More than half of IT decision makers opt to go for third-party maintenance (TPM) and pre-owned equipment, to cut costs and take advantage of improved support independent maintenance providers offer. It was also said they’ve had a "positive experience" with prior-generation hardware.

The news was published by Curvature, an IT infrastructure solutions provider, which polled 500 IT decision makers. Out of the 500 respondents, 60 percent use TPM, and 53 percent decide to purchase pre-owned equipment.

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Think mobile experience isn’t important to the success of your business? Think again. A massive 85 percent of people are unlikely to do business with a company following a bad mobile experience, according to the results of a new study from LogMeIn and research firm Vanson Bourne.

The study also revealed that businesses are currently falling short in delivering satisfying mobile experiences for their customers, with the number of respondents happy with their last mobile engagement with a business dropping from 59 percent in 2015 to 52 percent in 2016.

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Intel, SAP, Lyft, Spotify and VMware are just some of the 30 Silicon Valley based companies that have signed a "Tech Inclusion Pledge" as a promise that they will promote diversity in their workplaces going forward.

Two years ago, the civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson pointed out the lack of diversity in the tech companies operating out of Silicon Valley. He went so far as to press a number of companies to release their data regarding the number of African Americans, Hispanics and women employed at their organizations.

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Have you ever wondered if someone on LinkedIn is not really who they say they are? I’m not being paranoid here, this is a legitimate question.

If your answer is "No", you’re not alone. A vast majority of people never wonder if there are fake accounts requesting to connect on the professional social network, and almost a quarter accept requests from people they don’t really know.

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Dropbox has just announced a host of new features that will hopefully help the service retain its current users and possibly attract some new users as well.

The company has added many new features to its cloud storage software, but the most notable is the ability to use a mobile device’s camera to scan documents. Receipts, articles, whiteboard drawings and other text found in the real world can be captured with the app and then saved to Dropbox as a digital copy.

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High-performing organizations are widening the gap against low-performing ones, a new report on DevOps suggests. Entitled 2016 State of DevOps Report, it was released by Puppet and DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment), and is considered one of the largest, most comprehensive and longest-running studies on the topic of DevOps.

High-performers deploy 200 times more frequently and have 2,555 times faster lead times. They recover 24 times faster from failed changes and have three times lower change fail rates. The report also said high-performers spend 22 percent less time on unplanned work and rework, and are able to spend 29 percent more time on new work.

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Within the next four years, the extreme "no-cloud" policy among businesses will be as rare as "no-internet" policy is today, Gartner predicts.

By 2020, however, not everything will be cloud-based, but companies having absolutely nothing in that respect will be almost extinct.

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During its developer conference in Seattle this week, Docker announced that container orchestration will now be built right into its Docker Engine, making the process of building, deploying and orchestrating containers far easier for its users.

The company has basically taken the core features of Docker Swarm and Compose and has added them to its core Engine to simplify the process of using containers in production. Both of these standalone products only recently exited their beta phases last November and it is impressive that Docker has been able to add them to Docker Engine in such a short period of time.

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There’s a new report suggesting that banks need to seriously consider innovating, if they don’t want to hand over their business to tech companies.

The report, entitled "Are Banks Losing The Innovation Game?", was released by financial regulatory framework compliance experts, Neopay. It is based on a poll of 2,000 UK adults on their experience with high street banks and tech companies.

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Businesses want to increase their spend on mobile app development, but we’re still a long way to go before that spending becomes more relevant, a new study by Gartner has shown. According to the market analysts’ report, overall app development budget allocated to mobile is 10 percent, a two percent decrease compared to the year before.

However, almost half (42 percent) of organizations plan to increase their mobile app development spend by an average of 31 percent this year. "Demand for mobile apps in the enterprise is growing, but the urgency to scale up mobile app development doesn’t yet appear to be a priority for most organizations", says Adrian Leow, principal research analyst at Gartner.

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IT pros are feeling the pressure of digital transformation, as nearly 90 percent of UK’s businesses are looking to introduce digital services. According to CloudTalent, an Avanade company specializing in IT strategic advisory services, this challenge is greater than anything IT teams faced before.

Of the surveyed IT decision makers going through digital transformation just 40 percent believe they’re making good progress, and a third (34 percent) are near the end of the process. Two thirds said they need to hire specialist IT consultants, while 94 percent say they’d already used their services before.

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If you were thinking about switching careers in order to start earning bigger money, you might want to consider a career in big data management. Reports started coming in that salaries for this position jumped eight percent this year, more than what the Bank of England forecast (three percent).

Professional IT resourcing firm Experis also says that 5,148 advertised jobs in Q1 were in the big data segment, with 87 percent being in London. Other tech cities are closing the gap though, with Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham being notable examples.

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Is your smartphone battery sucking the fading fumes of its final milliamps? If it is, there is absolutely, positively no reason whatsoever for you to be frantically foraging for an AC outlet. None. Zero. Not when there are literally hundreds of portable power options in a wide variety of sizes, form factors and capacities to be had at surprisingly low prices.

For instance, you can buy a battery case for your phone. Or, you can buy a compact charger to stash in your pocket or purse. You can buy a slim battery just slightly larger and thicker than a credit card to slip in your pants. You can buy a thicker brick to tote in a bag able to recharge your dying phone multiple times. You can buy portable batteries that'll charge multiple gadgets simultaneously, portable batteries with extra memory to store photos or other files, even portable batteries with built-in flashlights.

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The tech industry is not really hyped about the UK’s potential abandoning of the European Union, according to new reports by market analysts.

Juniper Research just released a new report which says that almost two thirds (65 percent) of UK’s tech employees believe Brexit would not have a positive effect on the global tech industry.

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In an effort to find more security flaws in its defense systems, the US Department of Defense (DoD) has decided to expand its Hack the Pentagon program to include more of its systems and networks.

The program pays hackers to find and report the vulnerabilities in exchange for payment from the US government. So far the program has proven to be quite effective with the the first bug in the DoD’s systems and networks being discovered a mere 13 minutes after its launch.

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