Industry news

  • 22 Aug 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    Strong business investment between January and June 2017 saw UK market achieve strongest half-year performance since 2012, according to the Arvato Outsourcing Index. The research, compiled by outsourcing provider Arvato and industry analyst NelsonHall, revealed outsourcing deals worth £5.2 billion were agreed in the first six months of the year, with financial services accounting for 55 per cent of the total contract value at £2.9 billion. The sector’s investment in outsourcing services was behind a steep increase in spending by UK businesses, according to the findings. Companies signed contracts worth £4.5 billion between January and June, representing a 95 per cent year-on-year rise. The latest figures follow a particularly strong first quarter, which saw firms agree deals worth £2.5 billion - the strongest quarterly private sector spend since the last three months of 2011 (£6.4 billion).

    You can read the full report here.

  • 22 Aug 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    The chief executive of Infosys, Vishal Sikka, has resigned from his post with an unconventional and lengthy letter blaming "personal attacks". In the letter Mr Sikka said the "continuous drumbeat of distractions" contributed to his decision to resign. It follows public criticism of the company and its board by its founders. Infosys is one of India's largest IT services firms. Shares in the firm plunged 9% following news of Mr Sikka's departure. Mr Sikka was appointed in June 2014 and tasked with turning around the struggling business. The company announced he was resigning as chief executive and managing director with immediate effect, but would stay on as executive vice chairman.

    You can read more here.

  • 21 Aug 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    Over 100 influential leaders in robotics and artificial intelligence have sent a letter urging the United Nations to act now before robotics dominates warfare. The 116 experts are calling for a ban on the use of AI in managing weaponry. Experts are calling for what they describe as "morally wrong" technology to be added to the list of weapons banned under the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). Along with Tesla co-founder and chief executive Mr Musk, the technology leaders include Mustafa Suleyman, Google's DeepMind co-founder.

  • 17 Aug 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    Hyundai is the latest car manufacturer to announce plans to boost investment in electric cars with a new model with a expected range of 500 miles per charge. The move comes as governments have sets targets on limiting cars that run on fossil fuels in the next few decades. The future of oil is becoming a much talked about topic as experts debate on the future of travel. Sadly for the oil industry it appears to be on the precipice of major change that will disrupt business models, however, electric cars offer new possibilities and with the increasing use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in the motor industry, a self driving electric car may become available to buy in the coming years.

    Full stroy here.

  • 17 Aug 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    Symphony Ventures has secured £3.5 million of funding from Livingbridge to continue their global expansion. Symphony Ventures provide consultancy, implementation and managed services to enterprise clients looking to automate operational processes and have expanded rapidly in the past three years. “We are delighted to be working with Livingbridge. We had a choice of partners and selected Livingbridge for their strong track record of helping founders achieve rapid growth, while respecting the company and the culture in place” said Chief Executive Officer David Poole. Livingbridge is a mid-market private equity business with particular experience working with high growth technology companies which gives the Symphony Ventures the high accolade of being backed by a market specialist.

    Full story here.

  • 17 Aug 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    Retail Sales in the UK are showing a rather contrasting picture as growth slows and becomes focused upon food. Buoyant sales in food have helped sales rise by 0.3%, offsetting falls across the board in other sectors as consumers feel the squeeze on their wallets. The slowdown in growth adds to a murky picture of the UK economy, as the country struggles to find strong underlying statistics after the Brexit vote. It feels like the UK economy is bumping along, trying to discover what will happen in negotiations with the European Union, as business puts major decisions on hold and consumers bunker down to prepare for any inflationary pressure in the coming years.

    Full story here.

  • 17 Aug 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    Forrester's latest European tech market forecast projects that growth will be sluggish but steady in the coming few years. Purchases of technology software, hardware, and services by European businesses and government measured in Euros will hold steady at 1.6 percent in 2017, and increase to 2.2 percent in 2018 while spending on software and tech consulting services will do better, with software spending rising by 2.5 percent in 2017 and 3.5 percent in 2018. Three main factors have contributed to the figures, sluggish growth in the Eurozone, slow adoption of cloud technology and services and strong adoption of business technology contributed to the steady pace of growth.

    Full story here.

  • 17 Aug 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    A recent study by IT World Canada found that CIO's in Canada are losing satisfaction in IT Outsourcing as part of a shift away from conventional outsourcing. The study does not reveal a slowdown in spending but suggests that businesses would be less likely rush into outsourcing their IT infrastructure in the next two years. In the survey, about 28% of respondents said their outsourcing experience had “fallen below” expectations, the findings do not necessarily mean that Canadian firms dislike outsourcing, as they still expect external IT firms to help them increase operational efficiency, reduce costs, and improve employee productivity.

    Full story here.

  • 8 Aug 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    Synopsys, Inc, a global high-tech leader enabling companies to innovate from Silicon to Software, this week announced plans to invest in R&D capabilities in its Sri Lanka operations. To extend its local R&D capabilities, Synopsys is working with the University of Moratuwa, the University of Peradeniya and the University of Ruhuna to build very-large-scale integration (VLSI) and electronic design automation (EDA) skill sets to help graduating engineers meet ever-evolving challenges in semiconductor design, EDA, semiconductor IP and software security and quality, the company said in a media release. Synopsys established its operations in Colombo in 2015, and since then the R&D team has grown to approximately 100 engineers involved in the research, design and development of key EDA technologies and products that enable “Smart, Secure Everything from Silicon to Software” in the global electronics market. The Sri Lanka operation is engaged in R&D activities across core EDA, and its objective is to grow in advanced technology areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to embrace the era of “smart everything,”, the release said.

  • 7 Aug 2017 12:00 AM | Anonymous

    The moment a relevant RFP or invitation to tender (ITT) document arrives in your inbox, you need to act fast. Unfortunately, the bidding process is complex and resource-heavy. Large bid management situations can involve dozens of people across the business. With multi-million-pound tenders and lucrative multi-year contracts in the balance, teams must be able to access bid documents and information at anytime, anywhere. But as many service providers have seen all too frequently, the major road block to this is legacy collaboration technology.

    A successful bid is often won on subject matter expertise, which means tapping into many different sources of knowledge - sales, finance, operations, legal counsel, etc - to raise the quality of the bid. However, the bid team is unlikely to be working in a single, stationary location. What is more likely is that the team will be separated by location and time zones, often working from hotels, airport lounges or even at home – throwing another logistical spanner into the works.

    On top of battling dispersed teams, many businesses are still unaware of just how costly the inefficiencies during a bid process can be. One of the hidden costs of the bid management process is ensuring staff stay efficient. According to recent research into the UK professional services sector, at least seven people are typically involved in a new business bid, with each senior member of the team dedicating approx. 12.6 hours to the process. This equates to an average of 84 senior hours per bid. A costly endeavour, which can escalate if the team is repeatedly working on the wrong version of a document or spending precious hours trying to catch up with the latest feedback.

    With as much risk as potential value to the business, bid management teams must make sure that the process is as efficient as possible. With this in mind, here are the top three ways in which upgrading collaboration technology can deliver savings in both resources and bottom line revenue when pursuing new business:

    Controlling ‘versionitis’

    Everyone who’s been involved within the bid management process understands it’s inherently a document-intensive process. As such, managers find themselves dealing with many document-related challenges including maintaining audit trails and retaining version control. In fact, when surveyed, 68% of all professional services respondents admitted that, within the last six months, they had spent substantial time working on a document only to discover it wasn’t the latest version.

    Without proper document processes in place, mistakes and wasted efforts are more than likely. This may mean spending wasted time on editing content that has already been changed, or worse still, compounding the error by sharing the wrong version of a document for feedback.

    To take control of document processes, bid managers must step away from legacy technologies like email and opt for cloud-based collaboration platforms. The Go-Ahead Group, an operator for a significant proportion of UK public transport franchises in the UK, deployed Huddle for exactly this reason. With large teams working on a single bid document, version control problems were common, and proving inefficient and costly, and had the potential to jeopardise bid success.

    Being able to track content and version changes, create clear approval and review processes and revert to previous versions if necessary can save the team time and money and dramatically reduce the inefficiency and otherwise wasted time in creating each bid.

    Locking down security threats

    Security is non-negotiable when it comes to preparing a bid response.

    But typical collaboration “work arounds” are often inherently insecure. Email is too uncontrolled; USB sticks are inherently and notoriously easy to lose; consumer-grade file-sharing services are exactly that – consumer-grade.

    In many cases, participation in a bid requires signing confidentiality agreements and acknowledgements that your systems and processes comply with the latest in security and access management regulations. Without a cloud-based collaboration platform it can become an uphill struggle to prove your organisation can adhere to the strict security procedure. And yet, fewer than half of our professional services survey respondents (46%) said that they used robust file-sharing systems.

    Without central control of the document and its accessibility, Intellectual Property can easily leak to inappropriate third parties, and even to competitors. For many opportunities, data security is mission-critical, especially for the public sector – any leak during the bid phase will be fatal and taken as a sign of likely future non-compliance.

    Reinventing the wheel

    Many opportunities are won or lost based on the subject matter expertise displayed during the bidding process.

    Yet, when surveyed, the largest portion of professional services respondents (33%) confirmed that collecting information and evidence of expertise from within the business was the primary time drain in bid construction – with 24% spending more than five minutes to retrieve every document. It is a cruel irony that the most important part of the bid is the hardest to deliver.

    Many tender writers fall into the trap of starting the knowledge gathering process from scratch with every new bid. Within large and diverse organisations, creating repeatable, universal processes and learning from previous projects is simply too difficult – especially where there are multiple teams performing similar roles within different geographies or divisions. What the UK bid team is learning and developing as a consistently successful process may never be seen by the US team, and vice versa.

    But if a bid is built within a secure cloud-based collaborative space that maintains a digital audit trail of version changes, comments and approval workflows, then the entire process remains transparent and examinable. This then becomes the start of the creation of a bid library, filled with collateral, graphics, templates and processes, with teams learning from what has worked well before. The organisation-wide availability of this material not only removes the complexity of the bid construction, but it also removes the dangers of duplicating work, brand inconsistencies and the omission of specialist input.

    Conclusion

    There are many common frustrations felt by bid management teams during the bidding process; access to expertise, duplication of effort, security and managing the division of labour. For most, these frustrations will be traced back to inefficient technology and poor collaboration processes.

    Controlling the root causes of potential inefficiency in bid management with secure, cloud-based workspaces will increase efficiency, save costs and ensure data and Intellectual Propert security. Even more importantly, these improvements will do more than remove the burden of the process – they will increase the chances of the bid’s success.

    By Morten Brøgger, CEO, Huddle

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