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Technology giants like Google, Microsoft and Apple often polarise the marketplace, evoking strong differences of opinions between fans and detractors of the products and services they provide.

But love them or hate them, it turns out most people actually do love Apple, with the firm declaring the largest profits ever made by a public company in the three months to 27^th December 2014. It’s thought that record sales of iPhones during the past year were mainly responsible for Apple posting a profit of £11.8 billion (£$18 billion) in its first fiscal quarter.

[themecolor]Demand for iPhones ‘staggering’[/themecolor]

Christmas sales of iPhones reached a phenomenal 74.5 million units in the final quarter of 2014. Well ahead of most analysts’ expectations, the devices lifted the company’s revenues by 30 per cent, thanks mostly to demand for the larger iPhone 6 Plus model.

The sales surprised even Apple itself, with the firm’s chief executive Tim Cook describing the demand as “staggering”. Even disappointing sales of the iPad could not make a big enough dint in the company’s success, despite its tablet sales falling by 22 per cent in 2014 from a year earlier.

Apple’s whopping revenue tops the previous profit record set by multinational oil giant ExxonMobil in 2012, following a surge in oil prices at the time. The tech giant’s cash pile amounts to more than the total market value of Disney, Pepsi or Amazon, notes dailymail.co.uk.

The net effect thrusts the firm to the top spot as the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalisation of £428.5 billion ($650 billion).

[themecolor]China emerges as largest iPhone market[/themecolor]

China remains a strong market for the US-based company, where Apple became the number one smartphone manufacturer in the last quarter. Claiming the iPhone has “transformed” the mobile phone industry, BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones says: “A lot of this, at the moment, is about China, where this brand has got extraordinary cachet. They [Apple] sold more phones in China in the last quarter than they have in the United States.”

Apple’s next product – the Apple Watch – is a venture into the wearable technology sector. On schedule, the watch is to begin shipping this April.

Working on a computer all day has long been blamed for a sedentary lifestyle, failing eyesight, repetitive strain injury and more besides. Now new research has revealed ‘wellness’ to be a prime focus of 82 per cent of employers, ahead of increasing staff productivity.

Respondents to MetLife UK’s annual UK Employee Benefits Trends Survey named staff health and wellness initiatives as top of their benefits objectives. They were far keener to find ways of improving employee health than identifying tools to increase productivity (cited by 72 per cent of respondents) or address the workforce’s diverse needs (69 per cent).

Of the wellness benefits available, the most popular among employees themselves was flexible working. Almost three-quarters said they wanted to make use of this perk if it was offered to them. Two-thirds expressed an interest in preventative care, 59 per cent would use an on-site gym and 42 per cent would take up any financial counselling.

The survey also found that just 14 per cent of employees considered themselves energetic at work, which is not surprising given the majority sit down all day.

A study by epidemiologist, Steven Blair, cited in a microsoft.com blog, found that men who endured a sedentary lifestyle were 64 per cent more likely to develop heart disease. Worse still was the revelation that even those who participated in regular exercise could not fully counter the effects of excessive inactivity.

Of course it’s vital that employers take wellness seriously; sickness costs the UK economy billions every year. However, there are lots of initiatives that businesses can introduce to promote good health, in addition to those cited in the MetLife UK survey. These include Cycle to Work schemes, subsidised fitness club memberships and the provision of healthier food options in the canteen, to name but a few. Free initiatives might include creating a lunch-time walking group or insisting on meetings where participants stand or ‘walk and talk’.

What’s more, fit and well employees are proven to be more productive!

UK businesses strive all year round to protect their confidential data, implementing systems to keep cyber criminals at bay and avoid viruses and malware that would bring down their systems. Unfortunately, not all are successful and it’s the high-profile targets that attract the biggest headlines.

So let’s cast our eye back over some of the biggest IT disasters of the past 12 months, courtesy of the closely-watched annual ‘Hall of Shame’ from Original Software. This list of IT errors in the UK led to reputational damage for some red-faced company executives, causing disruption and reducing customer confidence. Make sure it is not your business in 2015!

[themecolor]The 2014 IT Disaster ‘Hall of Shame’[/themecolor]

Courtesy of Original Software’s annual ‘Hall of Shame’

1. Amazon: The run up to Christmas proved rich pickings on the IT disaster front – Black Friday and Cyber Monday saw e-commerce sites buckling under the weight of fervent shopping (step forward Tesco, Topshop and Net a Porter) but the failure that caused the most angst and the biggest headlines was surely a problems with Amazon. A glitch in price comparison software saw thousands of products in Amazon’s Marketplace (most of which are supplied by small business owners) on sale for just one penny. Shoppers rushed in snapping up everything from electric toothbrushes to mobile phones for 1p. The problem is that many of these products were housed in Amazon’s behemoth warehouses and were shipped toute de suite. Amazon has said that it won’t provide compensation to small shopkeepers and many have lost money, one to the tune of £100,000.
2. NATS: The year wouldn’t be complete without a monumental travel tech meltdown and 2014 was true to form when a glitch in the NATS system saw 10,000 passengers experiencing cancellations or heavy delays on one of the busiest travel weekends in the run up to Christmas. The struggles of the air traffic control system was apparently down to one line of code that caused a failure that affected thousands of passengers.
3. UK Border Agency and the immigration system: this was probably one of the biggest tech shambles of 2014, when in October, IT failures were found to add up to a breathtaking £1 billion of wasted tax payers’ money and 50,000 rejected asylum seekers were said to be unaccounted for. The Commons Public Accounts Committee also found that 11,000 asylum seekers had been waiting for seven years to find out whether they could stay in Britain and they still hadn’t resolved 29,000 applications dating back to 2007. PAC said the system was in chaos and a new backlog is building up. Government IT failures of this nature play into the hands of opposing political parties and anger tax payers who foot the bill.
4. HMRC’s faulty tax payments: the UK’s government tax agency again hit the headlines this year when a systems error was blamed for erroneous tax calculations for up to 5 million people. It meant that thousands of people were mistakenly sent rebate cheques – many of which have been spent – that HMRC needed to recoup. Again, this is further reputational damage for a department already dogged by problems.
5. BBC’s Digital Media Initiative (DMI): again, this is a project that was ongoing for a few years, but it deserves an entry in the 2014 Hall of Shame because in April this year, a report found that the Beeb was “too complacent” in its handling of the DMI, a project which aimed to move the broadcaster away from using and storing video tape through the production of new editing tools, an online archive of programmes and a new database. The BBC spent a colossal £125.9 million on the project, which was scrapped after serious failings in planning and management. The Beeb says that it recouped £27.5 million of that, but that meant they still wasted almost £100 million of license payers’ money on a project that never saw the light of day.
6. eDreams: the funny tale of a website glitch that saw an eager holiday maker charged £23.7 billion for a return flight with a low cost airline when she tried to book a Spanish getaway in September this year. This significant overcharge was in all likelihood down to a data validation glitch and was a signal to eDreams that it needs to tighten up its testing processes. Again, the main damage with this screw-up was was to eDreams’s brand – and the negative headlines were a blow to shareholders.
7. Screwfix.com: online DIY retailer Screwfix.com made headlines in February this year when everything on its website – from sheds and ride on mowers, to power tools and kitchen appliances – were listed for the bargain basement price of £34.99. As you can imagine, word spread like wildfire on social media and shoppers piled on to the site to snap up bargains. Once it realized the error – which was probably caused by a data validation issue – Screwfix was forced to cancel orders, which went down poorly with customers. And the reputational fall-out wasn’t exactly welcomed by its investors.
8. NHS patient booking system: in May of this year, the NHS was hit by another tech failure as it was forced to scrap its online outpatients’ appointment system. A decision has been taken to replace it with a potentially more costly e-referral system. GPs were meant to use Choose & Book – which has cost over £350 million since its inception 2004 – to assign appointment slots, but many hated using it and it was accused of being error ridden and tricky to use. The system was “dropped quietly” in the spring with patients and tax payers once again, being the ones who lose out.
9. RBS/Natwest/Ulster Bank: this is a tech failure that happened in 2012, but in November 2014, the bank was fined £56 million by the FCA following a lengthy investigation into the incident, which froze millions of customers out of their accounts, rendered ATMs useless and transfers and digital banking services were blocked. Thousands of companies were unable to make payroll commitments. The problems endured for three weeks. The FCA report found that risk management and control failings were to blame, rather than a lack of investment in IT or the banks’ legacy system architecture. Whatever the cause, customers were furious and RBS’s reputation took a hit.

Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software, a software quality technology company, commented: “Our 2014 Hall of Shame shows that tech disasters, system screw-ups and software glitches are still very much a part of the modern IT landscape. And they rarely go unnoticed. Customers, employees and shareholders can all be badly affected by disruptions in service and as a result, the organisation takes a big reputational hit. Again this goes to show that defect detection, quality assurance and testing have to move up the corporate agenda – failings in these areas can have massive consequences for the business.”