Industry news

Fujitsu has enabled the University of Bath to expand the scope of its Innovation Centre by migrating its business network system to a Cloud-based solution. This move has seen the Innovation Centre increase the number of its business networks, leading to more rapid identification of new technology start-up clients and spin-outs from University research.

With a research portfolio worth over £100 million, the University of Bath is ranked tenth in the UK in the 2012 Complete University Guide league table. Its Innovation Centre provides access to expertise, skills and quality contacts in a flexible business environment in which new ventures emanating from the University work along side privately-owned start-ups in an Entrepreneur-friendly environment. It operates a number of business networks, including SiliconSouthwest.co.uk, LowCarbonSouthWest.co.uk, OpenMIC and the Assisted Living Action Network. Over the last five years, ventures from the University of Bath’s Innovation Centre have created 160 new jobs and brought £15m into the City’s economy.

Hewlett-Packard Corp, the world's largest PC maker by shipment volume, has announced its expansion plans for China on Wednesday.

Although the company declined to disclose the amount of its new investment, it announced it has assigned two executives to lead the Chinese unit.

Leo Apotheker, HP chief executive officer, told a news conference in Beijing that the company will place greater emphasis on cloud computing (using the Internet as a hard drive), software and wireless devices such as tablet PCs this year to boost its growth in China.

To help understand the concept of innovation, a definition has to be established. Simply defined, innovation is the process that takes new ideas and implements them in a way that creates value. The value that innovation brings in improving products, services and processes can be measured as increased productivity, higher quality or other worth, and may directly benefit producers, consumers or both.

In today’s business world the general connotation of “innovation” is simply something “new and improved” and is often confused with invention, with many people frequently using the two words interchangeably. However, these are distinctly different concepts. “Invention” is an event that occurs at a specific point in time and typically focuses on the development of a single product, and, unlike innovation that produces money (value), invention consumes money.

“Innovation” is the extension of invention, the act of bringing an invention to market where it creates value for the customer. This is a key difference: Invention results in financial consumption, while innovation results in financial growth. Plenty of patents have been filed and gizmos created that go unused and create no measureable value. For innovation to make a difference, it takes more than a good idea, new product or an emerging technology. The good idea must be implemented and adopted by others by including things like services. Otherwise, it is simply an idea with the potential to be innovative.

There is also less of a relationship between innovation and R&D than most people suspect. R&D is a way to turn capital into knowledge – you learn how things work, how things might work, etc. On the other hand, innovation takes that knowledge and turns it back into capital by discovering and developing ways to apply the knowledge derived from R&D, thus creating economic value.

Taking this into account, there are three ways a technology, product or service can be innovative:

· An old (existing) technology product or service can be applied in a new way, thus creating a new business model or process

· A new technology product or service can be applied to an old business model or process radically changing its results

· A new technology product or service is applied simultaneously to a new business model or process, creating a truly disruptive innovation. This is known as the “black swan” approach

Forming ideas and designing for innovative business – whether the focus is products, services, technologies, business models or business processes – must mean more than only attacking problems at the product and/or service level.

Companies such as TCS, HCL, Wipro and Infosys are suffering from attrition rates ranging from 15% to as high as 25%. This is coupled with increasing salaries in an economy where at the moment inflation rates are spiralling out of control.

Traditionally, the main issue with offshoring was the difficult processes of communicating with the teams based overseas. This resulted in long distance phone calls and work taking place across different time zones. Now the issue is managing teams where there is increasing turnover and quality of service is being negatively affected. Yes you do sometimes get a lower cost but there is always a downside.

However, by implementing an automated solution, businesses would benefit from significant cost savings, a local based (same country) solution and a tool which can look after itself and adapt to its environment - eliminating management time and workers spending unnecessary time on mundane daily tasks.

Automated technologies can learn from human behaviour, meaning that simple everyday tasks can be handed over to IT systems and solved before human intervention is required. By doing this, businesses will eliminate certain risks such as putting key operating processes in someone else’s hands and overseas. This approach will also allow businesses to reap certain financial benefits as outsourcing and management costs are reduced as the solution will effectively look after itself and be scaled up and down as necessary.

The key to a successful outsourcing process lies in evolving technologies. By using automated and industrialized solutions which take the hassle and time away from staff on a daily basis, businesses will be able develop their business and get the most out of their existing employees

London borough of Lambeth has announced a 10 year extension of its deal with Capita.

The deal – worth £60m - will see Capita provide a range of services including call centre management and ICT support services.

Lambeth councillor for finance, Paul McGlone, says that the new contract will improve the people of Lambeth’s interaction with the council, and at the same time, save money. “The service model proposed by Capita is flexible and scalable over time, meaning it is 'future proofed' for changes in the way people communicate with us."

CSC’s on-premise cloud solution – BizCloud - is being launched in the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain. It will be rolled out to Nordic countries in September or October.

Infrastructure will be provided by CSC and its partners, set up within a company and delivered as a service using a standard rate card – all within 10 weeks of ordering.

The rate card has 4 bands - bronze, silver, gold or platinum - prices depend on the configuration required. Bronze service costs £29 per month, for which customers with receive one CPU processor and 1GB of RAM.

IT graduates are the second most sought after, says a new study of graduate recruitment.

Demand for IT skills has rocketed, according to a survey by the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR).

In 2009/10 IT accounted for 8% graduate vacancies. This figure has since risen to 13% making IT second only to accounting in 2010/11. The total number of graduate vacancies has risen 3% cent since 2009/10.

A significant chunk of the IT vacancies seem to be coming from consultancy firms, which reported an impressive 149% increase in graduate vacancies during 2010/11.

Google+ has been launched to a small group of users and invitees enables people to post status updates, share links and upload photos – sound familiar?

To differentiate from Facebook, Google+ allows users to communicate within separate groups of their online friends. Instead of posting an update to everyone, Google+ lets users to create "circles" or groups, such as a user's university friends, work colleagues or family.

"Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it." said Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice president of engineering.

Sitel clients to enjoy the benefits of high quality customer care provision from new state-of-the-art facility

Sitel, a leading customer care outsourcing provider, is solidifying its nearshore offerings, by announcing it has now expanded operations into Belgrade, Serbia.

A well educated workforce, high national literacy levels and lower costs mean that Serbia is an attractive proposition for organisations new to the region.

“With such a large untapped Balkans talent pool, Serbia is the perfect choice for our latest location. Potential contact centre candidates there not only have high standards of education, but also close cultural affinity with our North American and European customers,” says Tim Schuh, General Manager, Northern EMEA, Sitel. “They have access to those same consumer products, use the same computer and social media tools as those who they’re assisting from overseas. And the wide breadth of languages we can support from Belgrade, which includes English, German, Italian, French and Russian, make it a highly attractive solution for our clients.”

Sitel considered several other locations globally but was impressed by Serbia and specifically, Belgrade as a regional business centre. An educated, multilingual workforce combined with available local talent and first class call centre infrastructure made Belgrade the obvious choice.

“Serbia has many qualities which are similar to our successful sites in Bulgaria and Poland. Sitel is constantly evaluating markets across the world to ensure we leverage available labour pools and infrastructures to provide our clients with the best possible service and Return on Customer Investment” continues Schuh.

Sitel has market leading operations with numerous customer care contact facilities across Europe and the globe. Sitel provides services to many of the biggest and best known brands in the world and is now well placed to accept new clients into Belgrade as it moves forward with projected plans for a state-of-the-art customer care contact centre in the Serbian capital.

British Waterways, the public corporation responsible for a network of 2,200 canals and rivers in England, Scotland and Wales, has deployed a new service management system. Developed by Hunter Systems, a leading UK provider of service and asset management software, the new application will help the organisation to ensure that planned maintenance for all locks and control rooms is carried out efficiently and will improve the operational effectiveness of the national canal network.

The system is a core part of British Waterways’ SCADA project, an initiative that will enhance the service management of engineers and subcontractors employed to maintain important equipment such as valves and motors used in control rooms and lock gates across the canal network.

According to British Waterways: “We asked Hunter Systems to develop a bespoke application after seeing their SAM solution, a powerful service and asset management system that is in daily use by organisations throughout the UK. As well as providing the most cost effective solution, we were impressed by the responsive approach that the company took to ensure the development of a bespoke solution that met all our needs.”