London-based broking firm Martin Brokers has saved money and improved the management of critical data by moving to a new online back-up provider. The firm is on course to save around £63,000 per year in storage costs and has a much more reliable system for dealing with critical data, following its switch to vendor oncore IT.

ATM operator and payment processing company VocaLink is using virtualisation to improve flexibility and reduce emissions and costs. VocaLink runs the majority of the UK's ATM network as well as supporting the Bacs payment transfer system and Faster Payments Service.

Sony Pictures Entertainment has been getting its global IT house in order using Itil and technology from BMC Software. The work has seen the entertainment division of Sony improve its IT processes and make its tech operations - which support the motion picture, TV and home entertainment businesses, as well as corporate functions - more efficient.

Mutual retailer the Co-operative Group has cut its datacentre maintenance and support costs by deploying HP virtualisation tech and consolidating its "server sprawl". The Group - whose businesses include food retailing, funeral parlours and financial services - was struggling with a creaking legacy infrastructure consisting of hundreds of servers, each requiring its own maintenance pack and chargers.

The Arts Council England has enlisted an IT service management system from Sunrise Software to help keep its tech troubleshooting running smoothly. The organisation adopted the platform last year some months before a reorganisation that saw the Arts Council England IT centralised.

Chocolate chain Thorntons has speeded up transactions and slashed customer queuing times by rolling out a new chip and PIN-friendly point of sale (POS) system. Nine hundred Torex Retail POSes have been installed across Thorntons' UK estate - some 380 stores - which has led to customer queuing times being cut by two-thirds.

Baby goods retailer Kiddicare has doubled sales after introducing new navigation features to its website. Since January last year, the site has featured tag cloud-based product reviews - allowing shoppers to browse and select products based on a number of criteria including the item's best uses - and user profiles.

The Red Bull Racing Formula One team is using grid computing to help design and build the car it hopes can take on and beat Lewis Hamilton in 2009. The 2009 season has seen the biggest change in regulations in Formula One for some time - including the introduction of drastically different design regulations.

Asset management group Standard Life has boosted its sales capacity by deploying webconferencing software to its telephone sales team. The sales team deployed Cisco's WebEx online meetings software in June 2008, following a three-month trial of the technology. The company's 40 telephone-based account managers now have the ability to give virtual presentations and communicate with more than one client at once.

Since embarking on a project to upgrade its corporate network two years ago, conservation organisation the WWF has achieved much more than it originally intended. Working with the telecommunications company Telstra International, the WWF moved from a complex and inefficient infrastructure of disparate internet lines feeding the charity's offices to a much simpler MPLS network. Robots on film Like robots? Engage the future in pictures below1.Robots get friendly with humans2.Robots engage their Talons for mine explosion3.Robots the new teacher's pet?4.'Hero' bot hunts criminals5.Say hello to Intel's little helpers6.Robots, lasers, action7.Lunar mobile phones preparing to soar

The Guardian News and Media group has moved around 2,300 staff onto Google Apps, benefiting from a reduced need for IT support and greater flexibility for its staff. The organisation moved all of its users onto the internet-hosted software suite, Google Apps Premium Edition, towards the end of last year and is currently working on a Google Mail rollout.

Three councils in the West Country have teamed up on a shared services project to bring together information around road maintenance and management. The highway departments at the Bournemouth and Poole unitary authorities and Dorset County Council have teamed up on a new database system that will help them to better share information on road works, in order to cut the disruption for drivers.

Online lingerie and nightwear retailer figleaves.com has turned to virtualisation and open source software to revamp the technology platform that will support its upcoming ecommerce site. The decision to move to Red Hat Linux and VMWare technology on HP hardware was taken in May last year when the company chose to implement a new ecommerce suite from ATG.

Leeds University has implemented a new content management system (CMS) to help make dealing with online content easier for its nine faculties. Previously, the university had relied on various "homebrewed, eccentric, localised and quite incoherent" web publishing tech, until the purchase of a new portal system prompted it to start looking into a new CMS to go alongside it, according to Leeds University's web CMS project officer Matthew Hoskins.

Tewkesbury Borough Council has turned to service oriented architecture (SOA) to streamline the way it deals with customer requests. The council has been working with middleware company Software AG to integrate its bulky waste collection database with its customer relationship management (CRM) system and Government Gateway e-payment system.

A £26m revamp of youth justice tech promises to cut the risk of self-harm and reoffending among young inmates. The transformation, which began in April 2007, has already allowed close to 30,000 workers within the justice system and private sector to share care and risk management information on young offenders in England and Wales via secure email.

Nottingham Building Society has replaced legacy systems with a new mortgage application supplied by Finnish software specialist Tieto. The new system, which went live in September, will automate much of the mortgage application process required by the building society for its independent mortgage seller network. silicon.com Financial Services Get the latest financial services news straight to your inbox. Sign up for the FS newsletter today!

UK cinema chain Cineworld has relaunched its website, saving money and reducing power consumption in the process. The company has been working with hosting company Carrenza, which is running the new website on virtualised servers.

Nottingham Trent University is using technology from IBM Cognos to improve the way it plans the allocation of money and resources. Since November, the university has been using IBM Cognos 8 Planning suite in place of a series of Excel spreadsheets.

A scientific project that will help govern how the European Commission tackles climate change is relying on Linux and the Géant academic grid to complete its vital work. The Millennium Simulations, an earth modelling venture at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, will allow scientists to model the changes in the world's climate over the last millennium as well as centuries into the future.

ITV's F1 web team has been using load balancing software from Zeus Technology during the 2008 Formula One Season to cope with user demand. At the start of the season in March, ITV's F1 website had to cope with a huge increase in traffic as it showed live footage as simulcasts.

With more than 300 separate databases, each with a possible 100 variables and an offshore team preparing datasets that will be transformed into complex analytical models, pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca is reliant on high quality data. Wayne Obetz, senior manager of quantitative commercial insight at AstraZeneca, told silicon.com about the challenges in keeping data up to scratch.

Clothing and household goods giant JD Williams has revealed how it weathered the crowds logging on after its products featured on Gok Wan's Channel 4 show How to Look Good Naked. The army of fans were bested thanks to CA's Wily Introscope, which monitors core processing, image servers and support servers, user response times and more, and provides customised dashboards offering information in a variety of formats.

Leicestershire police force is using Citrix XenDesktop to give patrol officers access to central police systems when they're out and about, enabling them to file reports remotely and reduce the amount of time spent travelling to and from the station. The force has installed Citrix XenDesktop on 200 Panasonic CF-19 ToughBook laptops to be used in conjunction with docking mounts in patrol cars, or demounted and taken into premises while 3G and GPRS provide the connectivity so officers can access central systems via the virtualised desktop environment.

Insurance group, RSA (formerly Royal Sun Alliance) is using technology from Salesforce.com to keep customer service and support staff up to date with its products. RSA is using Salesforce.com's knowledge base CRM technology to push out the latest product information to its 1,800-strong staff in the UK and India.