Money Dashboard, the online personal finance management service for UK consumers, is giving away an iPad to celebrate the launch of its latest product update.

To be in with a chance of getting your hands on this year’s most coveted geek toy, visit the Money Dashboard web survey.

Atkins, the UK’s largest engineering and design consultancy, has awarded RMD Power and Cooling a three year contract to maintain power protection equipment at all of its UK sites.

The project, which is worth over £200k, will standardise the provision of Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs) at the company’s 87 UK locations. It is the first time that maintenance of Atkins UPS equipment has been consolidated and RMD won the contract in a competitive tender process after outlining a detailed solution for the large and complex project.

The maintenance programme will begin with a dedicated RMD engineer carrying out a “health check” on every existing UPS. New batteries will be installed on all UPSs over three years old and faulty equipment will be repaired or replaced. The Atkins estate will be completely standardised with APC UPSs.

All of RMD’s engineers are approved to install and service APC equipment and following standardisation, the company will provide ongoing maintenance, guaranteeing a four-hour response service for Atkins’ high priority sites.

John Smykala, RMD’s Managing Director, says: “Atkins required an end to end solution to organise and maintain their UPS systems. The health check will reveal exactly what equipment is being used and the standardisation process will simplify management of this technology. Our warehousing capacity also allows us to hold “hot spares” for Atkins so we can repair and replace UPSs straight away, rather than waiting for delivery from manufacturers.”

Atkins was established in 1938 and offers specialist services in planning, engineering sciences, architecture and project management. The company has a turnover of £1.4 billion and has offices throughout Europe, Asia Pacific, the Americas, the Middle East and India. It is the official engineering design services provider for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Paul Hayes, Project Manager at Atkins, says: “RMD provided a solution that met our needs both in terms of value for money and attention to detail. The company has a strong track record in this area and was a clear winner in the tender process.

“RMD are known for their personal approach and it is important that we have a single point of contact, whatever the problem. I know that if I have a question or problem I can pick up the phone and the person I’m talking to will know my site and know our history.”

RMD is a leading force in the provision of innovative, integrated power and cooling solutions for data centres in the UK and Europe. The company has a powerful reputation in the industry and is one of only a handful of UK companies that can design, supply, install and maintain power and cooling.

Working in the public and private sector, for global brands as well as the SME, RMD’s clients include the NHS, Cairn Energy, Amazon and National Air Traffic Services.

For more information, visit http://www.rmduk.com or email Lucy Smith.

The European Union (EU) has selected a revolutionary cloud platform developed by Flexiant, the UK leader in cloud computing, as a test bed for a seven million euro pan-European technology project. The project, code-named Optimis, results from a highly competitive selection process which brings together Europe’s leading experts in cloud computing. The consortium of industrial and academic partners, including ATOS Origin, SAP and British Telecom, will create the software tools needed to run the next generation of cloud platforms.

Optimis was conceived to provide organisations with the capability of working beyond the inherent limitations of local cloud capacity by allowing workloads to be moved between clouds, whether public or private. Optimis is conducted under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for research and technological development. FP7 bundles together all research-related EU initiatives and plays a crucial role in achieving the goals of growth, competitiveness and employment.

Flexiant developed Europe’s first cloud computing platform, FlexiScale and is one of only three independent public cloud providers in Europe and five worldwide. Flexiant’s ground breaking technology, Extility, allows service providers and data centre operators to deliver a cloud computing service to their own customers. Flexiant will use its Extility technology to provide a robust proving ground for the EU project, demonstrating that the Optimis tool set is able to run in a real public or private cloud environment.

Cloud computing allows businesses to lease computing power as and when they need it, rather than having to buy expensive equipment. Businesses use the internet to access computing resource from hosting providers who provide a platform to collect, store and process data. The net effect is to drive down operating and capital expenditure while significantly reducing the carbon footprint of each transaction and providing infinite scalability.

Alex Bligh, Flexiant’s CEO says: “The evolution of cloud computing is moving at breakneck speed and we are delighted our cloud platform is being used to help develop the tools needed for a new generation of cloud platforms. It is a privilege to work with the EU at this level beside Europe’s information technology leaders.”

Five fearless JCI Edinburgh volunteers are preparing to brave broken glass [this month] to raise over £1200 for the Barnardo’s Caern Project and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS).

The JCI Edinburgh team will be taking part in this summer’s Glasswalk Challenge at Edinburgh Zoo, where 30 courageous souls will walk barefoot over 20ft of broken glass. Before attempting the glass walk, each individual must raise at least £150 sponsorship and attend an evening of training at the Zoo.

JCI Edinburgh is part of Junior Chamber International, the worldwide personal development organisation for business people in their 20s and 30s. It holds numerous social and fundraising events throughout the year and offers a stimulating range of activities to enable members to develop communication, presentation, leadership, project management, networking and business skills.

Simone Medonos, JCI Edinburgh Communities and Environmental Director, is one of the members who will be taking on the Glasswalk Challenge.

She says: “I’m quite nervous but I’m looking forward to challenging myself and I want to prove that I can do it. I don’t think the 20ft will seem quite so far if there are lots of people to cheer us on so I hope lots of our members will be there on the night to support us. It’s all for two really good causes so we have all been working hard to collect sponsorship.”

In 2009, JCI Edinburgh volunteers conquered the Zoo’s sponsored fire walk to raise over £1000 for the RZSS. This year’s team are hoping to raise at least £1200 with proceeds split equally between Barnardo’s and the RZSS.

The RZSS is a charity devoted to the conservation of animals and their habitats. It owns Edinburgh Zoo and the Highland Wildlife Park, home to over 1000 animals. The charity supports conservation and research project across the globe, runs education initiatives for visitors and schools, and receives no direct government funding.

The Barnardo’s Caern Project is JCI Edinburgh’s nominated charity for 2010 and the organisation has raised over £2000 for the cause through their successful Burns supper and quiz night events. The Caern Project provides short-term residential breaks in Edinburgh and support at home, to children and young people with a profound learning disability and who may also have severe physical and emotional problems.

Kenneth Logan, JCI Edinburgh President, explains why the organisation nominated the charity:

“We are a local organisation so wanted to choose a local charity and the Caern Project is responsible for a lot of valuable work in our community. Charity fundraising is very important to JCI Edinburgh and we believe that we can make a bigger difference overall by focusing all of our efforts on one incredibly worthy cause.”

Funds raised for the Caern Project could be used in a variety of ways including: outings for the 35 children and young people, specialist toys for children with disabilities, specialist sleep counsellors or gardening materials for the sensory garden at Caern House.

For an annual fee of £80, JCI members can access a wide-ranging programme of events, training and social opportunities. A voluntary organisation, JCI also has a long history of charitable work and fundraising. Recent local projects have seen members volunteer at the Grassmarket Mission, a drop-in service, helping to cook meals free of charge for those who need it most, as well as regular blood donor events.

For more information about this and other JCI events, please visit http://www.jciedinburgh.org.uk or email JCI Edinburgh President Kenneth Logan.

“Coming from the sticks” sounds like a cute and endearing term to most people who spent their childhood swinging from street to street in the urban jungle of ‘Downtown’; those who believe that The Meadows in Edinburgh really depict a meadow – street lights and all. But not this guy – for I was not blessed with the bright lights of a capital city during my early years, I have been lucky enough to find my school of life located in a suburb of Aberdeen.

But the big city lights drew me in. Having packed my bags and said my goodbyes at the platform, National Express took me to my summer home, Edinburgh. And I’ve not looked back.

Who wouldn’t enjoy a morning walk to Hot Tin Roof HQ that passes The Castle, takes you along Princes Street and finally across George Street with a view of the Forth? The opportunity to rub elbows with the up and coming business men and women of Edinburgh, converse with the editors of newspapers, and find yourself waist deep in the facts and figures of computing concepts that would blow your mind is excellent fun and never dull.

But maybe it’s the little bit of the teuchter (pronounced tju-ch-ter – word used mainly for Northern Scots) in me that has enjoyed the peace and quiet of walking up Calton Hill, standing on the National Monument and looking over the city the most this summer.

Saying that, I prefer it to Arthur’s Seat because once you walk down the tarred path, there’s an adjacent bus stop. Maybe this city bug is getting to me…

Anyway, now it’s time to forge on with my latest projects, before grabbing a coffee on the way home.

Until next time, Edinburgh.

Announcing half yearly results today of £500K, Edge Testing is forecasting an annual turnover of £1.2m in year three. Since its launch at the end of 2007 the award winning IT company had already achieved a strong revenue growth rate from £170K in year one to £500K in year two.

Edge Testing is a powerful independent force in software testing, working with some of the UK’s leading public and private sector organisations including Heineken, Historic Scotland and Ignis Asset Management.

This month sees the company open its new headquarters in Maxim Business Park to accommodate its growing workforce, now standing at 12. Maxim is a £330 million development, the UK’s largest speculative build, aiming to attract 8000 jobs to North Lanarkshire.

The company has also completed a full rebranding exercise, part of which includes the re-launch of its website which can be seen at www.edgetesting.co.uk.

Earlier this year, Edge Testing won Best New Business in the Lanarkshire Business Awards 2010. This award is for businesses less than three years old that demonstrate a high degree of entrepreneurship and vision for the future, with the potential for further growth in turnover, profits and employment levels.

Founders, Susan Chadwick and Brian Ferrie, are respected as two of the UK’s leading experts in software testing. It is their strong personal reputations in the industry that gives Edge Testing a competitive advantage and has allowed the company to buck the trend of recession, having launched just months before the collapse of world markets in 2008.

Susan Chadwick, Edge Testing’s co-founder comments: “We are incredibly proud of what we have achieved in three short years and it is thanks to the whole Edge team and our focus on service excellence, thought leadership and our unique solutions that has helped us, not only to weather a stormy market but to prosper. We are very excited about the future and what we can achieve for software testing as an industry and the IT sector as a whole in Scotland.”

Edge Testing ties software testing to business strategy and directly affects the achievement of business objectives. Technology and sector independent the company has a broad client base and is able to target all markets. Again this has meant it has been well placed to ride the difficult economic environment of its early years.

The Edge Testing business model takes a holistic and business focused approach to testing, supported by an ethos that ‘prevention is better than cure’ and recognising that cost to fix increases exponentially the later in the project lifecycle that issues are identified. It is these potentially extraordinary levels of cost that Edge Testing addresses – enabling clients to decrease overall project costs and time to market. In essence testing pays for itself.

Software testing is still a maturing industry and Chadwick and Ferrie have led a movement to establish a community of software testing professionals that can share best practice and help shape the growth of the profession.

RMD Power and Cooling is to work with Scottish further and higher education institutions following the decision by APUC (Advanced Procurement for Universities and Colleges) to adopt the North East Universities Purchasing Consortium (NEUPC) framework agreement for the supply, installation and maintenance of UPS equipment.

RMD is the UK’s leading independent specialist in integrated power and cooling solutions and APUC’s adoption of the agreement means that it is now approved to supply all Scottish and English universities and colleges. The company, based in Alloa, has existing agreements with the five English higher and further education consortia: NEUPC, NWUPC, LUPC, SUPC and CPC.

The original agreement was signed with the NEUPC in 2008. Three suppliers, including RMD, were approved to install, maintain and supply UPSs following a full EU compliant tender process.

John Smykala, RMD Power and Cooling’s Managing Director, comments: “We have worked closely with the English purchasing consortia since 2008 and I am happy to be embarking on a new relationship with APUC. This is a significant milestone for RMD and it reinforces our reputation as one of the UK’s top suppliers of Uninterruptible Power Supplies.”

“RMD has grown considerably over the past few years and our depth of experience and independent status ensure we provide great value and meet the needs of each and every client.”

The purchasing consortia were established to simplify and improve the procurement process for higher and further education institutions.

Louise Burke, APUC communications manager, says that the agreements are an important means of ensuring that universities and colleges get value for money.

She explains: “APUC’s core vision is to work jointly, as one team with member institutions, to maximise the contribution that advanced procurement makes to Scotland’s investment in teaching, research and knowledge transfer. We aim to enable institutions to deliver as much as possible with the funds that they have available.”

From small server rooms to large data centres, RMD is the only company of its kind in Scotland and one of only a handful in the UK. From initial design through to installation and long-term maintenance, it creates state of the art data centres.

Digital communications agency CIVIC is to launch a digital assault on the use of snares in Scotland as part of Advocates for Animals’ forthcoming campaign for a snare-free Scotland.

CIVIC will use digital media to harness public support in the charity’s fight to ban the use of snares to trap animals and will build on the charity’s ethos: HumanKind. AnimalKind. OneKind. The appeal will also target MSPs in the run up to a vote on the Wildlife and Natural Environment Bill in the Scottish Parliament planned for late 2010.

CIVIC’s emotive and challenging campaign will raise awareness of the extreme suffering caused to any animal caught in a snare. The first part of the project will include a regular interactive email newsletter sent to thousands of subscribers and a campaign site.

CIVIC will also create a series of animated viral emails aimed at winning over hard-to-reach demographics and will advise the charity on the use of social media to create noise and raise funds.

Greig Tosh, CIVIC’s Managing Director, says: “Snares are cruel and distressing to the animals they trap and I believe this appeal will make a real difference when our MSPs come to vote. Public opinion is already weighted against the use of snares and our campaign will aim to mobilise support for Snare Free Scotland.

“Our team consistently creates innovative, high quality work and this, coupled with our technical expertise will be key to the success of the viral aspect of this project.”

Advocates for Animals is Scotland’s leading animal protection charity, established in 1911. The snare-free Scotland appeal  fits well with its OneKind campaign, which is designed to build a base of supporters who want to see fundamental improvements in the treatment of animals in all areas of life. The campaign prioritises public engagement in challenging lifestyle, attitudes and behaviour.

John Robertson, Advocates For Animals Communications Officer says: “Snares are cruel and indiscriminate traps that cause immense suffering to wildlife such as badgers, foxes and hares and also to domestic animals such as dogs and cats. The Scottish Parliament will be debating the Wildlife and Natural Environment Bill later this year; an opportunity for us to become a snare-free Scotland, so we need to build up a movement of people that can effectively lobby their MSPs on this issue. 80% of the Scottish public are against the use of snares but in 2008, the Scottish Government ignored the public’s wishes and voted against introducing a ban.”

“We want to engage the public and believe that CIVIC can create a positive and compassionate campaign that is urgent and inspiring. We were really impressed by how prepared they were – they did their homework on us and created a very detailed and creative outline proposal for a digital campaign. I believe people will love using the applications CIVIC are developing and I look forward to working with them over the coming months.”

CIVIC is an independent creative digital communications agency with major experience in the public and private sector. Using what it calls “creative technology”, CIVIC blends design with cutting edge digital expertise in order to apply strategic branding thinking to websites with the technical ability needed to make that thinking come to life.

To find out more about the Snare Free Scotland appeal, please visit http://www.onekind.org/get-involved/campaigns/snare-free

Flexiant, the cloud software and services company, announced today it is to offer CohesiveFT’s cloud overlay, VPN-Cubed®, on Extility, enabling secure virtual private clouds.

CohesiveFT’s product suite, developed from decades of enterprise management experience within a cloud-oriented engineering organization, directly addresses the needs of the cloud user. VPN-Cubed will provide Flexiant customers with enhanced networking tools including static addressing, end-to-end communication encapsulation and encryption; as well as the use of normally cloud-prohibited protocols, complete topology security and control in third party infrastructure.

Traditionally launching on the cloud meant giving up control over addressing, topology, protocols and communication to deployments was carried out over the public internet. With VPN-Cubed users take control with static addressing for virtual machines using VPN-Cubed managers as virtual routers or switches, allowing use of popular enterprise protocols for service discovery, and encrypting all communications between virtual machines and the datacentre using the user’s existing extranet device.

Tony Lucas, Founder of Flexiant comments: “We are delighted to be partnering with CohesiveFT – we have a great deal of respect for this innovative company and the products it has developed. The core technologies of both companies complement each other and combined provide an end to end cloud computing solution that is pragmatic and agile, providing a real opportunity for data centre owners to drive down operating costs and reduce capital expenditure.

“VPN-Cubed offers everything Amazon Web Service’s Virtual Private Cloud (AWS VPC) does but addresses its key weaknesses by offering customer control and market interoperability. Additionally, VPN-Cubed has been developed from a software rather than hardware perspective meaning more rapid feature development and easier integration with existing systems.”

One of only three independent public cloud providers in Europe and five world wide, Flexiant launched Europe’s first cloud platform, Flexiscale, in 2007. Extility, Flexiant’s licensed virtualised cloud platform, launched earlier this year effectively enabling hosting providers to compete on an even playing field with global market leaders of proprietary rapid provisioning infrastructures.

Extility offers a viable alternative to the cost of developing a cloud computing platform in-house. Licensees generate substantial savings and reduced energy consumption slashes operating costs and shrinks carbon footprints.

All the benefits of real-time server estate management are delivered to end users through Extility’s unique user interface and API. Users can shape server requirements to meet fluctuations in demand, allowing provisioning and reconfiguration of servers in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days.

Extility’s licensees see substantial capital expenditure savings, streamlining of technical resource and progressive efficiencies in server utilisation, allowing them to achieve business acquisition and profitability targets. This in turn enables them to offer Extility’s unified platform at a realistic cost.

Importantly, in times of challenging margins and market fluidity, sales gestation periods are dramatically shortened through accelerated delivery timescales, so reducing time to invoice and to attaining positive, profitable cash flow.

CohesiveFT has been providing enterprise-grade virtualisation and cloud products since 2006 (Elastic Server® and VPN-Cubed). Its early participation in the market provides it with the expertise to help enterprises understand the real benefits of cloud computing from assessment through to deployment. Elastic Server, a multicloud virtual server, will also be available soon on Extility.

Award-winning PR agency Hot Tin Roof has appointed undergraduate Andrew Raffan to its 2010 intern programme, as the agency expands its workforce following a series of high profile account wins including Flexiant, Edge Case and Civic.

Andrew joins Hot Tin Roof, one of Scotland’s leading specialists in high tech PR, in the second year of its intern programme. Successful recruits are taught how to handle the media, write tight copy and communicate clear messages in a hands-on environment, providing them with a launchpad for a career in the PR industry.

Having been involved in journalism since his teens as HighlandLeague.net’s staff reporter for Inverurie Loco Works FC, Andrew has also trained in radio broadcasting. It was this passion for journalism, online media and broadcasting which proved to be the deciding factor when choosing to return to higher education and study a degree in journalism, igniting his interest in PR.

When starting his internship, Andrew said: “I began the year wanting to gain further work experience over the summer, but being given the opportunity to work with Hot Tin Roof has exceeded my wildest ambitions. The innovative training methods they use will no doubt shape my future. This will provide me with an invaluable perspective of the industry before I return to my studies in the autumn and I cannot wait to become part of the team.”

Hot Tin Roof provides media relations, reputation, event and crisis management for business and consumer sectors with clients including Money Dashboard, RMD Power and Cooling and User Vision.