Industry news

ProcServe, a leading provider of eProcurement solutions, has announced that they are providing an end-to-end Purchase-to-Pay and eMarketplace service for all 43 police forces across England and Wales. The contract was signed on 31st March 2011 by the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) and endorsed by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and the Cabinet Office, to deliver a national Police Procurement Hub that will be used across all forces for purchasing goods and services.

The Police Procurement Hub will play a vital role in helping the police to become more efficient by collaborating on procurement across the police forces. This initiative will help to deliver the necessary cuts in spending that the police service faces over the next five years. The Hub will enable each force to buy from the best value centralised deals as well as from their regional and locally let supplier contracts. Roll out will take place over the next 12 months, as part of the Collaborative Police Procurement Programme. The contract with ProcServe will continue for a further five years.

Sue Moffatt, Head of Commercial and Procurement at the NPIA, said "The police service is committed to deliver £545 million pounds of savings per year by 2013/14. It is absolutely vital that those charged with buying goods and services have access to the tools that make them available quickly, and directly to their desktop."

The Hub complements existing procurement processes across the police service so forces do not need to invest in replacing current systems. It enhances existing processes and provides a simple online shopping system to access best value products and services."

Imec has announced the establishment of imec India in Bangalore, Karnataka, making a first step towards the Indian market with the signing of an R&D partnership agreement with Wipro Technologies, the Global Information Technology, Consulting and Outsourcing business of Wipro Limited.

Imec is a leading independent applied research organization that carries out research activities in semiconductor, nanotechnology and nanoelectronics, delivering industry relevant technology solutions.

Imec and Wipro have created a joint initiative to co-innovate and build next generation intelligent systems, called Applied Research in Intelligent Systems Engineering (ARISE). By bringing together an experienced team of system designers, user designers, process, software and system architects, this initiative aims to develop nanoelectronics and NEMS-(Nano Electro Mechanical Systems) based solutions for emerging markets like India.

The solutions will leverage imec's heterogeneous semiconductor process integration platform - CMORE - that offers design, prototyping and low-volume production of systems-on-chip that can combine logic with mechanical, chemical or optical functions.

"Our partnership with Wipro underlines our commitment towards providing solutions for emerging markets;" said Luc Van den hove, President and CEO imec. "I'm confident that Wipro's product engineering expertise, industry vertical presence and understanding of the emerging markets will augment our research capability to develop cost-efficient products for many new markets including India."

Cognizant, a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, has announced that its Board of Directors has authorized the expansion of its existing share repurchase program by $150 million, bringing the total authorization under the current repurchase program to $300 million. In addition, Cognizant's Board has extended the expiration date for the repurchase program to June 30, 2012.

"The Board's decision to expand our share repurchase program reflects confidence in our growth strategy and in our ability to generate strong cash flows," said Gordon Coburn, Chief Financial and Operating Officer of Cognizant.

Repurchases under the program may be made through open market purchases or privately negotiated transactions in accordance with applicable federal securities laws, including Rule 10b-18. The timing of repurchases and the exact number of shares of common stock to be purchased will be determined by the Company's management, in its discretion, and will depend upon market conditions and other factors. The program will be funded using the Company's cash on hand and cash generated from operations. The program may be extended, suspended or discontinued at any time.

HP Enterprise Services and Healthways, Inc. has announced the signing of a 10-year, $380 million applications and technology services outsourcing agreement to support growth and expand value to Healthways’ customers.

With this agreement, HP will provide Applications Development and Applications Management services to further accelerate the transformational development of the well-being improvement company’s applications and technology infrastructure. As a result, Healthways’ mission-critical application, EMBRACE™, will be able to support an increasing volume of customers and increasing market demand for multiparty integration.

“With a primary goal of healthier populations in private- and public-sector programs, EMBRACE experiences increased membership that requires added functionality,” said Ben R. Leedle, president and chief executive officer, Healthways Inc. “HP’s deep healthcare expertise offered the best opportunity to enhance an already powerful platform with greater scalability and sustainable timely innovation at a lower cost for us.”

Managed services provider, Advanced 365, has announced that it has signed a strategic partnership with leading construction industry software and service provider specialist, COINS. Under the terms of the agreement, Advanced 365 will become COINS’ managed services partner for the delivery of COINS On-Demand a new cloud based service offering for the construction sector.

The new COINS On-Demand service is a key part of COINS’ business strategy and has been developed to provide a broader, more scalable solution through cloud based services. As part of the service Advanced 365 will be responsible for all aspects of the infrastructure architecture required to support the delivery of the COINS ERP solution, and will be a key strategic partner for COINS in the delivery of a broader managed service solution portfolio.

Simon Lewis, Director of Technical Services at COINS, comments, “Advanced 365’s experience in delivering reliable, end-to-end managed service solutions made them the clear choice. They have worked closely with us to ensure that we can now fulfil our customers’ increased demand for broader, more resilient and cost effective managed services solutions, designed to meet each organisations specific needs.”

Lewis says, “The 365 Fast-Start programme was one of the key areas that differentiated Advanced 365 from other prospective managed service partners. The provision of this solution will enable COINS to deliver IT projects to our customers in a timelier manner, irrespective of their final infrastructure platform.”

Neil Cross, Managing Director of Advanced 365, says, “This partnership will enable COINS to gain competitive advantage through using our flexible approach to service delivery, so that they can rapidly deliver their software as a service to their customer base. Our On-Demand service offers COINS and its customers the opportunity to take advantage of our innovative outsourcing solutions with minimal risk and upfront investment so that they can benefit from reduced costs and increased efficiencies.”

It’s been a tough week for those of us with a vested interest in the outsourcing industry - and not just because of the difficulty of returning to work after the recent spate of Bank Holidays.

Instead, those who had hoped that the government’s commitment to making savings would result in a boom in the outsourcing industry were in for a shock, after it was revealed that a document leaked to the BBC had cast doubt on the government’s willingness to embrace outsourcing as a means of delivering public services.

We’ve already seen Suffolk County Council decide to ‘pause’ its plans to outsource to the private sector…so how much should we be worrying about this apparent turn in events?

It’s interesting to note that at least one leading support services provider, Serco, has already taken the time to dismiss the importance of the reports, and even gone so far as to state that it expects more medium-term opportunities to come from outsourcing public services in the UK.

Meanwhile, software provider Infosys has rightly pointed out that the current negativity surrounding outsourcing could hurt the business prospects of British-based organisations. Perhaps, however, it might be more prudent to ask whether the government has a plan in place to find the level of savings it has promised by using charities, social enterprises and employee-owned organisations?

On the face of it, it’s easy to understand why Francis Maude could see use of wholesale outsourcing as a ‘political risk’, particularly given the somewhat hysterical, knee-jerk reaction we’ve seen from some quarters in recent months, many of whom have have delighted in painting all outsourcing suppliers - unfairly in my view - as self-serving, greedy ‘fat cats’.

However, I do think it’s worth raising the question of how big a political risk it will be for the coalition government NOT to use private sector organisations as much as they can.

Consider for a moment the political ramifications if, over the course of the next few years, the government discovers that not only has it not been able to make significant savings as a result of its determination to look for alternatives to the private sector, but that public services have also become less efficient as a result?

The choice to use private sector companies to supply public services is one which has to be made for the right reasons - not merely as a means of easing political pressures, and it’s clear that if the government really is serious about making cuts then it must find the best way of achieving its aim.

Of course, outsourcing all contracts might not be the best answer for all public sector departments, and it’s clear that charities and social enterprises have a role to play, where it is appropriate for them to do so.

However, if the government really is going to insist on scaling back use of outsourcing to provide public services, then it will be interesting to see what their plan is for the next few years, and whether or not they have one! If not, it may be a case of it cutting off its political nose to spite its face…

The Cloud has promised much in terms of flexibility, agility, operational and cost savings. However , effective development of cloud application relies on sound underlying platforms; for development teams to be able to build cloud applications effectively, they need the right platform on which to create and deploy the applications. This needs to allow for scalability, for the multi-tenant architecture of cloud applications, where resources and costs are shared across a large pool of users.

This is where Platform as a Service (PaaS) comes in. This year, 2011 has, in fact, been identified by Gartner as the year of PaaS, offering increased flexibility for short term projects, and the ability to provision and scale up quickly for resource intensive projects. However, despite its predicted uptake there is still considerable discussion around its definition. This may be, in part, because the PaaS market is still relatively young and evolving, a fact that was highlighted in a recent report from Forrester and, as the analyst John R Rymer noted in his blog: “the PaaS market is a sprawling, fast-changing, and immature market.”*

So what is PaaS and what does it provide developers looking to capitalise on the cloud boom? In essence, PaaS is a loose term and occupies a huge space, between Infrastructure as a Service and Software as a Service although even within this, different vendors have different propositions. Broadly, it’s the ‘application infrastructure’ that is, the technology stack and computing platform, delivered as a hosted service. Elements such as the application servers, the customer portal, the BPM technology databases and file systems would all comprise this application infrastructure. It’s everything that is required in the cloud application design, development and lifecycle management.

For developers, it means that applications can be deployed without the cost of buying the hardware and software, freeing development teams from the headaches of managing this themselves. The advantages for developers are clear; particularly for those projects that need to be started quickly without the need to purchase, manage or configure the hardware and software in house. It also means that wherever you are based you can make use of the computing services of the PaaS provider. Drilling further, we have the application Platform as a Service (aPaaS) the Gartner defined term which refers to the development and deployment environment for cloud-based applications, or as Yefim Natis of Gartner calls it the ‘extended application server’.

Eventually I believe that everything we now term PaaS will, in actuality, move towards aPaaS however, semantics aside, it’s all about enabling development to be the main focus of activity. What’s more, this new era of cloud development I believe, by its nature demands an approach which offers more flexibility and provides a development and deployment environment in which teams can re-use different types of their software, no matter what language they have been written in. This kind of application platform also means that once written, applications can be taken to any new platform, be it cloud, or mobile, without having to re-write.

This, in turn, means that teams can focus on the development aspects of a project that really matter; delivering applications which bring business functionality and add value, reducing costs and time of development projects , rather than provisioning for and creating the environment on which they are built.

* The Forrester Wave™: Platform-As-A-Service For App Dev And Delivery Professionals, Q2 2011

The last few years have witnessed fundamental changes in the economy, society and technology with great implications for how organisations work, now and moving into the future.

Throughout the mid 2000s, we lived in a period of great economic and business stability. Now, things have changed. The economic situation, although positive, remains tenuous. Globalisation has accelerated hugely, with many developing countries participating more prominently in the global economy. Technology has been transformed, in both the consumer and business worlds. While consumers’ daily habits have been altered by the near ubiquity of social networking and massively increased mobility from devices such as the iPhone, enterprises have seen—and fuelled—the rise of technologies such as virtualisation, cloud computing and real-time collaboration.

These factors now combine to open up opportunities to improve efficiency, effectiveness and innovation in all areas—which, given the fragile economy, are an invaluable source of competitive advantage. For a long time, the rewards to be gained from real-time global collaboration and 24/7 working were considered to be the future of work—but it’s no longer in the future, the benefits can be achieved today.

The forces reshaping work

To understand the opportunities presented by the future of work, companies need to understand the factors driving it. These include a new generation of workers and consumers—the millennials—who are shifting how supply is created and how demand is manifested, a new generation of technology that is rapidly changing the IT landscape, and a new generation of business models, virtualized and globalized, that is changing how work is getting done.

First, let’s look at the millennials. Today’s knowledge worker is representative of an entire generation of digital natives, accustomed to multitasking across a huge number of connected devices and applications, from social networks and instant messaging to smartphones and mobile applications. Until now, the technology they experience at home on a Sunday night has often been more advanced then what they use at work on a Monday morning, meaning they have actually had to take a step back when entering the workplace. But by giving them the right tools to replicate their digital lives in the workplace, they can truly improve an organisation’s overall performance, and in turn, the quality of service it can offer to its clients.

The next driver is technology. Over the last decade, the internet has undoubtedly transformed the face of modern business. Within the last few years in particular, a raft of new web-based technologies has enabled the greatest potential benefits yet: closer, more interactive relationships between people, including those geographically distributed, and exponential growth of available information from around the globe, leading to real-time collaboration and changes in organisational form and function. Cloud computing, virtualisation, wikis, social networks and greatly increased mobility (via smartphones, BlackBerrys, 3G networks etc), if used in the correct way, can now allow an organisation’s knowledge to be banked, accessed, searched and shared. The implication is that everyone within an organisation can have access to the right information at the right time, adding their own insights as they do so.

Finally, we have new working practices and business models. The combination of millennial workers and new technologies means that the virtualised and globalised enterprise is now a reality. While globalisation is not a new phenomenon, it is now reaching into almost every aspect of business. Today end-to-end activities are performed globally as if they were done in one location by a self-contained workforce. Virtualisation, not just with technology, but now with people (the “anywhere, anytime worker”) and business models (increased outsourcing of key processes and sub-processes) is key to this transition. Seamless work on international projects can be delivered by partners from any location, and with resources based all around the world, work can take place 24 hours a day. This means that relationships with partners, suppliers and even customers can be opened up to new levels of integration, innovation and cost-efficiency.

Rethinking work, reinventing value

For many organisations, the business models they use are still based on assumptions made back in the 1950s and 80s. In the context of today, expectations have changed, and so have behaviours. There is a great opportunity now for companies to re-evaluate what’s core knowledge processes and become more innovative, collaborative and flexible. If businesses do not take it, they risk being overtaken by more forward thinking competitors.

As an example, we now have over 100,000 employees worldwide—and growing—across five continents. As you can imagine, we have collectively built up a huge bank of knowledge across many different technology disciplines and industry sectors. To embrace the future of work and put this expertise into the hands of any staff who need it, we built what we call Cognizant 2.0—a Facebook-like platform for programme management, knowledge sharing and collaboration. This platform enables colleagues working on entirely different continents to work together on projects in real time, boosting efficiency and cutting time-to-delivery. With more than 15,000 blog posts written and over 100,000 queries made to date, the collaborative technology forum has been a massive success. By making the combined knowledge of so many staff available to all, we have become more efficient, more dynamic, more responsive and more flexible.

Clients, of course, benefit from an efficient and better-skilled partner, but the future of work can also include them on a level not seen previously. By giving them access to the same social networking system, they can see who from their global partners is online around the world and communicate with them in real time, get visibility into the exact status of projects and essentially interact with external colleagues on a much deeper level, leading to better communication and fostering stronger long-term relationships.

The future’s bright

This is really only the start. With technologies developing at such a rapid rate, and working habits continually evolving to match, the future of work may already be here but it will continue to change over the coming years.

Forward thinking companies cannot afford to ignore these changes, especially as we all look for sources of competitive advantage coming out of the recession. New technology is ready to be used and the millennials are already in your offices—the challenge now is to use them effectively. The opportunity is there to re-evaluate what’s the core knowledge processes and transform them for more innovative, collaborative and flexible results.

There has been much discussion recently about data falling into the wrong hands, following the Information Commissioner Office (ICO) fines for companies that have inadvertently lost customer data. Not to mention information that has come to light from the Wikileaks scandals. There can be no denying that the issue of sensitive data is something CIOs need to tackle head on.

Particularly with the ICO now having the power to fine organisations up to £500,000 for serious data breaches, ten times the maximum penalty level that had previously been in place. Interestingly for CIOs, certain commentators are now calling for even higher penalties and even the mandatory reporting of data breaches, as the debate on this issue looks set to run and run.

These concerns around data sensitivity, combined with the growth in mobile devices in the workplace, such as smartphones and tablet devices, creates new challenges for CIOs in ensuring employees have access to the data they require to deliver their job responsibilities at optimum performance. In light of these issues, many CIOs now looking into self-service BI, to provide employees at all levels with reporting tools that enable them to navigate and share data sensibly across the organisation. According to a recent report from analyst house Gartner, self-service BI ranked fifth on CIOs list of top priorities in 2011*.

However, it is important that CIOs not only enable an environment that encourages caution around sensitive data, but also remain one step ahead to manage their business critical data and the people who have access to it. This is because in the modern working environment, employees across all functions need access to data and information to make decisions without delay. Take the fall-out from the banking crisis as a prime example. While many institutions were pre-warned about the slowdown in inventory turnover, few banks had the data available to minimise the impact of the crisis. Many branch managers were crying out for data that outlined which dealers had inventory that was aging past a certain point. If the data had been available, institutions could have then tightened their lending standards and adjusted capital reserves accordingly.

The good news for CIOs is that the prevalence of technology in companies is now driving flatter organisation structures, which in turn puts data into the hands of the many, not the few. As a result, this will help provide the right data, to the right people at the right time. So you will not end up having the sales team receiving irrelevant information about HR. In this case, people at all levels of an organisation have access to business intelligence (BI), and this is the driving force behind self-service BI. In other words, it is an organisation’s employees who know what information they require, so in certain cases, the CIO may wish to provide them with the reports and dashboards they need to make informed decisions.

Despite these benefits of self-service BI, empowering employees with data can sometimes cause issues for CIOs, who must take certain measures to protect their company’s assets and limit the potential negative impact of human involvement. All this, while simultaneously embracing the cultural shift to self-service BI and providing the infrastructure to enable a return on investment.

Often, the CIO’s IT team has many of the metrics that end users care about at its disposal, but it worries about sharing the information and being open to criticism. Additionally, there is rarely one person or group of people who represent the business that the IT team can speak to about overall service expectations. However, without sharing the metrics and demonstrating the adherence to service level agreements (SLAs), the IT team often wastes an excellent opportunity to boast about its value to the business.

Therefore, the CIO must not only take steps to measure the performance of his or her own function, but must also take effective steps to share the same information with the entire organisation.

Firstly, this involves managing the increasing customer demands. Today’s customers expect convenient, high-value services. That includes the ability to receive support or conduct transactions at any time, day or night. However, for most CIOs, employing service teams around-the-clock is cost prohibitive.

Secondly, CIOs must consider the impact of poor service delivery. Relying on live agents to aid customers when they have questions or problems can create a high level of risk. Different skill sets and work ethics leave room for mistakes and inconsistencies that can result in lost business. For example, manufacturing teams worldwide could benefit from accessing all the data they need to ensure products will be delivered on time, or adjust schedules in real-time when incidents like the Japanese earthquake happen and cause delays to parts being available.

Thirdly, and most importantly, CIO must look to their employees to provide business critical information around declining revenue. As CIOs struggle to realise acceptable levels of revenue from traditional reporting channels, they must take a more innovative approach to sales and tap into new income-generating opportunities. By providing reporting tools to employees, they will be able to get stronger feedback and new ideas that can help increase revenue across the business.

In summary there is a clear opportunity for CIOs to benefit from self-service BI, due to mobility becoming key to future revenue generation. The good news for CIOs is that they can now access self-service BI platforms that enable them to manage data while shielding them from the underlying data infrastructure, so employees don't have to keep asking IT for help.

Logica, a leading European business and technology service provider, has announced the acquisition of Grupo Gesfor, a privately held Spanish consulting and professional services company founded in 1985. The acquisition will be financed out of existing debt facilities and is expected to be earnings accretive in 2012.

Around 1,200 Grupo Gesfor employees with strengths in areas such as security, business intelligence, HR consulting and enterprise content management will join Logica. Grupo Gesfor’s presence in Spain and operations across Latin America will support our wider client base, particularly our many European clients already operating in these markets, and complement our existing presence in Iberia.

The Grupo Gesfor business to be acquired had revenue of €64 million (c. £55 million) in the year ended 31 December 2010.

The total consideration is expected to be up to €31.5 million (c. £25 million) of which €24 million (c. £19 million) will be paid in cash upon completion. Based on 2010 revenue, this would represent EV/sales of around 0.6x with assumed net debt of around £7 million.

Andy Green, Chief Executive Officer of Logica, said:

“The Spanish market is home to a number of major multinational companies and an important market for many of our existing European clients. Acquiring Grupo Gesfor supports our client intimacy strategy by extending our capabilities and presence to support clients as they grow in Spain and Latin America. This is a good time to be investing for the longer term.”