Industry news

Three firms have been selected to provide telephony services within the Government Procurement Service Managed Telecommunications Convergence Framework (MTCF).

Siemens Enterprise Communications, Global Crossing (UK) Telecommunications Limited and Virgin Media Business will supply the framework, which will replace the current Managed Telecommunications Services (MTS). It will allow organisations to procure services in support of the Public Services Network (PSN) and managed telephony, conferencing and data networking solutions

The MTCF will facilitate the delivery of managed telephony and data network services and enable the public sector to benefit from access to a new portfolio of hosted IP telephony, unified communications and video conferencing services. All services delivered within the framework will either be PSN (Public Service Network)-certified or provide transition to PSN-certified services, if required.

Michael Bowyer, director of Public Sector strategy, Siemens Enterprise Communications commented: “Siemens Enterprise Communications, supported by BT, is dedicated to delivering both traditional and next generation communication services that will provide efficient and scalable solutions, as well as enabling best practice working methods throughout the public sector. Being awarded this framework is a central part of our drive towards the successful development of the PSN.”

The Capita Group Plc has announced that it has acquired Ventura, a customer contact specialist for a cash consideration of £65 million on a cash-free, debt-free basis.

Ventura, the trading name of Club 24 Ltd, is the third party customer services management arm of Next plc and manages more than 50 million customer contacts each year for a range of additional private and public sector clients. Ventura is particularly strong in the private sector with clients including a number of leading telecoms, utilities and retail companies, such as O2, Orange, British Gas and BMI.

Ventura made a pro forma operating profit for its financial year to 31 January 2011 of £8 million on turnover of £156 million.

The acquisition will increase Capita's capacity for customer management services, providing additional front office services and flexible capacity for existing Group clients and the opportunity to provide entura's client base with access to Capita's wider service offering.

The Irish government plans to set up a cross-government implementation group on cloud computing. This group will support the implementation of the Programme for Government commitment on cloud computing. A recent report commission by Microsoft found that the cloud computing market in Ireland could be worth EUR 9.5 billion and employ 8,600 people by 2014.

The proposed Implementation Group will include representatives of relevant Departments as well as the Data Protection Commissioner, the IDA and Enterprise Ireland. The first meeting is proposed for later in July. The proposals were welcomed by ICT Ireland, IBEC group that represents the high-tech sector. ICT Ireland director Paul Sweetman said that for Ireland to become a world leader in cloud technology, it was important that the government took a lead as a user of cloud computing.

buyingTeam, Europe’s largest procurement outsourcing specialist, announces it has signed a long-term procurement outsourcing contract with global energy provider BG Group.

This new relationship marks the beginning of buyingTeam managing BG’s indirect expenditure in the UK with potential roll-out on a global basis during the lifetime of the contract.

BG Group has engaged buyingTeam to assist in evolving its procurement approach and embedding a global indirect procurement strategy. buyingTeam will provide BG Group with a full suite of procurement services, including, spend and market analysis, strategic and tactical sourcing, together with associated contract and stakeholder management.

The role of procurement as a key management discipline continues to grow and is fast becoming a central part of executive decision making. Leading companies increasingly value procurement’s ability to go beyond its traditional focus on a client’s supply base and positively influence internal attitudes towards purchasing and apply greater commercial emphasis on its working practices more generally. This change in approach is core to buyingTeam’s model.

Commenting on the contract, buyingTeam CEO Matthew Eatough, said:

“The signing of this multi-year contract with such a successful and internationally renowned company is a powerful endorsement of the substantial benefits that the buyingTeam approach brings to our clients. It also shows how the procurement function has evolved from simple cost-cutting into an integral management discipline.

“We will be working with them to identify where significant value can be unlocked to deliver ongoing future benefits to the BG Group’s operations. We believe that our shared services model provides us with the strength and depth needed to grow with international organisations.”

The company, whose CEO is from Burnley, has calculated that, with accommodation rental comparable between the two locations, the Lancashire town comes out on top. As a result, New Call Telecom are switching their operations back to the UK and are expected to begin recruitment this week.

Chief Nigel Eastwood said: "India isn't that cheap any more. As call centres have grown, real estate prices have gone up massively, while salaries have also crept up."

Call handling times in India are on average 25 per cent longer than in Britain, he added.

Burnley staff will be on the minimum wage but it will provide a huge boost to a high unemployment area.

Virtually unheard of a decade ago, instructional outsourcing is sprouting on university campuses around the US.

When students of Missouri State University in Springfield, Mo., take an introductory journalism class, they'll have some of the most qualified teachers in the field just not on the payroll.

They work for St. Petersburg-based Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism training group, which has agreed to supply the university with instructors for the class via the Internet.

"We are leveraging our e-learning platform to help journalism educators to have more time with their students," said Howard Finberg, interactive learning director for Poynter. "We can do some of the teaching for them."

"Given the significant reduction in state support for public education, compounded by the fact institutions need to maintain quality programs, we are going to see additional innovative attempts at partnerships that will address both issues of being able to provide cost-efficient programs that are high quality," says Daniel Hurley, director of state relations and policy analysis for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

Proponents see the practice as another innovative way to cut costs, access bigger markets and add expertise to classrooms.

mplsystems, the contact centre technology company based in Warwick, UK, has announced that it has been chosen by Smart Risk Wealth Management, one of the leading insurance brokers in South Africa, to provide a cloud based contact centre facility for its operations in Johannesburg.

The financial services provider will use the MPL intelligentcontact platform and campaign management to drive outbound marketing activity. The solution will provide contact handling, campaign applications and web services for their existing CRM solution and will be delivered through MPL Aurora, the cloud delivery model, providing Smart Risk with a facility on which to grow their contact solution.

The Aurora on-demand model gives customers a cost effective solution from day one which can be scaled as business and technology requirements grow. mplsystems won the contract against competition from Presence and Dimension Data, working with partner, iCorp, to negotiate the deal which will see iCorp also managing first line support requirements in South Africa for the Smart Risk Wealth Management facility.

“We were very impressed with the ease of use and flexibility of intelligentcontact and the ability to set up our own campaigns and administer the software. It was this ease of use that lead us to work with mplsystems along with their expertise in rapidly implementing campaign based projects”, commented Graham Craig, Director of Smart Risk.

Peter Haydn-Davies, Partner Manager for mplsystems, said: “We were delighted to be involved at this innovative time in Smart Risk’s development and as the insurance and finance industry heats up in South Africa. By promoting the enthusiasm of the Smart Risk agents, and using intelligentContact to present the right information to them at the right time every time, Smart Risk is now experiencing exciting growth in all their business departments.”

ChildLine’s call centre in Swansea will shut later this month.

There had been opposition to close the site and move operations to the Welsh capital, Cardiff. Earlier this week, a 12,000-signature petition was handed to the NSPCC.

However, the NSPCC confirmed the Swansea centre will close.

Peter Liver, ChildLine director said: “We will be relocating the service in Swansea to the NSPCC Cymru/Wales national centre in Cardiff, where we will offer online counselling only. We will also increase the number of ChildLine volunteers in our remaining centres over the next five years. Their roles will be expanded so by 2016 we will be delivering significantly more counselling hours in the most cost-effective way.

What would you rather use at work – the corporate, standard-issue hardware provided by your employer, or the stylish cutting-edge smartphones and tablets that you use at home?

It’s a question that public sector organisations are beginning to ask. Not just employees, who would enjoy using their gadgets of choice, but also their employers, who recognise they could make huge cost savings by giving them that choice, providing they can maintain control of the application, the infrastructure delivering it, and of course the data.

Benefits of ‘bring your own device’

More and more of the enquiries we receive about ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) initiatives come from public sector organisations tasked with cutting their costs, realising better utilisation of their estates, and reducing the size of their workforces and the number of desks they occupy.

The obvious benefit of a ‘bring your own device’ initiative is that every computer a staff member pays for is one that the organisation doesn’t have to pay for itself, although some employers run schemes which provide contributions or allowances. An organisation offering a BYOD initiative can save a huge amount in terms of capital expenditure: if you currently need computers for 1,000 people, for instance, but know that you will have to reduce your full time workforce to 800 people, it wouldn’t make economic sense for you to order 1,000 computers. Doing so would leave you with 200 computers that nobody uses but that you can’t return to the manufacturer. BYOD initiatives give employers a more flexible and cost-effective IT solution that copes with variable staffing levels.

They also enable more staff to work from home, so as well as spending less on technology, you can spend less on the desk space your organisation needs. You can also cut training costs, because staff don’t need training to install and use the common platforms, applications and technology that they already use at home. And you can reduce the cost of ongoing maintenance: people tend to look after their own devices better than they would employer-provided devices.

Of course, there is also the received wisdom that satisfied staff are productive staff. BYOD initiatives are the key to giving staff the satisfaction of choosing both where they work (at home, in the office, in a café) and what device they work on. The introduction of the iPad has seen a huge wave of people dropping their existing platforms and infrastructures for the sake of what they regard as an enhanced user experience.

Things to consider

One common reason for resisting BYOD is the myth that staff can’t use their own devices on the organisation’s network. But the truth is that they can, as long as they have the right technology in place. IT managers’ fears partly stem from the security issues involved in people using their own hardware on a corporate network. How, for example, can they tell if someone’s laptop has up-to-date virus protection? How can they monitor what software the employee has installed?

They need not worry. Technology from vendors such as Microsoft, VMware and Citrix enables organisations to deliver applications, data and indeed desktops to any device, whether PC, thin client, laptop or tablet. This approach allows data to be displayed, and interacted with, on the device in question, while keeping the data itself secure in your datacentre. When the user disconnects, no data is left on the end device. While technologies like this have been around since NT 4 Terminal Services, the fact that we have been able, for the last three years or so, to deliver a full desktop experience rather than a terminal services session has seen rapid take-up recently in organisations who want the dual benefits of device-independent computing alongside secure data access.

While the underlying technology is of course important, public sector organisations should look for good service providers that can handle everything needed to set up and support a BYOD initiative, including connectivity, security and ongoing management. If an ‘off premise’ hosted solution is required, the service provider should have the right infrastructure to satisfy these needs and be capable of delivering a good virtual experience with no latency.

Of course, keeping track of hundreds of devices is no mean feat, so it is important to have policies and processes that keep data secure and devices visible and in the organisation’s control, and that safeguard employees’ privacy at the same time. Some organisations install software on staff devices that lets them erase data remotely if the device is lost or stolen – staff that want to use BYOD must first agree to have this installed.

Taking the plunge

The rise of BYOD in the public sector owes much to the fact that a lot of the people who want to use their own devices at work are senior councillors, clinicians or professors. Now that secure, dependable technology is available, they can demonstrate the savings to their finance managers and quickly build support for BYOD, although many still choose to pilot the idea, or restrict the applications that staff can access on their own devices, before making the switch completely.

It’s no surprise that savvy international organisations are heavily investing in India’s booming outsourced software testing sector, which is poised for rapid growth at a CAGR of 56% over the next few years.

Industry analysts Gartner reported that the worldwide software testing market turns over $13 billion each year and the global market for outsourced testing services is now approximately $6.1 billion.

Indeed, India is expected to corner a 70% share, or $4.2 billion, of this market and SQS, the largest independent software testing and quality assurance provider,

is at the hub of this growth, having secured several major contracts, opening its Test Automation FaQtory™ and expanding its niche games practice. This growth has resulted in the opening of a 43,000 square feet test centre in India’s fast-growing IT hub of Pune on 22nd June 2011.

The additional facility will seat 350 software testing team members and is the first phase of a 120,000 square feet expansion over a complex of three new buildings, which will create space for 1,800 quality assurance engineers.

SQS’s expansion mirrors the growth in offshored software testing to India, where the average deal size of projects is also rising. A few years ago, average contract value of an outsourced testing project was approximately fifty to sixty thousand dollars and required only a few testers. That has now grown to between two million and four million dollars per project, which in turn means that India’s testing market required approximately 18,000 professionals annually between 2008 and 2011 to meet the increasing demand1. Software consulting firm Ovum reports that testing services will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 9.5% until 2013, which is faster than most other technology services.

Traditionally, Indian software testing providers have serviced English-speaking companies and countries. However, there is a growing shift to conquer other territories. While some Indian IT services providers are moving to Latin America and South East Asia, others, such as SQS, are also building teams in India to overcome language and cultural barriers with non-English speaking countries.

An example of this development is SQS’ base in Pune, a Tier 1 outsourcing city, which offers good infrastructure, direct flights to Europe, high availability of graduates, pleasant climate and a number of high-profile IT companies, but without the disadvantages (e.g. high costs, traffic congestion and limited room for growth).

Whereas German, Swiss and Austrian companies may have turned to Eastern Europe for outsourced IT, there is now a growing trend for these countries to outsource to Indian providers as client demand for cost-effective testing and other IT services continues to increase.

Pune already has an infrastructure for non-English speaking resources, such as the Goethe Institute and over 300 further education institutions offering between 50 and 400 seats in beginner to advanced German classes. The city is becoming more active in providing language tuition to support the German-headquartered companies that have large operations in India, including: Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Demag, Kone cranes and Knorr-Bremse. Indeed, Pune is India's largest base for German business, with over 197 German companies with subsidiaries and/or JVs together with a large number of German-Indian business alliances.

SQS India has recruited Indian German-speaking resources to support offshoring from its German, Austrian and Swiss offices. This recruitment drive will add software testers to its already strong English speaking teams who work in tandem with their onshore counterparts on a daily basis.

Whether demand for services comes from Europe or the US, there is plenty of room for further growth in the Indian testing market. The growth of Managed Services in the sector is spearheading that opportunity for SQS. By combining Managed Services, a Test Automation FaQtory™ and offshoring, SQS is able to control the costs of repeatedly testing software throughout its entire life cycle. This enables customers, such as Specsavers and Sunrise, to deliver more reliable IT applications, systems and software to their users cost effectively and faster than through traditional testing methods.

The Test Automation FaQtory™, launched in May 2010 in Pune’s Special Economic Zone, is receiving significant interest from clients in Europe and the US, including Siemens PLM, a company that benefits from only paying for what is tested, access to a global delivery team and working with a pure-play independent testing consultancy.

The growth of the Indian testing market also supports the creation of specialist teams. While SQS employs 2,000 staff in total, its games testing team is 150 strong. Major clients include: THQ, Warner Brothers, AGCC and Pocket Gems. Games testing takes place from a state-of-the-art studio with all the latest equipment, and other systems required for effective defect reporting (recording setup).

SQS also has security measures in place in its labs that allow customers to send sensitive IP-related information across to SQS without any concern. In addition, the team benefits from the latest hardware in 3D HDTV, and other accessories required to test all types of games. Games testing requires some of the largest download capabilities and SQS’ infrastructure matches if not sometime exceeds that of its customers.

Finally, the SQS India team is a critical part of SQS’ global delivery model, where offshored teams work in Europe for short or medium durations to increase their exposure to cultural variations and improve their experience and skills. This helps create a single team across the whole organisation with strong personal and professional bonds. The company’s move to develop multi-lingual testing teams will underpin its growth and help it to appeal to a larger international client base.

1 The Indian Economic Times (2009)

2 Physorg.com