In order to support over 6,000 staff across the two hospitals and rising demand from essential but data intensive healthcare operations, including telemetry such as CT scanners and radiology image reporting, the core network speed has been significantly been improved with a tenfold increase in bandwidth - 1Gbit/s to 10Gbit/s.

The new network will handle and electronically deliver up to two million patient healthcare records.

There are plans to repeat the project at Eastbourne District General Hospital in 2016, which is the second of two major district hospitals operated by the East Sussex Healthcare Trust, with proposals for a further extension to community hospitals.

Andy Bissenden, Associate Director of IT, East Sussex Healthcare Trust, said: "The core network is one of the most vital aspects of our IT modernisation programme, and we have ensured first-class Quality of Service by introducing consistent reliability and redundancy. I am particularly impressed with the power-saving features of our new switches, which will assist in cutting operational expenditure and the hospital's carbon footprint."

Chris Butler, Customer Account Manager, Khipu Networks, added: "Our delivery of a modern network tailored to the requirements of a healthcare environment with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise technology demonstrates the flexibility and versatility of the products we installed.

"The close working partnership we fostered with the team at Conquest Hospital was vital to delivering a solution that fulfils their needs - a reference trip to Royal Brompton Hospital allowed the team to see the benefits of a similar Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise solution in action."

Jola has launched three new Premium Broadsoft hosted telephony bundles, including the latest Polycom VVX handsets and a Premium Broadsoft licence with key features as standard.

"The trial we have been running to remove the upfront cost of handsets has been so successful that we have decided to extend the approach to all of our most popular Polycom models," said Andrew Dickinson, Managing Director, Jola.

"We also have a range of bolt-ons including unmetered UK landline and mobile calls, call recording and CRM integration so resellers can customise and differentiate their market offerings.

"Resellers benefit from a Premium Broadsoft seat which includes many features as standard such as disaster recovery, hot desking and shared call appearance.

"Although we provide connectivity options we do not insist resellers have to buy their internet connections from us."

Former Logicalis MD Tom Kelly has joined Luton-based IT firm ONI as a Non-Executive member of the board.

He boasts 30 years industry experience and has held senior management positions in a variety of organisations, including a ten year stint as MD for Logicalis between 2003 and 2013 where he oversaw the business' transformation into one of the UK's largest Cisco and IBM managed services partners.

Kelly is also Chair of the ICT Sector Panel for the Welsh Government and advisor to several other Public Sectors.

ONI CEO Mark Collins said: "Tom is a widely recognised leader within the channel and adds invaluable strength and experience to our board.

"We are excited about him joining our leadership team, especially as we can already see how Tom can help accelerate our ambitious plans to grow and gain market share.

"As the technology market evolves and people transition to the cloud, IT is increasingly seen as a vital, strategic component of any organisation.

"This is ONI's area of expertise. We work closely with our customers to ensure they are able to capitalise on their existing investment in on-premise solutions and leverage the myriad advantages of Cloud technologies when it makes most sense."

Kelly added: "ONI has established its credentials as a provider of physical and virtual cloud infrastructure, enabling it to make a significant investment in its Luton-based data centre facilities.

"These new facilities have laid the foundation to grow sales in managed services and solutions to both existing and new customers.

"However, the investment has not just been in the platform, it's also been in the people.

"ONI is better placed than ever to offer genuine value and quality services to its clients."

A growth rate of 315% over the past four years has secured New Star Networks (NSN) 49th position in the 2015 Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50, a listing of the 50 fastest growing technology companies in the UK.

Rankings are based on percentage revenue growth over the last four years.

NSN CEO Mark Shraga attributed the firm's impressive growth to opportunities in cloud telephony and strong business relationships.

"We owe our success to the continued good will and loyalty of our customers and channel partners," said Channel Director Ryan Kersey.

Organisations will deliver twice as many applications remotely compared with 2015, claims Gartner.

"Organisations will centralise a number of applications over the next three years to enable platform- independent computing," said Nathan Hill, research director at Gartner.

"As platform-specific Windows applications dip below a certain threshold and become a "manageable minority" - that is 20 to 30 percent of the application portfolio - organisations will find it increasingly financially and operationally attractive to ring-fence all of them using device-independent delivery options."

This is a continuation of using centralised delivery architectures to deliver legacy applications, but it also signals a watershed where the remaining business-critical and platform-dependent applications (that cannot be replaced) must be shifted to allow user-centric computing to evolve at the faster pace that users and software vendors are demanding.

By 2018, reckons Gartner, touchscreens will be shipped on one third of all notebooks.

As the incremental price for touch decreases, it will become more normalised as a default feature for notebooks.

Pricing is expected to get much more competitive in the second half of 2016 as manufacturing processes continue to improve and Windows 10 migration planning starts to accelerate.

By 2018, 30% of enterprises will spend more on display screens than on PCs.

According to Gartner, in the digital workplace users will demand more screen real estate for their workspaces and this will bring forth both higher resolution screens and more of them, leading to scenarios where more money is spent on display screens than on the PC itself.

"All of these trends portend a new employee workspace that is more mobile, more capable of working more naturally with humans, and, overall, more productive and secure," said Ken Dulaney, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

"Endpoint support staff must rethink the workspace and work with suppliers to rearchitect and re-cost standards.

"From an IT perspective, Windows 10 and the move of applications to the back end will dramatically change how those applications are delivered to employees.

"Updates will be more frequent, more incremental and less obvious to the end user. Software vendors and internal IT have much to do to adapt to this new model and to move away from the image management model for PCs of today."

Windows 10 is poised to become the most widely installed version of Windows ever, following on the path of Windows XP and Windows 7 before it, according to Gartner.

Gartner predicts that 50% of enterprises will have started Windows 10 deployments by January 2017.

"In the consumer market, a free upgrade coupled with broad legacy device support and automatic over-the-air upgrades ensures that there will be tens of millions of users familiar with the operating system (OS) before the end of 2015," said Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner.

"For enterprises, we expect that implementation will be significantly more rapid than that seen with Windows 7 six years ago."

Several factors are driving migration, specifically awareness of the end of support for Windows 7 in January 2020, strong compatibility with Windows 7 applications and devices, and a pent-up demand for tablet and 2-in-1 device rollouts.

The net result is that many enterprises are planning to begin pilots for Windows 10 in the first half of 2016, and to broaden their deployments in the latter part of the year.

Gartner expects that at least half of enterprises will have started some production deployments by the beginning of 2017, with an eye to completing their migrations in 2019.

KCOM Group's unaudited interim results for the half year ended 30th September 2015 show revenues up on the prior year, rising 3% at £177.9m.

Also ahead is EBITDA, up 3% to £37.2m over the period, and the firm's interim dividend is up 10%. The Group attributes a 3% decline in Group profit before tax and exceptional items to higher depreciation and amortisation consistent with increased investment.

Bill Halbert, Chief Executive said: "The Group has delivered an improved performance across all target segments.

"The results are clear evidence of the potential of our strategy and of the level of opportunity we have in our chosen markets.

"Our focus on generating targeted organic revenue growth, coupled with further steps to simplify the operating structure of the business, places us in a strong position to create a single, unified and simplified business by the end of this financial year.

"Consistent with our prior commitment of a minimum of 10% year on year growth, the Board confirms its intention to pay an interim dividend of 1.97 pence per share."

NetPay Solutions Group is celebrating a brace of award wins this week having bagged the Business of the Year Award at the Growing Business Awards on November 26th, just one day after MD Carl Churchill won a bronze award in the Great British Entrepreneur of the Year for Small Business.

Churchill said: "We are so proud and excited to have won these fantastic awards as they recognise the hard work and dedication of our team who continue to push the boundaries, raising expectations in the market and develop services that deliver tangible benefits to our customers and partners".

Nicole Jay, co-founder and Director of NetPay, added: "When we started NetPay our intention was to make a real difference to organisations, to give them more than just a method of taking payment. We deliver vital performance insight beyond the commodity payment capability for thousands of customers across multiple countries, allowing them to plan and grow their business.

"We will continue to focus on developing exciting new services and insights that will help businesses grow".