Industry news

According to a Dutch paper, KLM, plans to reduce its workforce by 7,500 jobs (25%) largely through outsourcing.

The report goes on to say that the Dutch arm of Air France is expected to announce this at the release of the quarterly earnings and hopes it will help it to cut 4.4 billion euros (3.4 billion pounds) in outstanding debt by reducing costs.

Air France reports improved benefits from private cloud

The opening of the Science Museum gallery dedicated to the history of ICT is celebrated by Her Majesty The Queen by sending her first tweet.

The tweet read: “It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R.”

The gallery explores the technological breakthroughs that have transformed how humans communicate, listening to personal recollections of people whose first experience of television was watching the Coronation in 1953.

The gallery opened on the 25th October – you can find out more by visiting the Science Museum website here.

Councils still using shared services and outsourcing to enable transformation

According to a recent article on the BBC website, The Department for Work and Pensions are investing in electronic pads that recognise job seekers' signatures using biometric software will be installed at centres around the UK, along with PC workstations and free wi-fi.

They anticipate that by installing computers, this will save £2m per year.

DWP award contract to CSC

World renowned diamond-mining and luxury Jewellery company De Beers have signed a global IT infrastructure deal with outsourcing provider HCL. HCL will supply De Beer’s global IT network where previously IT had been managed by regional providers. The agreement will see HCL run datacenter operations, a multi-lingual service desk, LAN Management, security services, service management, desk side support and project services. HCL will provide services to remote locations like Snap Lake mine in Canada which can only be reached via ice roads in the winter.

TCS and HCL disappoint whilst Infosys plays catch up

Philip Morris International (PMI) have picked Wipro to manage their IT infrastructure. The five year contract will include support for servers, storage, backup and applications with the aim to save costs and better be able to serve and support their workforce around the world. PMI owns seven of the world’s top 15 international cigarette brands including Marlboro.

IBM and Wipro in the running to win Rs 1,200 crore call centre deal

According to a recent article, the German airline Lufthansa is close to selling its IT infrastructure division and completing an outsourcing deal with IBM. It is due to result in a 240 million euro ($305.57 million) pre-tax charge in 2014. The airline has stated that the deal is expected to close at the end of the first quarter of 2015 and will yield an average of 70 million euros in annual savings.

Lufthansa plans to outsource ground staff

IBM pays $1.5bn in cash to offload its loss-making chip manufacturing division to GlobalFoundries. According to the article in the BBC news, IBM will now focus on cloud computing, mobile and big data analytics.

The sale coincided with the announcement that IBM had suffered a 17% drop in third quarter profit.

IBM and Wipro in the running to win Rs 1,200 crore call centre deal

Despite reporting net profits of $855 for Q3 – a 14% increase on Q3 2013 results – TCS’ shares fell 8%, as it seems clear that TCS will fail to meet its management pledge to exceed last year’s 16% revenue growth over the FY, dashing City expectations. HCL’s shares also fell 8% following disappointing results.

Infosys on the other hand has posted positive results under new CEO, Vishal Sikka, announcing quarterly net income was up by almost a third compared with the previous year’s performance.

3000 jobs at outsourcing centre for Saudi women

With continued pressure on local authorities to drive back costs and improve service delivery, it comes as no surprise that a recent report shows shared services and outsourcing are still high on the agenda to help them survive.

Top findings according to the senior managers risk report produced by Zurich Municipal for a recent SOLACE 'summit' meeting of local government chief executives in Liverpool include:

- Plans for progressive and transformative change are far more evident amongst local authorities in 2014 than in 2013

- UK seeing more innovation in local government than any time since the rebuilding of public services post World War II

- Commercialism high on councils’ agendas – finding new ways to turn capital into revenue

- Outsourcing grown in importance

- Smaller councils focused on shared services, larger councils can use economies of scale to benefit from extensive outsourcing

Local Council staff cuts and further outsourcing predicted

Transport for London (TFL) will go to tender later this month for a supplier to provide service integration and management (SIAM) services to support its transformational information management programme. The contract worth approximately £75m over five years is expected to be awarded by 2016. TFL plan for three service towers, end user computing, networks, applications development and applications management. A short list is planned to be announced in April 2015.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have also announced their plans to move to a SIAM model in plans to ramp up their IT following in the foot steps of Ministry of Justice and the Highways Agency who have outsourced to Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems respectively.

TfL award Cubic £660m outsourcing deal