Top 10 IT news stories of the week: personality over technical expertise, IBM memo and a new bug worse than Heartbleed

Employees to be retrained and have their pay cut at IBM, while Spotify and IBM would hire IT staff on personality rather than skills

This week's mix of stories is a scatter-gun affair without any particular focus or trend. We have case studies, acquisitions, new technologies and of course, security blunders. Not to mention quite possibly one of the worst memos to go out to employees of a big technology vendor. So without further ado... let's count down this week's top 10.

10. PSA Peugeot Citroen saves over £3m with implementation of Cornerstone OnDemand software

According to Peugeot Citroen's development and administration manager Phillip Price, the company's selection of CornerStone OnDemand has led to the firm saving millions.

How you may ask? Firstly, it simply scrapped laborious and expensive journies to training centres for its staff, from say Scotland to Coventry - and instead made much of the training available online. Secondly, it took away £285,000 of costs a year on folders by using Acer tablets instead. The cost of leasing the tablets is only £30,000 a year.

A 900-page training manual was also replaced with pdf documents that could be accessed on the rented Acer tablet devices. Price claims this particular initiative allowed Peugeot Citroen to save £750,000 on printing costs over three years. Next up for the company is to try and better recruit and retain staff, as the firm has been losing 40 per cent of its staff over the last three years. Easier said than done.

9. SAP acquires globalexpense owner Concur for $73bn

When SAP announced that it had agreed to purchase US software firm Concur - many were taken aback by the price of the deal which is said to be worth a cool $7.3bn (£4.5bn).

Concur, which is perhaps best known in the UK for its business expenses management tool GlobalExpense, has more than 23,000 customers, 4,200 employees and 25 million active users, all of whom will come under the management of SAP after the Concur board unanimously approved the deal.

But despite a positive reaction from analysts such as Bernstein, who claimed that "Concur is the leader in its market and the potential synergies would be a valuable addition", SAP shares declined by almost three per cent following news of the acquisition. Probably not the reaction the firm's stakeholders were looking for.

8. ‘Frugal' Facebook considering Blu-ray as cost effective data storage medium

Apparently, $200bn social media firm Facebook needs to be "frugal". That is according to Niall McEntegart, head of data centre operations, East Europe and US, who was involved in a Q&A session at Computing's Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit 2014.

McEntegart said the firm was considering switching to Blu-ray storage as a more cost and energy-efficient method of retaining longer-term "cold" data for its customers.

"There's a lot of manufacturers out there with a lot of excess production and there's a lot of potential there for 10,000 discs in a rack," he said.

Ever wondered what happens to your Facebook photos that are 10 years old in storage? No? Well, they could be stored on Blu-rays in the near future.

Blu-rays, Facebook reasons, will run on only a fifth of the power of server-based hardware - only around 400 watts - and can simply spin down when users do not wish to access so-called "cold" storage such as their old photos.

7. eBay hacked, criticised for slow response

eBay was yet again at the centre of a cyber-attack, this time a cross-site scripting attack, which sent some of its users to a malicious website designed to steal their credentials.

Despite being warned about the attack, the firm aparently sat back, relaxed and waited for 12 hours before addressing the compromise.

What is worse for eBay was that it followed a database breach for the e-commerce firm in May and a scam affecting its StubHub website in July.

"For eBay, this hat-trick of security incidents will surely do the company no favours in terms of restoring and maintain consumer confidence," says Paul Ayers, vice president EMEA at Vormetric.

I, for one, will be shopping elsewhere.

6. Data analytics firms make a serious play for telematics

The likes of SAS, Treasure Data and The Floow are all vying to be the company that insurance firms come to with their data analytics needs when it comes to telematics.

According to AXA's group CIO and COO Kevin Murray, telematics will become a mainstay in the UK within the UK within five years, after making inroads in the US. And all of the companies are offering different ways of going about the analytics.

But in amongst the algorithms, storage and processing involved in the data analytics workflow, there are wider issues that insurance companies have to contemplate such as privacy fears from consumers who may feel like the technology is a bit "Big Brother".

There are still many more questions about telematics than answers, the biggest of which is whether any one insurer will take the plunge and offer telematics insurance to the mass market, rather than keeping it safe (and relatively inexpensive) with high-risk drivers.

5. IBM to staff: compulsory retraining and a ten per cent pay cut

Being told that you're going to be re-trained for a job that you may have been doing for many years may not be music to your ears. But IBM have decided to take that a step further, and really test the resolve of its employees, by suggesting that employees take a pay cut of 10 per cent during the duration of the training. Nice.

Of course, the firm realised that the "few hundred" employees of its IBM Global Technology Services unit that that the plan applies to might not be so happy with this programme, and so kindly offered to restore their pay from the beginning of April 2015.

The employees were given another bucket full of confidence when an IBM spokeswoman told the New York Times that the company is "working to preserve their jobs".

4. Transport for London selects Computacenter and CSC aspart of £80m framework

Transport for London (TfL) selected Computacenter, CSC, Insight Direct and Proband to provide computer hardware, software and services across the organisation. The two-year contract is expected to be worth between £40m and £80m, with the option to extend for a further two years, one year at a time.

Steve Townsend, CIO at TfL, claimed that the purpose of the framework was to give TfL "fast and easy access to the products we regularly need, at the quality we demand while delivering value for money for fare and taxpayers".

3. New bash bug security vulnerability worse than Heartbleed

Every other day we at Computing hear of the latest big security vulnerability than could wreak havoc on IT systems and PCs. This particular vulnerability known as "The Bash Bug" and "Shellshock" has been described as "worse than Heartbleed" - which itself was proven to be the real deal.

The flaw has been discovered in Linux-based software called Bash - also common on Apple Mac operating systems. The vulnerability can be exploited to take control of any system that uses unpatched Bash software - and that's a lot of systems.

A few days after the initial announcement, security vendor Kaspersky Lab reported that a computer worm had already begun infecting machines by exploiting Shellshock, while AlienVault found several machines were trying to exploit the Bash vulnerability.

It remains to be seen how devastating the effects could be from the malware, although Apple has said it is working to provide a software update for the OS X operating system.

2. What's holding back in-memory databases?

The likes of Microsoft, Oracle, and in particular SAP have all been pushing in-memory databases, but despite the immense performance improvements that all three software giants claim for applications running on their respective in-memory databases, customer remain relatively unmoved.

In an indicative August survey by the American SAP User Group (ASUD) - encompassing more than 500 SAP customers and partners - indicated that users are holding back, concerned at the cost and complication of running applications on SAP Hana.

Of biggest concern to SAP would be ASUG's claim that three quarters of the customer who said they have not yet purchased any SAP HANA products say they can't identify a business case that justifies the cost. Ouch.

Most respondents preferred to dip their toes in the water with something less mission-critical. This is understandable to Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg.

"If an in-memory database goes down you have all kinds of issues with recovery because memory is volatile - you lose everything. So applications have to be aware of that when they are doing ‘commit'; when they are doing ‘transactional control'. They have to understand how the in-memory database is working so that they can assure the consistency of a transaction," Feinberg explains.

Tellingly, he adds: "That's just one example".

1. The cutting edge firms that hire IT staff on personality over skills

Some companies want to hire the best person for the job. Others, it seems, want to hire the person that fits perfectly into the team's culture.

Spotify and Laterooms.com are two organisations that subscribe to the latter philosophy.

Kevin Goldsmith, director of software engineering at Spotify, explained that the most important interview of the whole recruitment process is what is known as a "culture interview".

"If we don't think you are going to be successful in our culture, we won't hire you - and we turn away a lot of good people," he told Computing.