BT Global Services has until very recently been a shining star of the telecoms giant, and even after its shock profit warning last week, the division still accounts for £9bn of the group’s £20bn revenue.

In all the recrimination, resignation and share price falls since the financial announcement, one potential aspect of Global Services’ problems has been little discussed.

I’ve heard a few people wondering how much of the division’s troubles are down to its involvement in the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

BT is one of only two major contractors still involved, along with CSC. Accenture and Fujitsu have already pulled out due to concerns over potential losses, and BT had been expected to pick up the region ceded by Fujitsu’s departure.

Former NHS IT director general Richard Granger negotiated some tough terms and conditions for the key suppliers to the programme – in particular, that payments would be made on delivery of finished product. This is great news for the NHS – now that key parts of the project have been delayed, it doesn’t have to worry about the costs of software and services that are not yet fully operational.

This was a big factor in Accenture’s withdrawal as the supplier saw its costs increasing and its revenue being pushed further into the future.

In the early days of NPfIT, former BT chief executive Ben Verwaayen was asked by reporters about the impact on the firm’s bottom line, and he proudly explained that BT had not budgeted for a profit from the programme for some time ahead, seeing it as a long-term investment. A wise move – but one now wonders exactly when those profits were expected.

The core part of NPfIT –electronic patient records – is an area BT is most exposed to, and is the area most delayed. Recent reports suggested that many NHS trusts are refusing to implement software until they can see it working elsewhere. Considering that one of the BT pilot sites, the Royal Free Hospital in London, has just revealed it lost £7.2m due to the project, it isn’t looking promising.

BT meanwhile, is funding development and providing services to implement software and try to make it work – essentially without getting paid for it.

There has been no official word from BT one way or the other, but observers cannot help but speculate that the troubled National Programme may be a factor in Global Services' current struggles.

And if it is, and BT feels it has to reconsider or renegotiate its involvement, then the risks to the NHS IT scheme would be significant.

Happy 10th birthday to Google – an event celebrated by the creation of thousands more web pages about Google that Google can search for you. So here’s another one – 10 nice and nasty things about the most influential web site in the world.

Nice: The simplicity

At the heart of Google’s success is the elimination of complexity and those awful cluttered portals that we used in the early days of the web. A clean white screen, with a simple white box, and beyond it is everything you need to find on the internet. This has been perhaps the biggest factor in Google’s success, and also a critical element of making the web the global phenomenon it has become. Google has eliminated techno-fear among the masses and brought the complex nature of the internet to a non-technically aware audience.

Nasty: Advertising dominance

Google is still trumpeted as the anti-Microsoft, but how long before its dominance of the online search advertising market makes it a target for the same enemies of monopolism that dragged Microsoft through the courts? Google’s growing share of global advertising spend – in all forms – is changing the media landscape, and not always for the better.

Nice: Do no evil

Google’s corporate motto promised a new era of compassionate capitalism, and even when it entered the stock market the company’s off-the-wall approach to its dealings with Wall Street pleased users and shareholders alike.

Nasty: China

Human rights activists such as Amnesty International are still up in arms about Google’s acceptance of censorship for its Chinese web site. Critics say that the internet is such a force for good in human rights that to accede to the wishes of a repressive regime makes a mockery of Google’s good intentions elsewhere.

Nice: All the world’s information

Google’s stated aim to “organise the world’s information” offers the ultimate democratisation of knowledge and learning. At its simplest, how handy is it to resolve those arguments or remember those half-forgotten song lyrics in seconds with a Google search? One of the most-used phrases by web users the world over must be: “What did we do before Google?”

Nasty: Copyright and intellectual property infringement

Google has trodden on plenty of toes with plans to digitise books, reproduce news content, and the availability of copyrighted content on YouTube. Accessing all the world’s information is a great thing – but much of that content does actually belong to people, many of whom make a living out of it.

Nice: Larry and Sergey

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have managed to combine the geek-made-good image of Bill Gates with the coolness of Steve Jobs – but avoided the monopolist criticisms made of Microsoft’s founder and the smugness of Apple’s chief. Two smart guys with a bright idea who made good – everything Silicon Valley was meant to be about.

Nasty: Eric Schmidt

Google’s chief executive is the man who brings cold-hearted capitalism to the wacky Googlisms. Schmidt is the corporate rottweiler, there to stand up to Microsoft’s pitbull chief executive Steve Ballmer. And his background at Novell – a company that never recovered from Microsoft taking over its established market – means there is a score to settle with Redmond.

Nice: Free software

Free wordprocessing, free spreadsheets, free email, free web browser, free video – Google is not afraid to invest the billions it makes from advertising into a blatant attempt to change the software industry and slowly destroy Microsoft’s cash cows. The products aren’t perfect – but they are generally good enough, and if concerns over security and quality can be overcome, Google could lead the computing world into the cloud.

Nasty: Data collection

The biggest threat to Google’s future are the growing concerns over privacy, data protection and the use of our personal information. Just what exactly does Google do with all the information it compiles about each of us from our search profiles? How much can it learn by scanning the contents of our Gmails? And as more people use Google Apps to store personal documents and financial spreadsheets, what is being done to allay Big Brother fears over correlation of disparate data sources and how  much marketing and advertising firms can find out about us? Microsoft knows this is its rivals weak spot, and the next version of Internet Explorer will include a function to prevent historic search data from being collected by Google.

What do you think? Let us know your top likes and dislikes about Google and join in the 10th birthday fun…

On the walk from Oxford Circus tube station to the Computing office in London’s Soho, there is a Carphone Warehouse shop. It is normally unremarkable – except today at 9am there was a queue of (mainly male) people outside, apparently eager to be the first to buy the new 3G iPhone, out today.

Well, you might have thought, there’s a popular product. The last times there were queues in Oxford Street were for the opening of a new Primark store and the latest Harry Potter book.

But in this case, there also happened to be a camera crew set up outside the phone shop to film the queue. And another camera crew inside, no doubt waiting to film the “rush” of punters to get their hands on an iPhone.

Hmm. In-demand, or very carefully stage managed? I think the latter.

Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse have done a great PR job on the new phone – creating the illusion of massive demand regardless of how many units they will ship.

Newspaper stories this morning claimed that supply was limited to one iPhone per customer, or two per business. Given the big bucks Apple is chasing by establishing the product as an genuine corporate alternative to the BlackBerry, this is hardly likely to be the case.

Imagine the conversation: “Hi Apple, I’m the IT manager at [insert global multinational company]. I’d like to buy 10,000 iPhones please.”

“Sorry Mr Global Multinational. You can only have two.”

Yeah, right.

It’s become classic consumer electronics marketing – create a buzz around a product by making people think everyone is desperate to own one.

In the case of the new iPhone, it probably needs the buzz. After all, the great new features of the second-generation product include 3G connectivity for faster web surfing – already available in, erm, every other product on the market. And an online store of 900 ready-to-download consumer and business applications to help make your smartphone more functional.

Or you could buy a Symbian-based phone and download any of the 9,000-plus applications already developed for that platform.

Oh, and the iPhone costs a bomb.

Perhaps I’ve been in this game too long and the cynicism has set in after seeing too many product launches, but if anything is more likely to turn me off the iPhone – already the most over-hyped technology product in history – it’s the stage-managed artifice surrounding a me-too, catch-up phone.

As SAP’s latest user conference draws to a close, what should the software giant’s customers and prospects expect over the coming months?

The event was fairly news-lite, with no big announcements from the supplier that would really shake up the market. But it was clear that there are certain messages that your friendly SAP sales rep will be pushing to IT leaders the next time he or she comes to call.

At a strategic level, the phrases you will hear most frequently this year are collaboration, “business networks” and “strategic agility”. The latter, in particular, strikes me as a classic IT marketing buzzword that means very little in the real world of running an IT department. But overall, SAP is predicting that its customers will need to become more flexible, more open, and more connected with their supply chains from customers to staff to suppliers.

The biggest SAP users – the likes of Nokia, Colgate-Palmolive, Rolls-Royce or Kraft Foods – who presented at the conference exist in a global environment with many outsourced functions and a potential for complexity that would cripple a business that does not adequately support critical processes with technology. They rely on close co-operation with suppliers and fast response to customers. They have all adopted the principle of ruthless standardisation for their IT.

For the many thousands of companies that are not operating on such a huge scale, the concepts of flexibility and collaboration will still be recognisable – if a little scary. Opening up the organisation, becoming connected to external partners, and sharing internal information do not come naturally or easily to many companies – but they will be key characteristics of successful businesses in the internet age.

At a technology level, SAP is going for a big push on its latest customer relationship management (CRM) release, SAP CRM 2007.

Insiders at the supplier privately acknowledge that SAP’s previous CRM offering was maybe not as good is it could have been, but with the new product the firm hopes to better compete with Oracle / Siebel, as well as mid-market alternatives such as Microsoft. There seems to be a big internal push on making 2008 a successful year for CRM 2007 – so expect the sales rep to come knocking soon.

This was my fourth Sapphire, but my first for a few years. Overall, I would say this is one of the better IT vendor conferences – purely because SAP is very good at getting high-profile customers to speak about what they are doing and to share their experiences with their peers. Of course, if you want to delve into products and technologies, there’s every opportunity, but as an occasion to learn from IT leaders at some of the world’s top companies, it is a worthwhile way for any IT professional to spend a couple of days.

Oh, and Berlin has some pretty good bars too… 

Yet again the theme of ruthless standardisation has come through strongly in interviewing some of SAP's biggest customers here at Sapphire.

Kraft Foods is one of the very biggest – 12,000 users in Europe, 30,000 more in North America by 2010, Asia Pacific to follow later, and with the software in use since 2001.

Kraft used to have disparate systems in every country in Europe, but was very much an early mover in adopting a single, standard, unmodified version of SAP across the continent.

One of the great benefits of this was realised in October last year. The firm wanted to upgrade to the latest release of SAP to take advantage of new functionality. For most companies, the prospect of a major version upgrade to 12,000 users in many countries would make them shudder. The cost and complexity of such a project is what has historically kept too many organisation stuck on older versions of applications, with a system update taking on all the characteristics of a total re-implementation.

But for Kraft, the decision to standardise paid off – the entire upgraded system was built remotely, offsite, and implemented in just three months.

To add to the achievement, the food giant also chose to change its whole IT infrastructure at the same time – and completed that in the same three month period, working with outsourcer EDS and key supplier IBM.

Kraft senior director, SAP competency centres, Jan Ziskasen, is so laid back now about his standard implementation blueprint for SAP that he was able to be in Berlin this week despite a major part of the US project about to go live this weekend.

How many IT directors would be confident enough in an impending deadline to be happily thousands of miles away on another continent?

Computing is attending SAP's Sapphire conference to meet and talk to the software giant's customers. We are, as always, far more interested in the real-life business experience of IT leaders - our readers - than the detail of the technology itself.

But for once, I found myself genuinely impressed by a product demonstration today.

SAP has worked with BlackBerry maker Research in Motion to integrate its business applications with the BlackBerry user interface and have created a truly seamless connection between the two.

The demo featured the RIM executive who was presenting going into his BlackBerry calendar, finding a meeting with a customer, then at the click of a button bringing up that customer's history from RIM's corporate SAP software.

It is the first time I have seen a real business-focused innovation in the mobile technology world for some time, and an example of the way that business executives will be using their mobile computers - be they BlackBerrys, phones or smartphones - to really keep up with the organisation away from the office.

Email and calendars are the easy and obvious tools for flexible working, but there has been much less progress made by IT vendors in making the mobile properly a part of the core business applications that actually run the company.

SAP and BlackBerry are onto a winning combination - and an example of what will one day be the norm for business.

Day two at Sapphire started with something that SAP is good at – getting high-profile customers to speak at its conferences.

So much of these events is taken up with product-related information – obviously vital for users and prospective users – but even the most enthusiastic delegates would probably admit there is only so much detail you can take.

Hearing from a fellow customer though, is a different matter and is possibly the most valuable aspect of an event like this.

This morning we heard from two of SAP's biggest users.

John Clarke, chief information officer at Nokia, talked about the challenges of producing more than 300 million mobile phones every year in what has become one of the most diverse, demanding and rapidly changing markets in the world.

Clarke talked about the way that Nokia has been transformed in the last 10 years through IT, from a company where technology was holding back the business and causing great difficulties in its manufacturing and distribution, to one recognised as having one of the best supply chains in the world.

Another little snippet I liked was the diversity of the mobile phone market illustrated by the fact that in Africa, Nokia is starting to make handsets with a built-in torch, because African users find that a particularly useful feature to have.

In a recurrence of the theme emerging yesterday, Clarke's presentation highlighted again the benefit of ruthless standardisation – driving a global company through an adherence to a single standard version of its core business application.

That was echoed by the second customer speaker of the day – Paul McGarry, international vice president of global IT for manufacturing giant Colgate-Palmolive.

McGarry said that 99.6 per cent of the company runs on SAP, and highlighted the most important benefit as "taking complexity out of our IT."

While SAP may be pushing its own marketing messages, any delegate spending time listening to their peers here talking about the realities of their day-to-day work will be taking away plenty of food for thought about the reasons why they should be taking a similarly ruthless approach to simplifying and standardising their critical applications.

Footnote – One other interesting common aspect of Clarke and McGarry's presentations was the fact they are both Brits, running global IT operations for two important overseas-based organisations. It reflects well on the quality of IT leadership in the UK – something that all the UK IT profession should take pride in and shout out about a little more.   

One of the features of big IT supplier conferences such as SAP's Sapphire is that a theme always emerges that characterises the state of the vendor's customers.

Here in Berlin, the early signs are that the theme is the benefits of standardisation.

For several years, SAP and its main rival Oracle have been preaching to customers of the benefit of rolling out a single, common version of business applications across an organisation, with no – or the absolute minimum – of bespoke changes or additions to the package.

For the vendor, this has always made sense – not only does it hinder the use of other software, but it makes the system easier to support and maintain, especially when upgrading to new releases.

For users, the story has always been a good one – lower costs, easier support, less complexity, enforcement of core processes throughout the business – but the real-life evidence of this taking place has been less apparent.

But now, some of the early adopters have finally gone live, and are here at the conference to share their experiences.

Rolls-Royce chief information officer Jonathan Mitchell presented one such case study.

The aero engine manufacturer completed a global rollout of SAP in September last year, and is already seeing the benefits.

Mitchell discussed a few key lessons learned in the Rolls-Royce project that will be of use to others embarking on a similar initiative:

• Any requests for bespoke development had to be personally approved by him – thereby making only the most essential alterations to the standard product.
• He stressed the importance of testing – the company conducted three separate full dress rehearsals before going live, and one of the fundamental tenets of the project was that testing should never be reduced, only increased, regardless of the effect on delivery timescales.
• To enforce adequate and ongoing user training, Rolls only allows system access to licenced users – and to maintain their licences, users have to attend regular training sessions.
• The quality of your chosen super-users – the business representatives chosen to be the expert users of the system for their area of the organization – is critical to the overall project. Mitchell said the role of the super-user was central to the rollout.

The company is already seeing the benefits of the ruthless standardisation enforced by using a single software package worldwide.

As more organisations share the lessons they have learned, the more we will see smaller companies adopting a similar approach.

Magazine wholesaler Menzies Distribution is an example – the firm has just embarked on a £10m, five-year business transformation project, with a similarly ruthless standardisation based on SAP at its heart.

The growing use of unmodified, packaged software in companies is not necessarily great news if you are an in-house software developer - or perhaps it is if you are looking for an opportunity to develop new skills - but it is very good news for IT leaders looking to remove complexity from their operations and use IT to drive change and innovation across the business.

Last month, SAP announced that it had delayed the release of Business ByDesign, the supplier's long-awaited software-as-a-service offering for small and medium sized businesses, after weak first-quarter financial results.

But during today's press conference here at Sapphire 2008 in Berlin, SAP co-chief executive Leo Apotheker today put the record straight, in what must be a strong candidate for the most innovative explanation for delays to a major product release by any vendor.

Apparently, Business ByDesign now has an "adjusted" rollout. In particular, SAP made a decision a while ago to accelerate the development of the product and so put extra investment into the project.

Now, all that has happened is that acceleration has been taken away, and Business ByDesign is still firmly on track to meet the delivery schedule that existed before the acceleration was put in place.

So, remember that – not delayed, merely not being accelerated any longer.

In the early 1990s, I was working for ICL – the once and former poster child for UK IT – trying to sell big old mainframes running an operating system called VME (which stood for “virtual machine environment” – remember that, it becomes important later on…).

It wasn’t an entirely successful venture, given that most of the world was moving to mid-range Unix servers and proliferating these cheaper boxes around every department of the organisation.

At the time, I would occasionally come across an IBM customer still hanging on to their dear old water-cooled mainframes. Water cooling! Honestly. So 1970s. Air conditioning – that was the way forward.

Fast forward to this week when, while hosting a Computing web seminar on energy efficient IT, I find the expert speakers telling viewers to consider, um, consolidating departmental servers to one big central box and, err, investigating water cooling for their datacentres instead of energy-hungry air conditioning.

See? The IT industry is a fast-moving, forward-looking, innovative industry. You heard it here first – water-cooled mainframes are the next big thing. And flares.

Oh, and don’t forget the key technology that is driving the server consolidation trend – virtualisation, whereby multiple applications previously hosted on individual boxes are run in virtual servers on a single box, centralised into what you might call a virtual machine environment.

In the spirit of the IT industry’s love of TLAs (three-letter acronyms), let’s now give this technology its own shorthand – virtualisation, after all, being a bit of mouthful. I suggest that from now on, we call it VME.

Sound familiar?

Sometimes it really is true that the best ideas are the old ones. Of course IT, like anything else, goes in cycles and the trends of yesteryear find new popularity once more. Give it 10 years and we’ll have a dot com boom – Business 5.0, perhaps.

Can anyone else think of examples of old technologies and trends that are - or should be - making a renaissance today?

Here’s another one for the real nostalgists – the ICL One-per-desk (OPD), but with a voice over IP interface. It would work…

An OPD yesterday. Or in 1984.