Industry news

Computer Weekly has noticed a freeze on IT spending in the wake of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union, but it believes the freeze will “thaw” eventually.

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Related: “Brexit” Decision Contradicts Beliefs of Britain’s Outsourcing Industry

As reported in the Forbes, Chinese officials “encouraging” companies in the southern and eastern parts of China, where wages and other production costs are highest – Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shanghai and Zhejiang, in particular – to move their production facilities inland, where costs are lower, rather than outsourcing to countries such as Vietnam.

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Related: China’s outsourcing grows in early 2016 despite economic difficulties

The ramifications of the referendum continue as the Pound dropped against the Yen and temporarily hit its lowest level in 31 years against the Dollar. There are talks that the London Stock Exchange may now need to share its HQ between the City of London and somewhere in the EU and Aviva and M&G suspended trading on their property funds as investors pulled their money out at speed. The Governor of the Bank of England intervened by cutting its capital requirements for banks from 0.5% to 0% in an effort to stop a dramatic slowdown of the UK economy.

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Related: “Brexit” Decision Contradicts Beliefs of Britain’s Outsourcing Industry

As reported in the Independent, the European Commission has signed an agreement to launch a new public-private partnership that will see EU member states working with private cybersecurity firms. The partnership is just part of a line of initiatives in order to protect Europe against cyber attacks and raise the competitive ability of its cybersecurity sector. The partnership involves the EU investing an initial sum of €450 million under its research and innovation programme Horizon 2020.

Kevin Bocek, Chief Security Strategist for cyber-security experts Venafi predicts that cybersecurity companies in the UK will lose out on the benefits of the investment as a consequence of the Brexit vote result.

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Related: Brexit round-up

Lufthansa Systems is changing its business and delivery model to meet the new needs of its airline customers. IT investments in the airline industry were always made in core operational systems, but IT priorities in this industry are now changing thanks to the impact of digitalization and mobile technology.

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Related: Trade unions fear IT outsourcing expansion at British Airways

As reported in the online magazine Computing, RSA has completed a migration, moving its mainframe to a new data centre in Scandinavia.

This is just one of the many steps in the ongoing transformation project, part of a 7-year partnership with Wipro signed at the beginning of 2016.

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Related: Co-op Bank and Zurich Insurance to showcase RPA implementation at NOA Symposium 2016

According to research published by HfSResearch, India’s services industry will be the biggest loser of jobs thanks to the impact of Intelligent Automation. India will lose 14% of its services workforce, close to half a million jobs by 2021. Globally 1.4 million jobs will go, which amounts to a decline of 9% in the global industry workforce. For the full article, please read here.

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Related: Google follows Apple’s business strategy by outsourcing chunks of work to India

Computer Weekly has reported that the Scottish Police Authority has abandoned its delayed systems integration project, i6. In 2013 Accenture was contracted to create a new operational policing system by joining up over 100 legacy systems, designed to enabling the sharing of case information across Scotland. This project has now been terminated, with a mutually agreed settlement and Scottish Police are considering alternative options for a sustainable IT policing solution.

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Related: Accenture secures bid for New National Information Management System for Police Scotland

Sir Jeremy Heywood has been speaking to top legal, accountancy and consultancy firms to assist civil servants with Brexit negotiations. McKinsey, PwC, Deloitte, Linklaters and KPMG have all held meetings with the country’s top civil servant, or been approached to help the Government with these most complex negotiations.

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Related: “Brexit” Decision Contradicts Beliefs of Britain’s Outsourcing Industry

Capita has announced that it has secured a five-year contract for customer management services with Tesco Mobile, valued at £140m. The partnership will commence on 1st August 2016.

Capita will be contracted to improve Tesco Mobile’s customer service proposition through innovative technology and design.

Andy Parker, Capita’s CEO, commented: "With more than 4.6 million customers in the UK, Tesco Mobile is a quality brand renowned for its excellent customer services and, as a result, market leading levels of customer satisfaction. Capita is ideally placed to work in close partnership with Tesco Mobile to continue to enhance the customer experience through greater knowledge of customer behaviours, technology advancements and innovation."

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Related: Debenhams extends its customer service contract with Capita