Business news round-up: Manchester startup growth, G-Cloud success and AWS initiative

Is Manchester the UK’s leading startup city?

Manchester is fast becoming perceived as the UK’s ‘second city,’ following a business explosion in the region in recent years.

The relocation of the BBC takes a lot of the credit for the transformation of Manchester into a city predicted to become one of the top five cities in Europe for startups. Since the corporation switched to Salford, more companies dealing with media-related functions such as PR and marketing have launched in Manchester.

As illustrated in a new infographic by accountancy firm Alexander & Co, on the back of this rapid development, there are many benefits for startups in the city.

G-Cloud sales hit £1.39 billion

Following a dashboard update, sales on the government cloud procurement platform G-Cloud have now reached £1.39 billion.

Sales made to SMEs account for £753 million of the total to date, while large enterprises have made £640 million from sales on the platform.

This suggests that the government’s ambition to use G-Cloud to ensure that more IT spending goes to SMEs is starting to work.

To read more, visit Public Technology.

UK firms face competitive threat posed by startups

According to research from Dell Technologies, 32% of UK firms fear their brand could disappear over the next three-to-five years, as a result of increased competition from startups.

The research was conducted into how mid-sized firms and enterprises view their organisations’ digital transformation efforts.

Around two-thirds (65%) said they feel threatened by the ability of startups to be more innovative and distinguished in their respective marketplaces, with 41% of UK firms claiming to have first-hand experience of this already.

Speaking at the Dell Technologies Forum, Rob Lamb, director of cloud for Dell-EMC UK, said part of the problem is that business leaders are failing to grasp the important role technology can play in helping organisations to enhance their competitive edge.

Visit Computer Weekly to read more from Rob Lamb about the research.

Enterprise architecture key to improving mobile worker productivity, according to business expert

Businesses put a lot of effort into mobile for their employees, but still come up short, according to an experienced technology business president.

In an article for TechTarget, Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corporation, a strategic consulting firm specialising in telecommunications and data communications since 1982, explains how approaching mobile with an enterprise architecture model can help.

He identifies the biggest problem with mobile empowerment as the fact that typical strategies don't account for mobile workers themselves; they account for mobile devices only.

Tom recommends that an enterprise architecture model could help to define business processes and their implementation in a mobility-optimised way.

Read more about enterprise architecture and its potential for your business’s mobility strategy at TechTarget.

VMware and Amazon to team up on compatibility initiative

According to reports, VMware and Amazon are set to announce a partnership that would see the former's virtualisation solutions work better on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The initiative will make it easier for VMware customers to run their software on both internal servers and Amazon's cloud service, opening up a whole new world of possibilities.

According to Ingrid Fadelli and Clare Hopping of CloudPro, it's an agreement many cloud companies, including Google, would likely be eager to be part of.

To find out more about the compatibility initiative, read the reports in full on Cloud Pro.