Gareth Corfield

British bank TSB is reportedly hiring an extra 250 customer service bods to help it cope with an avalanche of customer complaints after its IT meltdown earlier this year. The Press Association reported the sudden hiring surge at the bank, which suffered a week-long outage in April, caused by a botched systems upgrade and data …

Alibaba and Elastic, the purveyor of scalable open-source search engine Elasticsearch, are to offer their joint Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch product outside of China for the first time. “With the expanded footprint, customers outside China will now have access to the real-time search, ingestion, analytical capabilities and …

Audio IoT networking firm Chirp has convinced Microsoft to integrate its tech into the Azure IoT platform. Chirp’s hookup with Microsoft’s Azure IoT platform comes a few weeks after it rolled out a free tier for SDK access. CTO James Nesfield told us: “We’re able to add a really elegant onboarding capability without adding to …

Amazon Prime’s next-day-delivery advertising strapline has been branded misleading by a British advertising watchdog. No fewer than 280 people complained to the Advertising Standards Authority, a private company based in London, that Amazon’s “one-day delivery” promise – including its “one-day delivery for Christmas” promotion …

Updated Swedish flat-pack furniture folk Ikea’s UK tentacle appears to be suffering a rather lengthy website backend outage stopping some customers from placing online orders. The website is currently greeting visitors with the message: "Oops! We are currently experiencing some technical difficulties and you may experience issues when …

The director of whistleblower support outfit the Courage Foundation has quit after being told to pull support from Barrett Brown following some barbed comments he made about Julian Assange. Naomi Colvin walked out of the foundation after “three of Courage’s trustees wrote to me demanding that I inform Barrett Brown that he …

IBM’s top cloud and Watson AI man has reportedly been tapped up about moving to scandal-hit ad company WPP Group as chief executive. David Kenny, veep of Big Blue’s Watson and Cloud Platform division, was reportedly interviewed by top WPPers who were hoping to tempt him across from Watson. WPP, a maker of supermarket shopping …

Extreme Networks’ share price almost halved after its Q4 financials hit the wires on Wednesday, in spite of the US network infrastrucutre kit-maker reporting a double-digit bounce in turnover. It serves as a timely reminder that tech companies miss Wall Street forecasts at their peril. While revenues rose 56 per cent to $278. …

A former Brocade marketer turned Cisco veep is leaving the networking kinpin, along with another veep who ran the service provider division. The two senior bods - Christine Heckart and Yvette Kanouff - are both set to be replaced, according to the firm. Kanouff, general manager of the Service Provider Business, told employees …

A former VMware veep who claimed tens of millions of dollars from the virtualization company over whistleblower victimisation has lost his legal attempt (PDF) to throw out a $1.5m arbitration award made in his favour. Dane Smith, a one-time vice president of the Americas at VMware, blew the whistle some years ago on a secret …

IBM has scored itself a AU$481m ($357m, £277m) mainframe contract with the Australian Department of Human Services. The revelation that half of a larger mega-deal rests solely on mainframes sheds more light on what's holding up Big Blue's financial position. angry employee IBM loses mainframe docs down the back of the web, …

Virgin Media's operating income slid 17 per cent over the past year despite the Brit telco growing its Q2 2018 revenues to £1.275bn, creating interesting conditions for its newly acquired chief operating officer. Of the total quarterly revenue, £903.9m came from residential cable subscribers. Business subscription revenue …

Review The ZX Spectrum Vega+ is running open-source Spectrum emulator software FUSE, The Register has confirmed while carrying out a hands-on review of the handheld console. As regular readers know, the Vega+ is the flagship product of Retro Computers Ltd, the company which took £513,000 in crowdfunded cash from members of the public …

Dell is wooing investors with the promise of profits leaping by more than two-thirds if they back Big Mickey D's plans to take the eponymous tech group public again. According to Dell's latest S-4 filing with the American Securities and Exchange Commission, by 2023 Dell reckons it will be generating revenues between $91bn and …

Nearly a third of Britons don't think they have the required computer skills to do their jobs despite 9 in 10 households having internet access, according to the Office for National Statistics. The government numbers agency's latest survey also reckons that 16 to 24-year-olds are the most likely group to be using cloud storage …

Google is pondering a cloudy move to China and a hookup with local operators Tencent and Inspur, according to reports. China, long coveted by the Western technology industry for its massive, tech-hungry markets, is a ripe target for the usual big firms on two fronts: as a market to sell into and as a contract producer of goods …

Mellanox claims to have rolled out the world's fastest Ethernet storage fabric controller at this year's Flash Memory Summit. The Bluefield storage controllers are, it said, optimised for "extreme efficiency and programmable virtualization for NVMe over Fabrics". They are billed as delivering 4 million IOPS with NVMe-oF, up …

Sir Clive Sinclair's company has accused flailing ZX Spectrum reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd of trading while insolvent. Meanwhile, the firm has delivered some consoles – and been stripped of the brand rights to its flagship product. Last week some customers of Retro Computers Ltd reported on social media that they had …

It would appear that the president of Ecuador is not a fan of Julian Assange. Lenin Moreno, the head of the South American state since 2017, reportedly said today that he had spoken to the British government about the evidently unwanted Australian-born squatter, who has been hiding in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since …

Openreach claims it is now more independent of BT than ever before, adding that the UK's fibre rollout is going just fine and all ISPs are now very happy with the BT-owned telecoms infrastructure company. This was the gist of its first annual review, issued to coincide with yet more central government pledges to extend …

You win some, you lose some. Citrix has embiggened its quarterly revenues – while at the same time shrinking profits by a couple of million dollars. How did they manage that? The firm on Wednesday reported revenues of $742m for the second quarter of fiscal year 2018, a 7 per cent increase on the year-ago quarter of $693m. …

The entire BBC website (less iPlayer) went down briefly this morning. Auntie's online offerings, ranging from free online news to telly and radio listings, recipes and educational content for kids, were all briefly offline. All the BBC's sub-sites were throwing up HTTP 500 errors, complete with a nice little graphic of the …

Oracle Database 18 is now available for on-prem download on Linux, according to a talkative senior Oracle chap. Oracle corporate HQ Oracle: Think our DB sales are great now? Wait until we actually get the new product out... READ MORE Mike Dietrich, Big Red's master product manager for upgrades and migrations, said users can …

HPE has appointed a permanent president to its new hybrid IT business group, in the form of Phil Davis, who is currently the firm's global sales chief. greenlake Public, private, hybrid cloud? Take a dip in our GreenLake HPE urges READ MORE Davis, who starts his new job on 1 August, was appointed "new global leader" for …

The Ministry of Fun* is wheeling out a new national telecoms strategy (PDF) that aims to slather the UK in healthy full-fat broadband fibre by 2033. Under the plans, the whole of Blighty's copper network will be ripped out and replaced by fibre-optic cables to enhance broadband speeds, as was suggested by a recent survey. New …