Industry news

Unisys NZ has won a three-year renewal of its longstanding IT services contract with the financial services cooperative PSIS.

The services delivered under the contract include ClearPath and ES7000 servers and other data centre hardware support, disaster recovery hosting and services, and security monitoring of PSIS’ internet banking channel.

In a statement from Unisys announcing the contract extension, Annette Natta, general manager of information services at PSIS, is quoted as saying: “At PSIS our customers are also our shareholders, so our aim is to provide consistent and reliable services that they can depend upon to protect their financial assets. We have worked closely with Unisys since 1967 to develop an IT infrastructure that combines flexibility and dependability to support that aim as the banking industry evolves and the economic environment in which we operate changes.”

The London borough of Bexley and Capita Local Government Services have agreed to extend and expand their existing partnership.

Under a new contract, worth £14m, the deal will run for three years before the original expiry date of June 2016, and the council's financial assessment team will transfer to Capita Local Government Services.

The service will join council tax and business rates administration, cashiering services and benefits administration in the contract. The financial assessments team is responsible for the administration of applications for assistance towards residential care costs and costs for care packages delivered to citizens in their homes. There are currently just over 3,700 active assessment cases in Bexley.

The pension scheme for 1.5 million civil servants in Britain is to be run by a new joint venture in the biggest "spin-out" of a government service under plans to devolve power.

Francis Maude, the cabinet office minister, will announce that handing My Civil Service Pension (MyCSP) to a mutual shows that the government is ending the days of a "binary choice" between central state provision of a service and outsourcing.

The new mutual, a professionally managed form of collective investments, will be a joint venture between MyCSP's 400 staff and a private sector partner. The mutual will take over the administration of pensions for most of Britain's civil servants. The government will continue to assume the liability for the pensions.

Maude will say: "Too often there's been a binary choice between the government providing a service itself, or outsourcing it to the private sector. These choices have historically been driven by a belief that services have to be controlled centrally – with a one-size-fits all approach that has left little room for innovation.

"We are looking for more innovative ways to structure services. We know that employees who have a stake in their business, or take ownership of it completely, have more power and motivation to improve the service they run. They can also benefit from partnerships with private or voluntary sector organisations which can bring in capital and expertise.

"For the private sector, which can no longer expect the generous margins of the past, tapping the talent of frontline staff to improve efficiency will be a priority. The state, too, can keep a stake so that taxpayers benefit from the rising value of an improved service.

"I'm impressed with entrepreneurial zeal of Phil Bartlett and his team at My Civil Service Pension. They are pioneering the mutual joint venture model, and the government is committed to ensuring they have they right support to succeed."

Phil Bartlett, chief executive of My Civil Service Pension, said: "At MyCSP we are proud to be the first pension administration service to pioneer an innovative mutual joint venture between the government, employees and a new private sector partner. By taking the opportunity to mutualise, we can better acknowledge our people and their expertise – and access valuable additional resources and expertise in the private sector. This new and innovative structure will give us the agility to exploit opportunities in the changing pension landscape and grow our business, and the taxpayer will benefit from the increased value of an improved and more efficient service."

Cognizant, a leading provider of consulting, technology, and business process outsourcing services, and Eagle Genomics Ltd., a bioinformatics software company specializing in genomic data management and integration, has announced they are working with the Pistoia Alliance, Inc., a nonprofit, precompetitive alliance of life science companies and vendors, as one of the groups engaged to develop a conceptual cloud-based platform to facilitate access to public and proprietary sources of gene sequence data.

The Pistoia Alliance’s sequence services working group aims to define and document an externally hosted service for securely storing and mining both proprietary derived gene/sequence information and public domain gene databases. This conceptual platform developed by Cognizant and Eagle Genomics, as part of this piloting stage, will enable working group companies to securely share their bioinformatics resources among simultaneous, registered users in a secure, encrypted environment, while leveraging the flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiencies of a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. The future of collaboration and externalization within the life sciences industry will increasingly utilize hosted information services, and the Pistoia Alliance expects to run future pilots to further explore this business model involving a range of participants.

“This engagement supports the Pistoia Alliance’s goal to inspire different ways of thinking in the life sciences industry and effect real change to benefit all our organizations,” said Nick Lynch, President at Pistoia Alliance. “With the combined strengths of Cognizant and Eagle Genomics and the broader Pistoia community, we will build a platform to define standards in sequence services, while overcoming the challenges of disparate data and tools.”

Cognizant and Eagle Genomics will combine the best of their consulting, domain, technology, and business process expertise to effectively deliver the business solution. While Eagle Genomics will contribute specialized bioinformatics knowledge, Cognizant will manage the development of the platform, oversee testing and security validation, and help strengthen the initiative by managing relationships with existing and potential member organizations. The platform will deploy a secure and scalable installation of Ensembl, a software system and supporting database developed jointly by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the European Bioinformatics Institute to produce and maintain automatic annotation on selected eukaryotic genomes. The platform will deliver a Plasmapper and a gene alias service as part of the initial functional services.

HP Enterprise Services UK Limited has announced a new seven-year services agreement signed by National Grid plc, a utility company operating in the United Kingdom and northeastern United States.

With this agreement HP will provide a flexible, enterprise-wide service management solution to enable National Grid to manage its hybrid technology environment.

HP will establish a multisupplier governance model to deliver a service-management function that will provide a single point of accountability across all of National Grid’s technology and services suppliers. HP will integrate all aspects of the IT service management processes and tools across the National Grid ecosystem, with comprehensive management of service levels to the business requirements.

“Technology underpins all of our critical business processes and we need to use technology to operate more efficiently and provide our customers with outstanding customer service and reliability,” said David Lister, chief information officer, National Grid. “We’re working with HP to establish a service management hub to manage our multisupplier environment more effectively and to enable us to be more flexible and achieve our cost and service goals.”

HP will use a combination of its Enterprise Service Management processes and HP Software, including the implementation of HP Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB), HP Service Manager 7, and all the requisite policies and procedures. The agreement also includes dedicated Service Desk Services for approximately 30,000 National Grid employees in the United Kingdom and northeastern United States.

“Many CIOs are wrestling with the challenge of managing complex hybrid environments that include a combination of traditional as well as private and public cloud,” said Mike Nefkens, senior vice president and general manager, HP Enterprise Services, EMEA. “The HP team brings deep service management expertise and tools with proven operational excellence from managing some of the world’s most complex, multisourced environments helping National Grid compete effectively today and in the future.”

Compass Point Business Services, the shared services company established in August 2010 by East Lindsey District Council and South Holland District Council in Lincolnshire, has selected Capita Software Services to support the first step of its merged revenues and benefits operation. The software will create savings for the department of 20% annually. The five-year contract is worth over £700,000.

In addition, Capita Software Services has secured a five year contract worth £370,000 to provide an electronic document management solution to Compass Point Business Services. This will be delivered in partnership with information and workflow management solutions provider, IDOX.

The revenues and benefits application will enable the efficient processing of transactions to support the councils' drive to improve services to residents and businesses. The revenues and benefits information for each council will be stored in separate databases, but appears as a single set of information which can be accessed and updated. As a result, reporting and analysis can be provided for each local authority, while still allowing the councils to gain the efficiencies associated with a single solution. The software will also support self service, which will allow citizens and businesses to make payments for services, such as business rates or council tax, online.

Capita Software Services is also implementing its enterprise mobile working platform to support the councils' mobile working initiative. Initially this will enable revenues and benefits teams to conduct home or site visits, but it has the flexibility to support any business processes that need to be carried out in the field.

The electronic document management solution will be deployed across the revenues and benefits, HR, payroll and finance departments. It will store documents electronically on a central repository, which will increase Compass Point's speed of access to files, reduce the time spent retrieving documents and increase office floor space by reducing the reliance on paper.

"We are confident that our bold approach will allow us to continue to deliver excellent value for money to our residents," said Councillor Paul Przyszlak, chairman of the board, Compass Point. "Making the most out of Capita's software will go a long way towards helping to improve access to services for the local community."

"We expect to see more shared services arrangements forming as councils consider ways to improve efficiency, and software will play an important role in enabling their success," said Paul Millard, operations director, Capita Software Services. "The contracts with Compass Point demonstrate that, through our range of software and our strong partner network, we have the solutions in place to meet the needs of our customers."

The councils' decision to launch Compass Point Business Services is a testament to their commitment to meet the challenge of reducing costs, without impacting the quality of service to citizens. We are delighted to be supporting them in their initiative."

Outsourcing giant Capita has acquired the government and healthcare units of public sector consultancy Tribal for £15.9 million.

Capita said it will be able to offer “a comprehensive menu of services” to support GP commissioners following the acquisition.

Tribal’s health business includes services in clinical coding, health informatics, support for GP commissioners, disease management and estates and facilities planning. The health and government businesses had combined operating losses of £2.7 million last year.

Tribal, which has been in an offer period since 17 December 2010, said that following completion of the proposed sale, it will focus on its education and training businesses in the UK and internationally. The company will remain in an offer period.

Under the terms of the deal, Capita will pay £13.4 million in cash on completion with a further £2.5 million payable on the satisfaction of certain conditions.

Beverley Bryant, managing director of Capita’s health business, said: “The acquisition allows us to supplement our propositions in patient engagement, HR, payroll, finance, IT and estates services with more direct commissioning support services like invoice validation, health needs assessment and risk stratification.

“Our aim is to offer a comprehensive menu of services that cover the full range of functions that GP commissioners will be required to fulfil.”

Satyam Computer Services and its former auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) have agreed to pay a combined $17.5m (£10.7m) in fines in the US after one of India's biggest corporate scandals.

Satyam, an outsourcing company, will pay $10m for falsely reporting more than $1bn in profits over five years.

The company's chairman Ramalinga Raju admitted to the fraud in 2009.

Satyam's shares were indirectly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) as well as in India.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it had fined the Indian affiliate of PwC $7.5m, describing it as the largest American penalty against a foreign firm.

The SEC said the auditor, PW India, failed to independently verify cash balances in Satyam bank accounts.

Capgemini is Selected for New IT Outsourcing Contract at the UK Financial Services Authority

Capgemini Financial Services, a global business unit of the Capgemini Group, has been selected in the competitive bidding to supply IT outsourcing services to the UK Financial Services Authority in a framework agreement covering applications development and applications maintenance for the four-year period 2011-2014.

Under the agreement Capgemini will work with the FSA on strategic projects involving the IT applications required to support the FSA’s regulatory responsibilities. The framework agreement has been designed to give the FSA value for money and the flexibility to address the regulatory change agenda for the next four years. Capgemini will work in close collaboration with the FSA and its suppliers to help the FSA ensure that its systems remain fully attuned to regulatory reform in the UK as well as any changes that are introduced at EU level. The systems in scope will also support the transition to the new regulatory structure in the run-up to 2013 and beyond.

The agreement, known as the Strategic Outsourcing Framework Agreement (SOFA) follows a mandatory competitive bidding process under EU procurement directives. The FSA says that Capgemini was successful because of its in-depth knowledge of financial sector regulation, its collaborative ethos and its cost-effective proposals based on its Rightshore® delivery model, with the Capgemini FSA delivery teams located in the UK and India.

Gareth Lewis, Chief Information Officer at the FSA, said: ‘Capgemini have a longstanding relationship with the FSA and during this time have demonstrated their understanding of the regulatory environment. My team and I look forward to working with them over the next four years.’

Capgemini has worked with the FSA since 2006 and has successfully designed and built a number of its core systems including its Mandatory Electronic Reporting System (MER) which has simplified regulatory reporting for the financial services industry while tightening compliance for the FSA.

Andy Lees, Head of Capgemini Financial Services UK, said: 'We look forward to working with the FSA during a period of significant change for financial industry regulation in the UK as it migrates to the twin peaks model, and to helping them address the challenges and opportunities involved.'

HMV were in the news this week. The high street music retailer continues to struggle with the shift from people buying their CDs from traditional bricks and mortar retailers to buying their music via clicks suppliers, the most notable being iTunes.

The songs haven’t changed – although they don’t play much R&B on Radio 4 so I cannot guarantee that – but the way people consume them have. The supply chain has changed.

In the case of music, we have had both supply chain shifts and also technology shifts.

First off, online retailers like Amazon disrupted HMV by selling CDs online, and doing it cheaper by removing the hassle of having to visit the high street at all. It was the same old CD, just delivered in a different way.

Then Steve Jobs dramatically changed the way we consume music through technological innovation, the invention of the truly music-playing phone (iPhone), and by then connecting the device directly to the online store, removing the need for a CD or delivery vans.

Amazon disrupted HMV, Apple disrupted them both.

But the music is still the same, and we all still have ears to listen to it with – although with the use of plug-in-your-ear ear phones, I do predict a major problem in about 50,000 years time for glasses wearers, because our outer ear lobes will have been made genetically obsolete.

What’s all this got to do with cloud you may ask?

Well, firstly, Apple i-Tunes lives in the cloud. My own iPad connects through my wireless network at home, through my broadband connection and then simply finds the place to buy my music. i-Tunes is the classic disruptive application delivered because of the really big cloud called the Internet.

And, your own internal IT infrastructure is going to feel the impact of cloud at some point. The supply chain for IT is changing, not as dramatically as the music industry, but, not far off.

Today, your IT department orders some servers, probably off a company like Logicalis.

Logicalis, an IT systems integrator, then places on order with the chosen server vendor, the likes of IBM, HP and Cisco. They build them then ship them, to us. We check them and ship them to you, and install them for you. Your IT department then houses and powers them on your premises until they become old and then the cycle starts off again. The entire IT industry has been built on this model for decades.

But, in the same way you can now buy music through the internet, the ability to simply consume computing processing power is going to change the way you think about managing your internal IT supply chain. Today, with a credit card you can go and ‘buy’ applications or computing processing power off the internet. Your Sales Director can decide to move your CRM applications into the cloud – bypassing IT if they so desire.

Putting the power to consume IT into the hands of the consumers is truly a supply chain change that is worth taking note of.

HMV didn’t recognise early enough, although they are catching up quickly now, that consumers didn’t find high street browsing for a single track of music efficient or experiential enough.

The same is now true of a growing part of the IT your business uses on a daily basis.

IT supply change is happening because of the massive growth in bandwidth now available to enable resources to be accessed and consumed from anywhere. Sounds a little bit like buying a song off i-Tunes – you couldn’t do it 10 years ago because it would have taken 24 hours per song to download, now it takes seconds.

Now you can buy ever more computing resources from somewhere in the cloud and it’s only going to increase over time.

My only concern is that like my iPad, I seem to make far worse decisions about what I will listen to because I don’t really have to excerpt much energy to make it happen. Just because I can download an entire Madness album from £4.99 off i-Tunes late on a Saturday night doesn’t mean I should…