Industry news

Rochdale council is revoking its 15-year outsourcing deal with Mouchel after only five years.

The consultant confirmed in a city trading statement today that: “We are in discussions with Rochdale Council to mutually agree an amicable exit from our Partnership.

“If achieved, the order book will decrease by circa £130M, with negligible impact to operating profit and cash.”

Mouchel is lead partner in the Impact Partnership which signed a 15-year deal in 2006 to take over services including highways and property maintenance across Rochdale.

CEO, Mark Lyttle, explains how a combined onshore/offshore approach is helping to keep standards high and costs down at his specialist service management and IT operations organisation, Fusion Business Solutions.

With cost optimisation at the top of the current agenda and organisations demanding ever-more competitive rates from service providers, utilising offshore resource can provide a highly effective means of cutting operational overheads.

At our own service management and IT operations firm, establishing a new overseas base has helped achieve valuable savings that we have been able to pass on to our customers, allowing us to offer even more competitive prices. Crucially, it has also given us access to highly-skilled and enthusiastic new staff.

Offshoring is not without risks, and a purely offshore model can fail when all operations are taken overseas or lack of communication results in services not meeting client expectations. To prevent this, we believe that it is crucial to establish good communication channels at the outset and we work very closely with the offshore team to build a lot of understanding and make sure the work is delivered effectively.

Our model sees the onshore and offshore teams receiving the same level of training and also using the same systems and reporting methods. Although we are one of the few firms in our specialist area to adopt this blended approach, we have been transparent about the fact that we are doing it and it has not affected the quality of service we offer our clients in any way.

In our case, all the initial consultation and workshops are still conducted by the onshore team and clients always have access to dedicated UK-based project manager. Rather than being conducted remotely by the onshore team, however, some of the subsequent non-customer facing work such as analysis, configuration or software testing and installation is now passed to the offshore team.

The work done by our Bulgarian operation, for example, is incorporated in our service desk operation as well as some of our off-site technical consulting work, which is also carried out by remote workers. In the next year, we plan to apply the same onshore/offshore approach to expanding our operations to include India, as well as Bulgaria.

In reality, it makes little difference to the customer where the technical team are dialling in from, but it does enable us to reflect the savings we make in the prices we offer our customers. The bottom line is that, in these tough times of fiscal uncertainty, this creative onshore/offshore approach is undoubtedly helping our business to deliver the same demonstrable improvement in IT operations for our clients - whilst also remaining competitive.

Members of Unite, employed by IT services company Steria UK Ltd working on a Capita account, will take industrial action today in protest against the company's refusal to offer a pay rise for 2010 (payable from April 2011).

Unite members, who are system developers and analysts, voted an overwhelming 82 per cent in favour of strike action. Industrial action will take place at various Steria sites in Bristol, Coventry and High Wycombe (see notes) and staff will take part in the 24 hour strike from midnight tonight.

Unite regional officer, Jerry Pickford, said: “This is the first time that this group of workers have ever taken these steps as they feel that they have no option other than to withdraw their labour in protest at the refusal of Steria to make any kind off pay offer whatsoever."

"Steria has carried out a comprehensive pay review awarding pay rises to our lower paid employees this year. We cannot add any further costs to our pay bill," reads Steria's statement.

"At this time of increasing economic uncertainty our priority is to protect the job security of our employees. Steria does not believe encouraging individuals to take strike action, where they will lose pay, is in anybody's interest."

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Rypple, a cloud-based social performance management company. The acquisition signifies salesforce.com’s entry into the human capital management (HCM) market for the social enterprise.

Salesforce.com plans to re-launch Rypple as “Successforce” and create a new HCM business unit, which will be run by John Wookey. Rypple’s unique social technologies will also extend the value of salesforce.com’s existing core products. The transaction is expected to close in salesforce.com’s fiscal first quarter ending April 30, 2012, subject to customary closing conditions.

“Salesforce.com and Rypple share a vision for extending the social enterprise to transform the way we work,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “The next generation of HCM is not just about a cloud delivery model, it’s about a fundamentally better way to recruit, manage and empower employees in a social world.”

Mitie Group Plc, the strategic outsourcing and energy services company, has signed a ten-year contract with Essex County Council.

The FTSE 250 company will work with the Council to deliver a transformational outsourcing contract which includes facilities and property management as well as energy services. MITIE will be working in partnership with Lambert Smith Hampton to provide estate management services to the Council including strategic asset management and new ways of working that deliver sustainable improvements for Essex.

Under the new contract MITIE will employ more than 500 people to service over 350 sites including Essex County Hall, offices, libraries, community centres and depots covering 145,000 square metres.

Ruby McGregor-Smith, Chief Executive of MITIE, said: “This is a fantastic opportunity for MITIE to deliver a transformational outsourcing offering to one of the UK’s most visionary local authorities. We are delighted to be working with Essex County Council and are looking forward to developing this relationship over the long-term.”

EMC Corporation today announced that ITV has made a purchase of EMC® Isilon® scale-out NAS to provide a storage platform.

The deal will enable the television network to transition to a pan-itv HD file based infrastructure in order to store and manage all content digitally and make it available through existing broadcast channels and the online platforms.

In August 2010, ITV announced its Transformation Plan, aimed at redesigning and refocusing the business over a five-year period. Isilon and ITV have agreed a deal to provide Storage for all ITV production sites and two datacenter’s to allow ITV to confidently scale-out storage in-line with its transformational plan, future growth and success of the business.

Andrew Ioannou, Director of Strategy for ITV said, “We are delighted to have entered an agreement with EMC Isilon to support a core part of ITV’s technology platform. The deal marks continued progress of ITV’s Transformation Plan and a further step in our move towards a fully tapeless environment.”

WNS, a leading provider of global Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services, has announced its partnership with SEEinfobiz, a global software technology consulting and outsourcing services firm, to further strengthen its capabilities in customized e-fulfillment-based Order-to-Cash (O2C) solutions.

This partnership will enable WNS to provide multi-lingual and multi-format, e-fulfillment-based F&A solutions to its clients globally, spread across various industry verticals.

"We are delighted to have established this partnership with SEEinfobiz. The e-fulfillment-based solution will ensure a much more accurate, and seamless delivery of O2C solutions to our clients and end-customers; it will also help WNS to deliver at a higher level of the value chain, by driving operational excellence and enhance our F&A capabilities," said Keshav R. Murugesh, Group CEO, WNS. "With this partnership, we intend to create a dynamic end-to-end web-based F&A solution to enrich the customer experience, and broaden our service offerings to both existing and prospective customers," he added.

Logica shares fell to a three-year low as the company announced a drop in its forecast and 1,300 job cuts.

Logica cut its 2011 forecast for the second time in just over a month, expecting around three per cent growth – down from above three per cent in November’s prediction and five per cent earlier in the year.

The group put this down to the economic slump and said it intended to respond by speeding up the restructuring that would otherwise be spread over two years.

More than1,300 jobs will be cut, and the firm will take one-off charges of around £93m

Ofsted has published a report into ICT in schools in England over the last three years slamming the teaching of ICT.

It states in no uncertain terms that young people are being failed by the standard of teaching and the content of the curriculum when it comes to learning about technology which will be essential to their personal and professional lives.

After examining inspections of ICT teaching in 167 primary, secondary and special schools, the education regulator concludes that the big problem is at the secondary level.

In 30 out of the 74 secondary schools, pupils got to 16 without having been given the skills necessary to progress further in the subject. And in almost a fifth of these schools Oftsed describes achievement in ICT as "inadequate" - a failure rate that would be considered something of a scandal if it applied in some other subjects.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has launched a procurement worth £200m for identity assurance services to support its major programmes, including the provision of universal credit and personal independence payments. The services could also be used by other parts of central government.

The DWP published a tender notice in the Official Journal of the European Union for a framework contract, valued at £200m over four years with an option to extend for two more, for services that would provide identity assurance for approximately 21 million claimants.