What's up with... Macquarie Bank, TIM, Accenture

via Flickr © Kenny Holston 21 (CC BY-ND 2.0)

via Flickr © Kenny Holston 21 (CC BY-ND 2.0)

  • Fibre-driven Italian mergers
  • Accenture launches ‘Cloud First’
  • New lockdowns likely?

Competition and regulation issues seem to have risen  to the surface in today’s grab-bag of chunky goodness

The infrastructure arm of investment bank Macquarie has made a €2.65 billion bid for the 50% stake in Italian wholesale fixed access network operator Open Fiber, currently owned by utility giant Enel. Open Fiber is on course to merge with the access unit of national operator TIM (Telecom Italia) to create a single national fixed access infrastructure outfit, but Bloomberg has reported that the European Commission might oppose the merger on competition grounds. (See TIM buys into national Italian broadband plan.)

Accenture has announced the formation of Accenture Cloud First with a $3 billion investment over three years. The move is aimed to help clients across all industries rapidly become “cloud first” businesses and accelerate their digital transformation, it says. Karthik Narain,  Accenture Technology lead in North America, will lead Accenture Cloud First. Accenture has been on a buying spree for the last year and more and recognised $11 billion in cloud revenues in 2019. It claims leadership spanning Software as a Service — delivered through the company’s Intelligent Platform Services — to its migration, infrastructure and application cloud services. It boasts more than 100,000 client-facing Accenture cloud professionals.

New lockdown? The notion of a two week lockdown at some point in October is being urged by ‘scientists’ in the UK as its coronavirus numbers give every impression of being the ominous ocean swell in advance of the ‘second wave’. That will require companies to be ready and equipped for work from home (WFH) to minimise the economic damage. And that could be a silver lining for the service providers and WFH enablers who are ready with solutions.

As reported here, new Japanese Prime Minister Suga appears to be following through on telecom regulation. According to Reuters he instructed one of his ministers to look at cellphone pricing and their shares suffered again as a result. 

AWS’ most dangerous competitor is probably not Google or Microsoft but, ultimately, China’s Alibaba Cloud, which has announced the 2.0 version of its cloud computing platform at the company's virtual Aspara Conference in Hangzhou, China. 

Going 100 per cent carbon free is one of the movements of the moment in the US. Both AT&T and Google have recently pledged a carbon free future in favour of solar and wind.

BT has decided that  now - with the UK Premier League football season revving up - would be a good time to announce a price rise for BT Sport and BT TV ‘legacy’ customers. Not that these were customers obtained back in the days of valves and B&W, just those who signed up before the most modern flexible packages, it claims.

Email Newsletters

Sign up to receive TelecomTV's top news and videos, plus exclusive subscriber-only content direct to your inbox.