Industry news

IBM and Nirvanix has announced the integration of cloud storage technology from Nirvanix as part of an expanded IBM SmartCloud Enterprise storage services portfolio available to customers worldwide.

With the integration of Nirvanix cloud storage technology, IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise storage services will provide customers with a solution designed to support millions of users, billions of objects and exabytes of data to complement IBM’s existing security-rich, virtual server environments in the cloud.

“We look forward to teaming with IBM in the enterprise cloud storage space and cooperatively enhancing our leading cloud storage service for the most demanding IBM global customers,” said Scott Genereux, President and CEO of Nirvanix. “Today’s announcement marks an important step in accomplishing Nirvanix’s strategic goals of capturing cloud storage market share and accelerating revenue growth.”

Sitel, a leading customer care outsourcing provider, today announced that Dagoberto “Bert” Quintana, 51, has been named Chief Executive Officer. Quintana, who has been serving as President and Chief Operating Officer of Sitel since February 2010, succeeds David Garner, 53, in the role of Chief Executive Officer. Quintana will continue to serve as President. Garner will continue to serve as non-executive Chairman of Sitel. Garner will continue to support the Board and the executive team of Sitel on strategic matters and as necessary on commercial and operational initiatives.

Garner said, “Bert Quintana is an energetic, customer-focused leader in our industry. Working with Bert over the past two years, I am confident of his commitment to our Customer #1 strategies as well as to enhancing Sitel’s market position, revenue growth and stockholder value. Bert is ready for this next challenge.”

Quintana said, “Sitel is a growing company with a strong client base. I look forward to continuing the progress we have made over the past two years in my new role. I also want to recognize Dave Garner for his many contributions to Sitel. Dave is a true industry leader and has mentored me over the past two years to reach for this next challenge. I thank him for his continued commitment to Sitel and look forward to continuing to work with Dave in his role as Chairman in the future.”

Key highlights from last quarter include:

- Revenues were $1,746 million for the quarter ending September 30, 2011

- QoQ growth was 4.5%; YoY growth was 16.7%

- 45 clients were added during the quarter

- Gross addition of 15,352 employees (net addition of 8,262) for the quarter

“The global macroeconomic environment is still uncertain. It is and should be a concern for the IT industry.” said S. D. Shibulal, CEO and Managing Director. “In this scenario, clients are looking for new opportunities for growth, accelerated innovation and increased returns on investments. Our strategic initiatives and organisation structure will enable us to build long term partnerships with our clients and help them drive their business objectives.”

Gloucester City Council and Civica has launched an innovative partnership to outsource the delivery of revenues, benefits and welfare rights services for the authority and deliver annual savings of £220,000.

The seven-year agreement between the council and Civica will see the partnership maintain and improve service delivery to local citizens while achieving financial savings. It is the first step in the creation of a centre of excellence in the city for local government revenues and benefits administration that will sustain local employment and bring new business to Gloucester through the provision of outsourced business process services to other local authorities around the UK.

The agreement is part of the wider process underway at Gloucester City Council to transform the authority’s approach to providing back office, transactional and corporate support services and to systematically deliver vital budget savings across all these operations.

Civica, which is a supplier to more than 90% of the UK’s local authorities, provides IT systems and business process expertise to 175 local government revenues and benefits departments. As a strong and stable partner, the company is able to build a specialist and highly flexible service model that provides an alternative to both large scale ‘one size fits all’ outsourcing and local authority shared service models. Both these existing models can lack the flexibility and scalability to respond to the rapid and significant changes faced by councils or to accommodate additional work.

Councillor Debbie Llewellyn, Cabinet Member for Performance and Resources at Gloucester City Council, said: “This ground-breaking agreement provides the council with a means to improve, rather than cut, our services to citizens. The model harnesses our employees’ knowledge and experience with Civica’s service improvement know-how to meet local outcomes while achieving annual cost savings of £220,000. It’s very pleasing to be setting up a service centre with the potential to increase its contribution to the local economy and local jobs as time goes on.”

The Commons Public Accounts Committee publishes its 49th report of session 2010-12, on the basis of evidence from the Cabinet Office.

The Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MP, Chair of the Committee of Public Accounts, said: "The Efficiency and Reform Group, created initially to lead the drive to cut government spending by £6 billion in 2010-11, has made a good start, but a lot of that is down to key players in government pulling in the same direction with a high profile target in mind. In the long term there will need to be a much deeper change in the cultural and institutional structure of government.

The Group reported to us that its actions have so far led to £3.75 billion worth of efficiency savings. Sustaining these savings will be a challenge, requiring senior civil servants to strengthen their implementation and project management skills.

We welcome the level of detail in the Group's reported savings. This degree of transparency is a big improvement on the very poor standard of reporting by departments.

The MOU is intended to pave the way for the two companies to identify and pursue infrastructure opportunities in India and sub-Saharan Africa, with an initial focus on power generation, transmission, railways, mining, water and wastewater.

"This agreement with Tata, one of the largest and most respected companies in India, offers Balfour Beatty an exciting strategic opportunity to develop a substantial business in India and Africa, markets of high potential,” said Balfour Beatty chief executive Ian Tyler. “While we have an established presence in India, through our professional services business, Parsons Brinckerhoff, we now seek to develop our full range of capabilities in the region. This initiative is in line with our broader strategy to develop our business in the high-growth emerging markets.”

The updated TrainTracker NRE service is expected to use industry leading voice recognition technology capable of accurately and consistently recognising natural language and multiple item requests in a single utterance. The service will interact with TISL provided APIs for the provision of train running information and is expected to include self service elements to enable control and manipulation of reference data and call flow by TISL.

National Rail Enquiries, as part of their call handling strategy, provide a interactive voice response service to enable customers to request and receive real time train running information, including full journey planning up to 3 months in advance and information about the cheapest available fares for their journey.

The service handles 6 000 calls each day with peaks in excess of 14x this volume during disruption. The current contract for the provision of this service expires in september 2012 and TISL will use this opportunity to update and refresh this service to ensure it continues to meet customer expectations.

The launch follows the June 15th agreement of a global distribution partnership under which Siemens Enterprise Communications will exclusively resell the inContact cloud contact centre portfolio under the OpenScape Cloud Contact Center brand in the UK.

OpenScape Cloud Contact Center is based on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) contact centre platform from inContact (NASDAQ: SAAS), the leading provider of on-demand contact centre software and agent optimisation tools. OpenScape Cloud Contact Center is designed to simplify the agent interface, streamline contact centre management and improve the customer experience, all at a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than premise-based solutions. It allows companies to easily add part-time, temporary or seasonal agents to their existing contact centre, giving them ultimate flexibility in day-to-day operations. Hosted in inContact’s best-in-class data centres, OpenScape Cloud Contact Center offers the reliability and security of a private cloud but with more flexible, yet affordable deployment options.

OpenScape Cloud Contact Center complements the existing premise-based OpenScape Contact Center solution to deliver choice and investment protection. Customers will be able to choose a cloud-based, premise-based or hybrid contact centre solution based upon the best-fit for their business needs. In addition, OpenScape Cloud Contact Center enables customers to easily and affordably add on to an existing premise-based contact centre to provide new functionality, expand to new sites, support increased capacity needs, and to easily add remote or seasonal workers.

Scott McDonald, Global Vice President of Contact Centres at Siemens Enterprise Communications, commented that: “We are excited to announce the availability of OpenScape Cloud Contact Center into the UK. The proposition of increased flexibility and scalability, higher productivity levels and also the lowered cost of delivering service is resonating strongly with organisations, especially within the current economic conditions. With the availability of our OpenScape Cloud Contact Center proposition, we have the most comprehensive contact centre portfolio in the market today.”

Unison is conducting a ballot that could see 1.1 million workers strike on 30 November – and possibly beyond. The strike is over the Government’s public sector pension reforms. It affects works in local government and health service retirement schemes.

Other large public sector and civil service unions are already in the process of balloting, which could see over two million workers out, making it the biggest strike in UK history.

Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison said the strike “could take the form of targeted action against certain local authorities, health trusts or privatised service employers or the form of rolling action in certain regions.”

Deutsche Telekom and Capgemini have signed a five year business intelligence (BI) sourcing framework agreement.

The contract is between Deutsche Telekom AG – a new company merging two business units, T-Home and T-Mobile - and Capgemini Deutschland GmbH. It aims to consolidate the business processes and IT systems of both.

Capgemini global head of Business Information Management Paul Nannetti said: "Our investments and focus on developing a differentiated approach to the delivery of BI programs, combining consulting, technology and a scalable India centric delivery platform, have positioned Capgemini as a global leader in the provision of BI transformation services.”