Industry news

Frontier Airlines have announced plans to outsource a total of 1,300 jobs at its Denver hub and Milwaukee station. The airline has undergone a transition into a low cost to regain profitability since Indigo Partners bought Frontier at the end of 2013. 1,160 frontline jobs at Denver airport will be outsourced. The outsourcing giant Sitel will take over 140 job’s at Frontier’s Milwaukee reservation centre.

United Continental Holdings to outsource up to 2,000 jobs

The Southend contact centre Ventrica have opened its new “designer” contact centre wing that effectively doubles its capacity to 250 seats. The new wing will create at least 80 new jobs in 2015. Ventrica invested £750,000 in the new facility, part of the investment came from a European grant of £114,000 that was secured with the help of Essex County Council Economic Development Services.

TNT UK moves to cloud based contact centre system

Blackburn Council are planning to renegotiate their £10 million a year outsourcing contract with Capita after 15 years. The contract which is up for renewal in June 2016 needs to allow for a minimum of 12 months notice period before termination. Blackburn plans to save £31 million from their budget through new outsourcing deals between 2015 – 2018. The original contact with Capita included revenues and benefits, social services administration, print and design, highways and transport, architecture and technical services, property management and maintenance, and debt collection and accounting.

Birmingham City Council advised to outsource

AIB is planning to outsource certain IT functions later this year. Eircom, Integrity Solutions and Wipro have been lined up for this new arrangement. Up to 450 positions could be affected by this latest move to outsource however AIB have confirmed that any redundancies made will be on a voluntary basis.

As AIB is 99.8% owned by the state, the Government has bought in Goldman Sachs to advise on this deal. Goldman Sachs have been appointed for six months on a pro-bono basis.

Aegis secures 5 year contract with Punjab National Bank

United Continental Holdings said earlier this week it was looking into outsourcing up to 2,000 jobs across 28 U.S airports to vendors who would provide the services at a lower cost. This is not United’s first attempt at outsourcing ground staff having outsourced nearly 500 jobs in 2013 across 6 airports and a further 635 jobs in 12 airports in 2014. This supports the growing trend of airlines turning to outsourcing to cut costs.

United Airlines outsource 630 jobs across US

According to research one of the biggest security threats to businesses are the employees.

The results, which draw on responses from over 1,000 employees in the UK, uncover two significant issues. Firstly, employee behaviour is becoming an increasing source of risk – more through complacency and a lack of awareness than negative intent.

Cisco says that internet of everything could generate £17 billion

Oxford City Council has gone to tender for a maximum of seven ICT infrastructure service providers to start in 2016 when their existing contract with a neighbouring authority expires next April. The contracts are valued between £5m and £13m and are to include data centre hosting, database administration, server storage and support, IT service management tools and service desk operations. Suppliers need to submit their interest by February 9th with a bidders event on January 20th at Oxford Town Hall.

Birmingham City Council advised to outsource

Xchanging Procurement has signed a new deal with Brambles to help strengthen its procurement capabilities. Brambles serves dry grocery, fresh food, retail and general manufacturing supply chains in over 50 countries and they specialise in pooling unit-load equipment and the provision of associated services. The three and a half year contract includes a co-sourcing agreement to help integrate procurement processes in Brambles across six global regions.

The Jockey Club launches procurement and outsourcing services

TNT UK has moved to a cloud based contact centre system and has signed a two year contract for use of NewVoiceMedia’s ContactWorld for Service. The aim is to improve its customer service and deliver their operations more efficiently. Since the new system has been in place, the logistics and international parcel delivery company, has already reduced average handling times and customer satisfaction has increased. NewVoiceMedia’s technology integrates with salesforce which allows all customer agents to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time supporting their customers.

Infosys reportedly wins a $98 million contract with TNT

According to The Times of India, analysts are forecasting moderate growth by IT players for the quarter ended December 2014.

Edelweiss (brokerage firm) forecasts growth of 0.8-1.5% for the top four IT players in the December quarter.

Tech Mahindra is their top pick with a 2% growth forecast followed by Infosys and HCL Technologies (HCL Tech) with around 1.5% growth and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) posting 1% growth and Wipro likely to clock a 0.8% growth.

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HCL win global IT infrastructure in outsourcing deal with De Beers