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Posted: January 28, 2018 |
Not that Intel-powered Chromebooks are anything new, really. The very first batch were all based on Atom chips, and in July, Acer even went as far as to release a model sporting a dual-core Core i3.But lately, vendors such as HP and Samsung have strayed from the fold and shipped Chromebooks based on the ARM processor architecture. That has to be plenty worrying for Intel, especially considering Samsung manufactures its own ARM system-on-chips (SoCs), the Exynos line.Now comes Samsung's latest entry in its Chromebook 2 range, and lo and behold, the Korean chaebol has switched back to Intel. Specifically, the Chromebook 2 model XE500C12-K01US runs on a dual-core Intel Celeron N2840 clocked at 2.16GHz, burstable up to 2.58GHz.Without benchmarks on hand, it's hard to gauge how the new machine's real-world performance will stack up to Samsung's earlier Chromebook 2 models. Still, our hunch says Samsung is positioning the Intel version as a lower-end device. The powerhouse of the line is the Chromebook 2 XE503C32-K01US. It's based on the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa 5800, a 28-nanometer process SoC that combines a 2.0GHz quad-core Cortex A15 ARM CPU with a 1.3GHz quad-core Cortex A7, for a total of eight cores.The Celeron N2840, by comparison, is a dual-core 22-nanometer CPU that doesn't do Hyper-Threading, meaning it's limited to two processing threads. The Exynos' integrated ARM Mali-T628 MP6 GPU should deliver better graphics performance than the Celeron's Intel HD graphics, too.Another telling sign is that Samsung's new Intel Chromebook comes with 2GB of RAM, which is half the memory of either of the octa-core ARM-based models in Sammy's current line-up.On the plus side, the Intel chip's 22-nanometer process seems to offer significantly better power performance than either of Samsung's ARM SoCs, delivering an hour longer battery life with the same-sized battery.Samsung's Intel Chromebook is also cheap. While the high-end XE503C32-K01US retails for $400 and the less-lavish XE503C12-K02US goes for $320 (currently discounted to $300), Samsung started accepting preorders for the Intel-powered XE500C12-K01US on Friday for $250. Note the "US" in all of those part numbers, though. There's no telling when or if these devices will make it to other markets, but we already know Europe will be left in the cold.Also, we couldn't help but notice what's helping keep the prices of Samsung's new Chromebooks down. Unlike earlier iterations, the current models all ship with a "convenient software value pack" that includes trial subscriptions to AirDroid Premium, Wunderlist Pro, and Little Bridge. You've gotta hand it to Samsung for figuring out how to bundle bloatware with a browser-based laptop that you can't even install software on. The charity merged with Save the Children after management determined they couldn’t raise the kinds of funds that corporate sponsors wanted to see it raising.The giving scene is changing – bigger grants with more strings attached – with the charities themselves competing harder for our cash.This month, October, Macmillan runs its GoSober campaign, followed by Movember next month – both raising funds in separate fights against cancer. That’s on top of the usual cycle of coffee mornings, cake bakes and various muddy and riverside runs from many other charities.One of those changing to stay ahead in this game is Plan International, the 75-year-old children’s charity.Plan is replacing a patchwork of decentralised information systems, ditching legacy AS 400 and Microsoft Dynamics finance and canning ad-hoc HR systems for an all-in-one, $15m SAP global finance and SuccessFactors rollout.“You are taking mega grants and managing that across countries with many actors working with local community groups. That creates large complexity," Plan International's global CIO and director of shared services Mark Banbury told The Reg during a recent interview.“The competition has increased and it’s pushing out smaller players who can’t invest in the scale or depth like Plan and Oxfam.”“Years ago, child sponsorship involved taking a picture of a child, writing it down and the photo was stapled to a piece of paper and posted to the sponsor,” Banbury said.
“Now that’s all digital – we capture the data. It’s loaded onto a central server and sent as a PDF or to a central website.”In June, the company completed the replacement of HR systems in its 57 offices worldwide with SAP's SuccessFactors – a three-year, £5m project. Rollout couldn’t have gone smoother. “We took it off the shelf,” Banbury said.“In our design cycles, we literally demonstrated [to staff worldwide] what the systems did out of the box and said: ‘This is what you are going to get, now tell us why it won’t work’.”The same couldn't be said of Plan's £10.5m SAP finance system. It was “floundering,” according to Banbury, who “liberated” it from the project’s incumbent leader – Plan’s finance officer. The finance rollout fell to Banbury following a 2013 corporate re-org of the charity. Commissioned in 2010, 2013 was the year finance was supposed to be delivered. Specifically, development of Business Objects and Business Warehouse were going badly - both pivotal to Plan's future reporting and data query.ERP projects are well known for their tendency to go wobbly. Banbury reckons the reason it happened this particular time wasn’t scope creep – of people adding more features – but rather that the chosen integrator was simply overwhelmed by the application development work. The unnamed SI had only a handful of experts, rather than the thousands Banbury considered necessary.“The scope was well known. We had legacy systems that we knew how they worked. We took those and shifted them to an SAP environment. The vendor [SI] lacked the depth of resources.”By his own admission, Banbury - who only became Plan International CIO in 2010 - is no SAP expert. But he has rolled out what he calls "large" CRM systems before and he was CIO of Plan International in Canada immediately before taking on the global role. Among other changes he instigated, Banbury switched vendors – he picked Atos, which had delivered Plan’s SuccessFactors rollout on time – and took on a project manager experienced in running SAP rollouts.According to Banbury bringing the finance project under an IT leadership is what really made the difference.“It’s about getting a good project manager that knows the subject matter – not necessarily knowing the software first but owning the business. We can rely on an SI and hold them accountable if we know what the business problem is,” he told The Reg.Banbury reckons it takes an IT person to successfully deliver a giant piece of software like SAP.“IT people tend to run projects of scale on a regular basis, we are working with project managers who are certified, they sit there with numbers and are holding people accountable to deliverables.“Financial teams in general don’t have the experience in a project like that and knowing the importance of changes that get made that could have an IT impact.”Also, coming from an IT background meant he could monitor the project full time rather than rely on somebody in finance who already has their day job. Banbury reckons there were no hard feelings with the CFO, who became the overall business owner while he – Banbury – was executive sponsor.“IT people tend to run projects of scale on a regular basis, we are working with project managers who are certified, they sit there with numbers and are holding people accountable to deliverables." - Plan International global CIO Mark Banbury A solid foundation in finance and HR are vital for Plan.SuccessFactors is now Plan’s central repository for all of the data about the people in its operations. Before, that data that lived in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and third-party payroll systems around the world.That was a problem. Plan has 10,499 staff but until June, when SuccessFactors was finished, it didn’t know that for sure - or what skills they possessed.“It was very decentralised. We couldn’t get a handle on data. If you asked how many people worked for Plan today, I’d say: 'Where are they located?' But today if you ask me... I can say: 'This many people, these are their skills, this is what they are doing, and this is the career path they are on'.”
People had been recording data in different ways so there was no concise view. Now, Plan can now harmonise reporting and structures, establish best practices, make changes and move quicker on the ground.“For the first time we now know how many people at different levels of reporting we have on staff, the skills they have and the jobs they are doing," Banbury said.This isn’t HR reporting for the sake of improved jockeying, it will help Plan on the ground. “We now have an emergency roster position: we know if there are 20 people who have emergency training in IT who are willing to be deployed – that’s on the system,” Banbury said.Things were harder in the not so distant past. During the Haiti earthquake recovery operation in 2010, Plan relied on email to track down people in its organisation who could speak French and who had skills in finance, IT and HR and who also had a background in emergency response. Then, it had to find out if the person concerned could be spared from their day job. It was a lengthy backwards and forwards process. “It’s about cutting response time from weeks down to days,” Banbury said. “Deploying in 24 to 48 hours and rotating people out because you burn people out.”Plan is a 75-year-old children’s development charity founded to support those affected by the Spanish Civil War. Its signature programme has been about funding individual children through their life and development. But Plan's work is changing. It has not only seen a dramatic expansion - spending in Africa was up by 15 per cent in 2013, for example – but also moved more into the field of disaster recovery in areas like Haiti.More recently, it responded to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, which displaced four million people. Now, Plan is on the ground handling refugees coming out of Syria and children left parentless thanks to the Ebola crisis in west Africa.Another example of how Plan has changed its work can be seen in its current Because I'm a Girl campaign, which tackles gender discrimination and abuse of girls.As Plan's work has become more diversified and less dependant upon a single revenue stream, so the sources of its income have changed.Plan made £540m ($858m) in 2013 - with more than half of its money (54 per cent) coming from that long-term sponsorship of children. But sponsorship is falling – at one time, it was 95 per cent of Plan’s revenue.
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