Industry news

Siemens PLM Software has announced that Aston Martin is standardizing its global sports car development process using their NX™ software for integrated computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering analysis and Teamcenter® software to manage their product and process knowledge.

This company-wide commitment will enable Aston Martin to drive productivity improvements, common processes and enhanced global collaboration for product design and development.

“The automobile industry is undergoing enormous transformation both in terms of technology and business operations. The increasing complexity of vehicles and changing economic conditions are forcing automakers to re-evaluate their existing PLM applications to align with the best available in the market,” said Sanjeev Pal, PLM analyst at IDC Corp.

“Luxury automotive manufacturers like Aston Martin must make their product decisions earlier and more efficiently in today’s marketplace. We are pleased that our technology has been selected for the advanced product planning through detailed engineering processes which are critical to increased productivity,” said Chuck Grindstaff, president and chief technology officer, Siemens PLM Software. “It’s truly a must for OEMs to be able to manage increased sophistication across all systems in a car to ensure quality while reducing time-to-market.”

Aston Martin’s decision to adopt Siemens PLM Software’s technology as the corporate-wide PLM standard highlights the importance of an open PLM environment to enhance innovation and manage increased sophistication.

Executives from Facebook, Google and other companies have held talks with Twitter over a possible acquisition of the micro-blogging service, pushing its estimated value as high as US$10 billion, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The figure is high for a company that only had revenue of $45 million last year, posted a loss, and estimates its revenue this year will be between $100 million to $110 million, the Journal said.

However it is reported that Twitter executives are not interested in selling. The newspaper did not say whether any formal offer was imminent.

Hewlett-Packard Limited has announced that it has been awarded a US$46 million IT outsourcing contract to improve security and reliability while reducing costs for Interconnector (UK) Limited, the operator of the strategic gas pipeline between continental Europe and the UK.

The ten-year deal involves the full range of HP products and services, including a dual data-centre solution across international boundaries and converged infrastructure technologies designed to offer the high levels of security, availability and reliability.

“Our expectation is that the improved performance will enhance our end user experience and our visibility of service quality and we estimate that it will reduce IT costs significantly over alternative solutions,” said Terry Stephens, chief information officer for Interconnector. “We chose HP because of their deep understanding of our business needs and they delivered a competitively priced solution which minimized our risk.”

The new services will be delivered from HP’s state-of-art data centre in Wynyard, UK with disaster recovery through Interconnector’s Data Centre in Zeebrugge, Belgium. The agreement covers the provision of dual data centres, webhosting, networking services, end-user workplace services, service management, application maintenance and development, security services and disaster recovery, server and storage refresh and technology transfer and adoption support.

“With our technology breadth, data centre and services capability, we are able to help companies like Interconnector build an Instant-On Enterprise. This will enable them to drive growth through innovation, reduce costs through optimization and manage risk to their advantage,” said Craig Wilson, vice president for United Kingdom and Ireland, HP Enterprise Services.

If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that 2011 will see government departments moving outsourcing rapidly to the top of their list of priorities.

Indeed, we’ve already seen a number of private organisations bidding for public sector contracts to provide everything from street cleaners to back office bureaucrats, and it’s a trend that we’re set to see more of in the coming twelve months.

Nicholas Ridley, the former environment secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, once said in his pamphlet “The Local Right” that the ‘ideal’ council was one that utilised practically nobody and meets just once a year to award contracts to private firms.

Produced in 1988, he claimed outsourcing would take politics out of the public service equation, making everything from education to refuse collection a simple transaction.

Although this might have been unthinkable as recently as a few years ago, many are starting to wake up to the fact that, for the public sector at least, it could be the reality.

According to analysis by the consultancy firm, Deloitte, local councils are spending around £42bn a year (40% of their total expenditure) on private sector firms. Deloitte also believes third-party suppliers will make up 44% of total public sector spend by 2014/15 and there are fears among unions the figure could end up even higher.

Suffolk county council have already explored ways to outsource the running of all libraries, youth clubs, highway services and children's centres to private firms. The expectation is that big, private contractors such as Capita, Serco and Sodexho will benefit as councils and quangos follow Suffolk's lead and outsource services in a bid to save money. But is this a dangerous move?

It’s true that there is a risk that we might see private companies becoming so powerful that they could be able to determine what services are provided and how much they charge. But this event might be one driven by the public sector looking to just outsource cheaply, at the cost of improved service, in order hit cost reduction targets over the next four years.

Obviously, a project that is initiated on cost alone stands a much bigger chance of ending in failure. But, as we have seen, if the right due diligence is in place, it’s clear that outsourcing can achieve real results for the public sector.

To deliver both high levels of savings and protect our front line services, new ways of working across the public sector have to be developed, to ensure long term quality and cost savings. This could mean that the private sector may need to change the way it deals with these programmes and how the public sector views private sector bids.

Do we need to see the outsourcing industry stepping up to the mark, really working in partnership with government departments and local authorities in the coming months and years? If we all are really to drive efficiencies without sacrificing service - then the answer is yes!

The Retail Distribution Review is a new piece of regulation that will come into effect at the end of 2012 and will ultimately change the financial services industry. The RDR will apply to all advisers in the retail investment market, regardless of the type of firm they work for (e.g. banks, product providers, and Independent financial advisers or wealth managers). This, in turn, will have an effect on financial products and how they are designed and sold.

There are a number of changes that are due to come into force following the RDR, starting with two options, from which advisers and firms will have to choose one. These are the ‘independent’ option – offering unrestricted and unbiased advice which may include a panel approach (which is required to cover a broad range of requirements and be regularly reviewed). The other option is known as ‘restricted’ and includes offering single or multi-tied advice through simplified or basic advice regimes.

Advisers must make it clear with which regime they operate before advice is given (the ‘execution-only’ sales channel will still exist and will be the only area where no advice is offered).

Product providers will no longer be able to commission advisers for the sale of a product. The onus is now placed on the advisers to set out their own charges in agreement with their customers. Along with this, if the adviser is to charge ongoing fees they must provide a proven service for the fee.

Products written pre-RDR will not be affected by these changes and any alteration/top-ups to these products can continue on a commission basis post-RDR. Products and services must also have clear pricing models that can be evidenced to the customer in an unbundled manner.

We expect the RDR to increasing demand for outsourcing in financial services. The range of financial products on offer to the market is now so extensive that the reality is, for any firm to remain competitive and compliant, the need to outsource is becoming a must. Third parties can provide compliance and regulation support which has kept many firms in business in spite of the environment of constant change in the UK market. Outsourcers can also help providers bring new ‘RDR-friendly’ products to market much more quickly.

Here at OPAL, we’re doing just that - supporting product providers in the evolution of outsourced product design and administration technology to ensure product propositions are fit for purpose under RDR.

Providers are looking for the functionality to administer structured products, onshore/offshore bonds and maximum investment plans (MIPs), among other products, in both pre- and post-RDR environment. In order to make things simpler for financial services providers, we have put together an RDR checklist to summarise the points which will come into force:

Key RDR Check List

• Advisers are able to clearly define service they offer and fees.

• Advisers have the ability to charge fees for a service either against product or standalone.

• Advisers have the ability to clearly show difference in fee and product charges.

• Advisers have the ability to clearly show ongoing services for fees.

• Fee structures are clear and unbundled.

• Advisers are suitably qualified to provide investment advice

Alex Blues, IT sourcing specialist, PA Consulting Group.

I know that they say that a year is a long time in politics, but a year is certainly a long time for NASSCOM.

Last year, there was a nervous and cautious optimism about 2010. This has now evolved to a greater level of certainty about growth in 2011. Everyone we have spoken to has talked about sustained pipeline growth in IT of around 16 to 18 per cent, although this is perhaps slightly lower in BPO.

The key messages from today have been:

1. There has been a major move from project-based work, where every client’s requirement is tailored to their need and to platform-based work. This has led to a lot more talk about specialism and domain knowledge and as a result, organisations are talking about requiring different skill sets.

2. There has been very little talk of offshore. People are talking instead about globalisation. This can be seen just from the attendees at the conference – there are far more nationalities represented here than last year.

The key point for today is that the market has moved from ‘lift and shift’ or ‘mess for less’ to ‘innovate and serve’. All of the CEOs that we interviewed talked about the move from ‘time and materials’ type contracts to outcome-based business solutions, where the client is looking to have a business problem solved rather than having the component of a problem solved, leaving the client responsible for the outcome.

Organisations are therefore applying pricing formulae based on the outcome, not the input and component prior to that outcome. Again, this endorses the point that there is a greater need for domain knowledge and a greater need for different types of staff.

Given this backdrop, it was widely agreed that the role of the CIO is going to diminish as decision making moves from the CIO to the CFO and CEO. NASSCOM is a completely different place this year in terms of the level of optimism and the maturity of what people are talking about. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

For many organisations, fear of change is the biggest hurdle in moving from their current electronic archiving format to PDF/A. Many believe the transition to PDF/A is difficult to implement and expensive, and that their current systems are “good enough.”

Throughout Europe and Asia, and increasingly at U.S. federal government and state government agencies, the PDF/A standard is being successfully adopted for long-term archival of scanned and electronic documents. The standard meets government requirements and gives organisations the flexibility to manage their own document archives, offering significant cost savings for storage and bandwidth over the long term. Just why, then, are both UK and USA businesses being so slow to adopt the PDF/A ?

Although it’s not law yet, in the UK there are serious fears that a change in policy on digital archiving would present a huge cost for the country’s already stretched business community. The same applies to the USA where proposed new laws for electronic document archival are already creating a furore. If implemented, not only would these laws fundamentally change the ways that government departments and businesses approach scanning and storing documents, but some believe that they will ultimately result in an unfunded mandate that could cost organisations thousands of pounds in order to comply with the law. However, if the right strategy is employed, then the transition to PDF/A needn’t be costly or complicated.

A quick look at the way archiving has developed over the years will reveal why PDF/A has become the standard of choice for archiving in many countries. Every governmental agency around the world has its own specific requirements when it comes to archiving records, some require documents to be retained for 10, 20 or 30 years plus. Most of this archived material was initially kept in hard copy, but the introduction of computer technology has enabled departments to create digital indexes that help users easily find paper documents or media.

Continued improvements in technology have resulted in the use of imaging systems and the evolution of enterprise content management (ECM) systems for managing records and documents. This has enabled these systems to become the index of record and the electronic repository for digital records, which were primarily scanned documents saved in TIFF format. Now, though, Adobe Corporation’s Portable Document Format (PDF) has become the predominant, accepted digital file format. PDF files can be generated either by scanning hard copy documents to create an image-only PDF or through the use of a centralised PDF rendition server for documents that originated in digital format.

However, despite the widespread use of PDF, not all PDFs are created equal. Depending on user-based settings, there is the potential for significant inconsistencies with the way PDF-based records are generated, which ultimately could have an impact on the way records are opened, and importantly, read in the future.

Realising that the use of PDF as a long-term archiving format had the potential to present problems, the International Standards Organization (ISO) approved a new standard - PDF/Archive in 2005. The PDF/A standard was developed with the archival requirements of companies, libraries and government departments in mind. To achieve compliance and meet long-term archiving requirements, PDF/A output had to offer a number of key features; namely to be device independent, self-contained, self-documenting and free of encryption. Importantly, PDF/A must also maintain static visual representation of documents and provide a consistent methodology for managing metadata, as well as be capable of maintaining structure and the semantic meaning of a PDF’s content. By achieving these key features, PDF/A provides the flexibility to serve as a file format of choice for archival documents.

There are many upsides to implementing PDF/A. Current archiving systems that are based on black-and-white TIFF or basic PDF file formats are not necessarily protected from inaccessibility over the long term. In addition, these formats can result in files that are very large, making it incredibly costly to store documents, particularly those that are scanned in full-colour, and increase bandwidth costs for sharing the files. However, with tools to implement PDF/A, organisations will be able to save scanned compressed documents in full colour in files smaller than black-and-white TIFF, resulting in the need for less storage and bandwidth, while preserving the look and feel of the original document.

Governments around the world often rely on ISO standards when defining their technology requirements, and the PDF/A standard is no exception. Founded in September 2006, the PDF/A Competence Centre is an initiative of the Association for Digital Document Standards (ADDS) and its aim is to promote the exchange of information and experience in the area of long-term archiving in accordance with ISO 19005. The association is geared towards developers of PDF solutions, companies that work with PDF/A in the area of DMS/ECM, and users who want to implement PDF/A in their organisations.

Throughout Europe and Asia, PDF/A has been adopted as the standard for long-term government archives. In 2008, the Swiss Federal Council began requiring PDF/A format for all communications between the government and citizens. In Austria, all land register deeds must comply with PDF/A, in order to prove the authenticity of its documents through a qualified digital signature. And in Germany the use of PDF/A has been recommended for e-government applications. The European Commission has also included PDF/A in the recommended data formats for scanned documents and long-term archiving in order to standardise the exchange of documents between the European Commission and the governments of its member states.

Nonetheless, in the UK and USA, adoption of PDF/A has lagged behind. Although, momentum has begun to grow in the US over the last year or so due to federal government agencies and more than a dozen states requiring the use of the PDF/A format or strongly advocating for users to adhere to recommendations from leading organisations such as the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) or AIIM, the enterprise content management association.

Of course, there are always some limitations and the use of PDF/A alone does not guarantee long-term preservation or exact replication of source material. And, the creation of PDF/A does not explicitly mean that PDF is the best choice for archiving documents. However, if archives are using PDF, then PDF/A is the superior choice for ensuring long-term accessibility. The legal requirements to migrate to PDF/A for long-term archiving should not be considered an unfunded mandate. Instead, governments and businesses should feel the fear and do it anyway and see the PDF/A standard as an opportunity to ensure the long-term accessibility of critical documents, with the bonus of being able to reduce costs associated with storage and bandwidth needed to support electronic archives over the long run.

Fujitsu and Oracle Strengthen Decades-Long Relationship

Fujitsu and Oracle today announced that they are strengthening a multi-decade partnership with the extension of their SPARC development relationship, an expansive, new product distribution agreement and a commitment to further joint engineering, marketing and sales promotion efforts.

Fujitsu and Oracle will advance joint engineering efforts, to help ensure Fujitsu and Oracle products are optimised and tested to best run Oracle software in mission critical environments.

The companies previously announced (December 2, 2010), a new unified enclosure design featuring logos of both companies for the Fujitsu and Oracle SPARC Enterprise M-series servers. Fujitsu and Oracle have also made available a roadmap of M-series servers that provides 15 times better performance in the next three years. These new developments will further ensure these milestones are met.

Moving forward, sales teams from both Fujitsu and Oracle are now aligned to jointly sell SPARC Enterprise servers. This will help to ensure ongoing continuity while continuing to improve customer satisfaction.

Additionally Fujitsu signed a new Oracle PartnerNetwork distribution agreement giving Fujitsu the ability to resell and distribute Oracle products across the full Oracle portfolio. This permits Fujitsu to act as a systems integrator and solution provider for the overall Oracle stack.

HH, leading print management and marketing services provider, has secured a €5 million global marketing communications contract with Sara Lee, the global consumer brand manufacturer. Following a three-year period of working as a procurement partner to Sara Lee in three European markets, the new contract with HH has been expanded to nine European countries, including the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

The contract follows an initiative between IBM and Sara Lee which reviews global strategic partnerships for various categories of spend, including printed marketing communications.

The business model provides Sara Lee with a combination of online procurement and asset management systems and dedicated onsite HH support teams for the Sara Lee marketing departments. The HH account team consists of 18 people and will function as a hub between the marketers, creative agencies and the suppliers.

A joint HH / IBM implementation team is managing the phased roll-out to the new countries. The team are assessing the individual spend and workflow profile of each region to ensure savings can be maximised at the earliest opportunity. Sara Lee has an extensive requirement for Point of Sale (POS) printing, one of the key areas of strength in HH’s services portfolio. HH will be working closely with client brand owners to deliver the wide remit of in-store marketing communications required, flyers, brochures, POS, Digital POS and studio services.

"We are delighted to be delivering significant savings and support Sara Lee's marketing teams with our specialist knowledge, as well as working together with IBM as a strategic partner" says Robert MacMillan, CEO, HH Associates.

CA Technologies and Capgemini has announced a partnership to establish a global Energy, Carbon and Sustainability Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) service. The partnership will help customers better manage complex sustainability data collection and increasingly challenging reporting demands, enabling them to focus on sustainability strategy and carbon reduction activities.

“The global alliance between CA Technologies and Capgemini is among the first of its type for energy, carbon and sustainability management services,” said Stuart Neumann, senior manager at Verdantix. “Capgemini’s reputation for business process outsourcing is well-suited to complement CA ecoSoftware, which Verdantix recently identified as a leading solution in the carbon and energy management software market. This alliance between CA Technologies and Capgemini delivers a strong sustainability management capability to the market.”

The managed service will provide customers with ‘actionable insight’ into their level of sustainability, which will help support and accelerate achieving their environmental objectives. Internally, Capgemini UK already is benefitting from this new BPO service to manage its energy and sustainability data. Historically, spreadsheets were used to collect and manage data. But the increasing complexity of data requirements, multiple reporting and the need to provide different levels of user access meant that a new auditable software solution was required. The new managed service – powered by CA ecoSoftware – captures all energy and carbon data and provides web-based reports to the UK Sustainability Board and operational dashboards to the Environmental team. It is estimated that this service will reduce sustainability operating costs by 30 percent while providing improved data quality.

Tony Kelly, New Business Services Director at Capgemini BPO said, “Capgemini has always embraced innovation in its BPO services development and we are finding our clients’ back office needs increasingly include Sustainability Data Management and Reporting. So a new managed service is a logical extension of our strength in Finance and Accounting and Supply Chain Services BPO. Capgemini selected the CA ecoSoftware solution because it can meet the needs and scale of our global enterprise clients.”

CA ecoSoftware works by providing accurate, auditable sustainability data to meet the needs of global client operations. By providing insight into sustainability operations data, organizations are better equipped to comply with regional regulation and to increase operational efficiency. This helps enterprises reduce carbon emissions, manage natural resource consumption, cut energy costs and deliver on environmental goals. Through bundling the CA ecoSoftware solution with Capgemini’s managed BPO service, customers gain an informed position on their sustainability via a cost effective managed business process delivery model.