German Government Mail Looks for New Contractor
Germany may contract out the delivery of official correspondence after it works through some unidentified issues, according to Reuters, quoting the Interior Ministry.
Such a move could cost Deutsche Post a million letters a month or roughly $28 million a year by Wirtschaftswoche magazine’s calculations.
Deutsche Post is already supposed to cut its sorting and delivery operations in response to the drop in letter volume.
Parcelforce Exposes Identities
Parcelforce’s track and trace went haywire last week and exposed customers to identity theft.
The BBC discovered that using the web site and entering a unique reference number revealed the names, addresses and in some cases the signatures of people as far and wide as Cleveland and Swansea, even on packages en route from Shanghai and awaiting customs clearance.
Packages also seemed to be in odd places and showed up delivered when they weren’t.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is now investigating the Royal Mail express unit what caused the security breach and what steps Parcelforce has taken to prevent it from happening again.
Parcelforce says the unidentified problem has been cured. It put it down to work being done on the system.
The BBC said the breach put Parcelforce at risk of violating the Data Protection Act.
And, as if that wasn’t trouble enough, Royal Mail workers in London and parts of Scotland struck this past Friday and Saturday over cuts and modernization plans, with the Communication Workers Union accusing the Royal Mail of breaking a 2007 agreement giving the union a say in automation.
The union, which says its members are being asked to work more without compensation, has repeated its offer of no strikes for three months if the government sits down with it and talks automation.
The strike is likely to drive more business to Royal Mail’s competitors.
Royal Mail & Google Back UK Attempt To Tickle International Trade
Search Laboratory, a British outfit, is managing the multi-lingual pay-per-click side of a pre-packaged service designed to help UK SMEs boost their international trade.
With partners Royal Mail, Google, HSBC and the Institute of Export it’s providing a service called Export Box meant to drive traffic to businesses’ web sites and find new customers worldwide.
Export Box involves localizing company web sites. As part of the deal, Search Lab will create and initially manage a foreign language pay-per-click campaign using keywords picked by a mother-tongue search linguist.
It cautions do-it-yourselfers that “the best translated version of a top keyword for an English campaign may not be a good keyword in a French campaign.”
Up to 100 keywords will be chosen as likely to be typed by potential customers and a campaign with up to five ad texts set in place. Search Lab is supposed to refine the keywords over time and deploy its bid management system, Bidlab.
To see which foreign markets have the biggest opportunity, Google has created a new tool for Export Box called Export Adviser. It shows average click costs and search volumes surrounding a particular search topic.
Royal Mail is kicking in special discounted shipping rates and advice about shipping overseas; the bank is offering Export Box customers preferential rates on bank transfers and currency conversions.
The Institute of Export will throw in consultancy skills, offering companies six mentoring sessions with experts in their particular market or sector.
The service costs £3,000 ($4,950); with £1,200 ($1,980) budgeted to spend on Google Adwords. Google will give Export Box customer a £200 ($330) voucher to spend.
UK companies wanting to invest in overseas expansion could be eligible under the Passport to Export Scheme for a rebate of up to 50% against the cost of Export Box.
Search Laboratory has developed pay-per-click and search engine optimization campaigns for companies such as Novell.
Its managing director Ian Harris says, “A slow domestic market, a weak pound and the availability of grants make this an ideal time for companies to start trading internationally.”
Headlines – Issue No. 449 (June 29-July 10, 2009)
Royal Mail & Google Back UK Attempt To Tickle International Trade
Parcelforce Exposes Identities
German Government Mail Looks for New Contractor
Anchor’s Change-of-Address Processing Goes SaaS
Stamps.com Teams with Avery Dennison
RR Donnelley Acquires E-Delivery House
Swiss Post Digital Mail a Go
RAF Updates its Software
FedEx Losses $876m
Marketing E-Mails Blocked
Austria Post Names New CEO
Steve Jobs Had a Liver Transplant: WSJ
IBM Adds to its Cloud Repertoire
Adobe Tries Commercializing its Online Widgetry
Microsoft Calls Google’s Apps Sync ‘FUBAR’
Intel To Strip Centrino of its Chip Epaulets
Opera Turns its Browser into a Server
Can Bing Hold That Note?
An Itty-Bitty Chip Could Slash a Data Center’s Energy Bill
SAP Borrows Microsoft’s Software-Plus-Services Approach
China Ripped Off US Code for its ‘Censorware’
ParaScale & Alfresco Partner on Content-as-a-Service
Jitterbit 3.0 Betas
Disney Brands a Netbook
VMware To Integrate HP Software
IBM Earmarks $100m for Cell Phone Research
IBM Upgrades Symphony
Royal Mail’s Fate Uncertain
Royal Mail still lingers in limbo, its fate uncertain except now 10,000 postal workers are threatening to strike for 24 hours on Friday June 19 on the premise that modernization will lead to “arbitrary” job cuts.
After the strike was called the Communication Workers Union (CWU) offered a three-month moratorium on any job actions in return for a temporary halt on modernization and more talk about job security and higher pay and benefits. As it is, more strikes could follow Friday’s walkout. The government is threatening to pull pensions in the absence of a partial sell-off of the Mail.
However, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who survived calls to quit last week, is too weak right now to push through the part-privatization plan in the face of the entrenched opposition of his own party.
The Brown government can’t afford an MP discussion of the Royal Mail bill because it would underscore its weakness. It needs to regroup. So the proposed legislation’s second reading by the House of Commons has been put on hold. No date has been set and Parliament will adjourn for the summer the third week in July.
And to really screw things up, the government can’t get its price for Royal Mail from either of the remaining bidders.
Some press reports say the plan may be scrapped. Among other things, the new minister appointed to oversee the Post Office is Lord Young, described by the Times as a “former union baron in the Communication Workers Union leading the opposition to the part-privatization of the Royal Mail,” which in turn has led to claims that the government’s taste for reform had changed.
But, as of last Thursday the government – to prove that it was still running the country – said it intended to push ahead with the bill although it will only pursue a sale with the right “economic conditions.”
The prime minister’s spokesman was quoted as saying that “any strategic partner must be motivated to modernize the Royal Mail over the long term and must offer value for money for taxpayers. We will not do a deal at any price.”
The statement suggests there is grounds for thinking the plan will be “put on hold” until the government gets its price, which may be never.
Even if the plan is jettisoned, Whitehall still has to come up with a way to deal with the Mail’s stubborn inefficiencies and its huge pension deficit and make it viable. The numbers demand it.
The Hellmail blog probably captures the situation best when it says, “At the moment, the tabloids, Labor backbenchers and the CWU all seem to be convinced that the bill is dead, particularly with so much political controversy for Gordon Brown, but this bill isn’t going to go away and the longer it drags on, the greater the chance of full-blown privatization, either by this government or the next.”
FedEx Torches UPS in Straw Man Argument
FedEx doesn’t want to be unionized.
It especially doesn’t want the Teamsters unionizing its ground people.
They can’t be right now because its delivery guys are covered under the Railway Labor Act (RLA), which was meant “to avoid any interruptions to commerce.”
See, FedEx started with airplanes. It is not covered by the National Labor Relations Act (NRLA) like UPS, which started with bicycles.
But all that would change if a union-indebted Democratic-dominated Senate passes the 2009 Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Bill awaiting its disposition.
Then FedEx Express would be governed by the NRLA like UPS, which would be like putting out the welcome mate for the Teamsters because it allows workers to unionize location-by-location rather than a company-wide vote.
Unionized, FedEx workers could agitate for higher wages and even strike, which won’t exactly get packages delivered any faster.
FedEx has already threatened to cancel orders for 15 Boeing jets with an option for 15 more if the legislation passes. It says unionization would make them unaffordable. The deal is worth an estimated $6.75 billion and would give thousands of workers job security.
Now it’s mounted a PR campaign aimed at inciting grassroots outrage – expressed via an online petition to Congress – by claiming the legislation hands UPS a veritable bailout, currently a dirty word with a lot of Americans.
A web site (www.brownbailout.com) that went live last week paints UPS as a virtual monopoly seeking to put its primary rival at a competitive disadvantage by driving up costs and prices to reliably deliver “medicines, paychecks, critical replacement part [and] essential inventory,” introducing “uncertainty” and forcing it to “change its business.”
FedEx aims to spook people with a threatened 10% increase in costs from a “hidden package tax.”
A video mocking UPS’ whiteboard commercials says UPS is trying “to improve its own [recession-compromised] market position” by “slipping a few words into an important government bill that gets [it] a bailout.”
It notes that UPS spent $6 billion to “bail itself out a union pension problem” and remembers the 1997 UPS strike that “crippled business and commerce across America.”
It says the NRLA wasn’t designed for airlines and express companies and that gelding FedEx “could be worth billions to UPS.”
“UPS – the largest political giver to Congress over the decades – is a trucking company, shipping 85% of its parcels on the ground. FedEx Express is an airline, flying 85% of its packages in the air. FedEx Express carries time-sensitive packages, most of them transported by air. Most of UPS’ packages are less time-specific and never travel by air. In fact only 6% of all UPS drivers carry express packages that were transported by air.”
The way larger UPS, of course, lobbied for the legislation and maintains that “FedEx is preparing to spend millions of dollars trying to convince Congress that a FedEx driver delivering a package is different somehow than a UPS driver delivering a package.”
The recession has forced both companies to cut wages and lay off workers because of volume and revenue reductions.
Meanwhile, Chrysler, which is getting an honest-to-God bailout from the US government, wants $224 million from the Energy Department to co-fund the development of a bunch of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids including a fleet of four all-electric zero-emissions demo minivans for the USPS.
Headlines – Issue No. 448 (June 22-26, 2009)
FedEx Torches UPS in Straw Man Argument
Persystent To Keep USPS PCs Afloat
Royal Mail’s Fate Uncertain
Zumbox Gets New CEO
Postal Mail a Step Closer to E-Mail
Royal Mail Has ‘Clear Prospects’
Post Sours Political Ambitions in Japan Too
PB Centralizes Desktop Printing & Mailing
BBH Creates Direct Mail Postcards
Intermec Claims Best-of-Breed Mobile Computers
Savit Develops First Wireless Tracking Device with GPS, RFID and Satellite Communications
HP Designs New Cloud-Size Server Family
Google Launches Guerilla Attack on Exchange
Cisco Pays for its Server Impertinence
Thinking Global, Big Chinese PC Maker Allies with NComputing
Hosted Solutions Promises Trustworthy Cloud
Russian, Korean & Malaysian Cloud Researchers Join Open Cirrus
China Requires a Censorship Wall on All PCs
Second Bidder Upsets Micro Focus-Borland Deal
Ballmer Pushes Back Against Obama
Petabyte-Scale Data Analytics Moving to the Cloud
ECIS Accuses Microsoft of Fudging Numbers
Did Microsoft Just Give the EC the Finger?
Novell Reportedly Planning Free Apps Store
Dell To Bundle Boxes with Open Source Apps: Report
Why Novell Kisses Microsoft’s Ring Every So Often
Oracle’s Secret Plan for Sun
Dell Believed on Acquisition Trail
SAP Apes Oracle, Thinks Acquisitions
Bing Creates Mini-Surge
Microsoft Kills Money
Storage Market Bleeding
Dell Sell Microsoft Software on its Store
Talk about an Apples-to-Apples Comparison
Microsoft’s Free Anti-Virus Program Close
Satyam Squeaks Out Profit
Lightning Strikes Cloud
Spending Cuts Deepen: Gartner
AMD Up; Intel Down
DHL Using Cognos Analytics
DHL Worldwide, which has lost billions of dollars and can use all the help it can get, has started using IBM software to analyze more than 30 million customer records in seconds rather than hours while reducing its system maintenance costs.
The new intelligence system – from IBM’s pricey Canadian acquisition Cognos – is supposed to help transform DHL’s global business operations and drive customer relationship profitability at its Express Germany and Call Forwarding North America units.
DHL Express Germany handles more than 1.5 million consignments a year, everything from letters to 2.5 ton pallets, and sends them to over 120,000 destinations worldwide.
Before implementing the Cognos software, the company couldn’t share critical sales and operations data because of competing systems in its divisions. And integrating these different tools would have required extensive manual and administrative effort.
According to IBM it needed a single system that could handle its entire value creation chain more flexibly, function automatically, and was easy to use.
With Cognos Business Intelligence, DHL Express Germany can now tap into multiple sources of information via a single platform and get a complete view of its operations.
This gives its employees new intelligence to analyze and report on such things as earnings per item, number of transactions a day and loyalty. The company can also get a precise view of customers’ margin contribution from a range of perspectives – the salesperson’s point-of-view, the product view and the view at each individual process step.
This information is now used across DHL Express Germany by analysts, sales and management to manage resources, predict business opportunities and react more quickly to emerging trends.
DHL Express Germany Klaus Baumhauer explained that “In the past, we grew the business primarily on sales growth. But to extend our market lead and meet long-term customer needs, we knew we had to be much more efficient. IBM technology has radically transformed our business processes. It has allowed us to reduce maintenance costs so that we now are only spending 25,000 euros ($35,000) a year for maintenance. And we now have a unified, international data infrastructure to help achieve the consistency we need for fast, effective decision-making.”
DHL Global Forwarding North America, another division of DHL Worldwide, needed quicker access to financial data in a more structured manner so that finance and operational managers could do a better job of tracking budgets and making forecasts to expand the business internationally.
For near real-time access to all their financial information, DHL Global Forwarding finance employees across North America now use IBM Cognos TM1 for forecasting and budgeting data from the entire global organization. Every hour, more than 100,000 records are automatically downloaded to produce a consolidated view of KPIs in less than two minutes. Previously, this was a manual process that would have taken up to three hours.
DHL Global Forwarding North America can now complete its top-to-bottom budget in a month instead of three months. Since budget updates are done in real-time and all staff can access the latest information simultaneously and instantaneously, management can have budget discussions across four time zones via video conferencing instead of traveling to meet at one location, saving significant travel costs.
The company is also using IBM technology for management reports of monthly results. About 500 managers at all levels can view spreadsheet-based reports that are ready the day after the monthly results are finalized in the accounting system. It used to take three employees working a week to produce these reports when the company had revenues of $1 billion. Today, revenues have reached $3.5 billion, and every manager can see a top-level view of his unit as well as line-item details in the reports in real-time.
“The biggest change from just a few years ago is in how much emphasis we put into accessing information faster and faster. The need for reliable, up-to-the-minute information is constant. Without it, our finance directors are operating at a huge disadvantage,” said Anand Saxena, Financial Reporting (FIRE), DHL Global Forwarding North America. “Using IBM technology as our business analytic platform, we’ve been able to drastically improve the quality and timeliness of reporting and at the same time improve the efficiency of our finance department.”
Headlines – Issue No. 447 (June 15-19, 2009)
DHL Using Cognos Analytics
iPhone Sends Real Postcards
Royal Mail Somewhere in Limbo
Estonia Post Launches into e-Invoicing
Certipost Moves into e-Contracting
Neopost USA & IKON in Cross-Selling Alliance
Cisco Pushes into Volume Server Market
Windows 7 Due October 22
Now Imagine a Sun Netbook, Larry Does
Tibco Silver – Amazon for Dummies
Russian Regulators Investigating Microsoft: Reuters
Verizon Takes to the Cloud
Intel Enables Anorexic-But-Not-Pricey Laptops
AMD Pushes Out Six-Core Chip
Sun To Build Clouds
Intel Buys Wind River $884m
Acer To Sell Android Netbook
Google Takes Another Crack at Enterprise Search
So the Dog Ate Your Presentation Huh
Google Docs Adds Formats
Cloud by Mail
Amazon has started telling people to send in their cloud data by mail.
No, really. Swear to God. It’s not just us enamored of how much better people look by candlelight.
Because of dead-slow bandwidth on burgeoning datasets at the customer end Amazon Web Services (AWS) has invented a new Import/Export service that it started testing the other day in the US.
The limited beta offers to accelerate moving large amounts into S3 using portable storage devices sent back and forth by post.
Amazon gets it and uploads it, bypassing the Internet using its high-speed internal network and vetted personnel.
It intends to add an export facility and then move on to Europe.
It claims it could be more cost-effective than the user upgrading his connectivity because “It is now relatively easy to create a collection of data so large that it cannot be uploaded to offsite storage (e.g., Amazon S3) in a reasonable amount of time,” it says, particularly in the scientific space.
Amazon figures the service can be used for data migration, offsite backup, disaster recovery and direct data interchange – in other words if you regularly get content on portable storage devices from your business associates, they might as well sent it directly to Amazon.
Pricing includes an $80 fee for each storage device plus $2.49-an-hour for the time it takes to upload the data, with partial hours being billed as full hours.
Amazon says that if you’ve got a T1 line and 1TB of data you’d better use the mail otherwise it’ll take you 82 days to upload it. On a T3 connection it’d take three days. It figures the breakeven point would be 100GB and 600GB, respectively. If you’ve got a 100 Mbps connection, it suggests it would be more economical to use the Import/Export service if you’ve got 5TB. If you’re got a 1,000 Mbps connection then your breakeven would appear to be 60TB
Amazon’s very favorite device has an eSATA interface. USB2’s okay but either’s got to use the FAT32, ext2, ext3 or NTFS file system and fir an 8U rack. Otherwise you’ve got to negotiate with them. Amazon says it’ll return the device.