Industry news

BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Green IT Promotion Council, GIPC, to promote the adoption of green IT.

The agreement will see the pair working more closely together to share information, systems and work on the promotion of energy efficiency and green technology. Both believe the partnership is "an element of their activities to address the issue of global warming", they said.

David Clarke, chief executive of the BCS, said: "I’m delighted that we are going to be working more closely with GIPC to help the IT industry understand the issue and improve its green credentials.”

Hiroshi Suzuki, director of GIPC, said: “It is becoming increasingly important to achieve more energy efficient products as well as energy efficient leading edge data centres. We are pleased that we will be able to discuss it internationally with BCS, share best practice and encourage more organisations to consider energy efficiency.”

The Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) has allocated £12.5 million to a new cloud computing shared services initiative for universities and colleges.

The shared cloud services initiative will put £10 million towards building and supporting shared storage and data management services. This amount will be split between building the cloud infrastructure itself, developing a sustainable funding model for the future and building specific data management applications for HE providers.

A further £2.5 million will be spent on developing cloud-based services to support university administration.

JANET (UK), the organisation that runs the higher education sector shared network, will appoint a broker to manage the allocation of cloud services and the relationship with suppliers.

Peter Tinson, executive secretary of the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA), said that there is a degree of cultural resistance towards shared services among universities. “I think there’s a fear of loss of control,” he said.

The overall cloud services project will be operated by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

Internet access in Egypt has returned after the shamed President and government cut all services affecting twitter and facebook.

Firms measuring the traffic have now said the four major internet service providers are back to business as usual.

While the services were disrupted, many Egyptians quickly found ways around the blocks. On 1 February Google introduced a "speak-to-tweet" service which allowed people to connect to Twitter via the telephone.

US President Barack Obama has said he believes that Egypt cannot go back to how it was before the uprising against President Hosni Mubarak , and that the time for change is now.

Nine in ten looking to share more front line services in the next two years

Nine out of ten local authorities in England are looking to share front line and back office functions within the next two years following the government’s decision to reduce local government spend, according to a survey of senior local authority managers by Browne Jacobson published today.

Almost two-thirds (65%) will target back office functions and 68% front line services in the next year.

Some 85% of local authorities might also consider outsourcing on a service by service basis whilst 78% would also consider setting up a joint venture with the private sector.

Environmental and social care services are the two most popular areas where senior managers would consider sharing.

Not surprisingly costs savings appear to be the key driver for those considering a move to more shared services, with 63% expecting to save up to 10% of their total budget savings by sharing services in the financial year ending April 2012.

But political and public opposition is seen by 28% of senior managers interviewed as the biggest barrier to delivering shared services in the local government sector. That said 84% of local authorities agreed that the long term rewards of shared services justified the short term pain.

The Ipsos MORI survey for Browne Jacobson interviewed 150 senior local authority managers in England including chief executives, deputy chief executives, chief finance officers and service heads.

It’s a far cry from nearly three years ago when a Browne Jacobson commissioned survey of 178 public sector managers revealed that less than half saw the potential to merge front line services and only 5% saw opportunities of working with the private sector.

Commenting on the results Browne Jacobson’s head of shared services, Dominic Swift, said: “The government’s austerity bombshell is clearly forcing authorities to look at innovative and radical ways in which to deliver their services.

“We can also see a noticeable sea change in attitudes towards merging front line services.

“Councils are starting to think outside the box and previous no-go areas such as the private sector and large scale outsourcing are also back on the agenda.

“With local authorities up and down the country already feeling the financial pinch the next step is to turn the shared services rhetoric into action.”

The best way to increase the number of IT entry-level jobs in the UK is to encourage highly skilled people from abroad to settle here, according to Mike Lynch, CEO and founder of Autonomy.

Attending an Intellect conference in London yesterday, Lynch was asked whether the best way to boost the IT jobs market was to have more IT companies headquartered in the UK.

ynch, whose company is based in Cambridge, agreed, but added that the best way to do this would be to encourage highly skilled people from overseas to work here.

"A large number of the entrepreneurs that start businesses in Silicon Valley are from other countries," he said. "We need to be looking to encourage very highly skilled people to come over here in the same way that they might go over to the US; we need to let them know that this is a good place to live. This would generate lots of entry-level jobs."

Lynch said the government's immigration cap is dissuading entrepreneurs from coming to this country and is therefore hindering job creation.

http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2024348/bigger-influx-gifted-techies-overseas-jobs-market-autonomy-ceo#ixzz1DGZot7pe

As the crisis in Egypt continues, Ovum lead analyst Peter Ryan asks what the effect on the country’s outsourcing market will be:

As the global community watches in horror at the scenes unfolding in Cairo, many in the outsourcing community are pondering the demise of what appeared to be the next big thing, in terms of location, in offshore services delivery. The virtual state of martial law imposed by the Mubarak government not only impacts the ability of outsourcers to service their clients, but also counters the pro-business message of openness that has been the watchword for foreign investment for the past several years. The largest question remains whether this once-waking outsourcing giant can recover regardless of a change in government, and what the broader implications are for offshoring.

Curfews, restricted movement, and no Internet impact service delivery

It is clear that the expression "business as usual" has no practical application for outsourcing work currently slated for Egypt. Communications within, to, and from the country have been minimal, and staff are under government curfews restricting movements to and from work. These constraints are giving outsourcers on the ground a significant amount of pain from the strain of fulfilling tactical processes and ensuring that adequate labor and technology backups are in place.

Many service providers, as well as their clients, are re-evaluating whether Egypt is still the right location for outsourcing deployments.

This is especially disturbing considering the large number of global players that have set up in Egypt in the past several years – among them most recently, Sutherland Global Services in Alexandria. Other IT vendors that have been investing in Egypt for longer periods, just as large, home-grown providers (including Xceed and Raya), could be impacted severely in the coming months as clients are anxious to minimize offshore risk. Microsoft has already begun to move some of its work out of Egypt.

Can Egypt's outsourcing sector recover?

Over the longer term, it will be crucial to see how Egypt's global reputation as a leading destination for outsourcing services can recover from this wave of violence and civil and political unrest. Effective damage control among prospective and existing investors will be difficult for any future administration, and convincing many outside investors of ongoing Egyptian stability will be a tough task to say the least. For nearly ten years, executives, consultants, and site selection specialists have been fed a steady diet of positive rhetoric from Egypt's government, quasi-government affiliates, and the Egyptian private sector touting the country's political and economic stability in order to secure BPO and IT service investment. It is unlikely that these same investors will be quick to take such declarations at face value in the future.

However, Ovum believes that Egypt's outsourcing space retains value in the form of a sizable talent pool with significant education and language skills. This, along with generous financial incentives, has been the backbone of the country's growth in services. That said, after recent events the extent to which educated, multilingual Egyptians will choose to emigrate to more stable shores (at least in the short term) is questionable. This could erode the country's competitiveness further.

What are the Egyptian crisis's broader implications for offshoring?

What has recently occurred in Egypt is certain to have ramifications for offshore outsourcing destinations the world over.

“Following recent border violence in Mexico and the 2009 terror attacks in Mumbai, the events in Egypt are certain to make outsourcers and their clients much more risk averse than any time in recent memory, and are likely to push many companies to choose the more secure , albeit costlier, option of keeping third-party work onshore,” added Ryan.

According to respondents to Ovum's 2010 CRM outsourcing Business Trends survey, this sentiment is already present among Western enterprises. Approximately two-thirds indicated no offshoring plans, and regardless of location, the Egyptian unrest will reduce the bar for enterprise risk tolerance for offshore delivery.

Tim Palmer, expert in HR Transformation consulting and the Co-Chair of the European HR Outsourcing Association at PA Consulting Group.

In the third of four articles, Tim Palmer, expert in HR Transformation and the Co-Chair of the European HR Outsourcing Association at PA Consulting Group, examines a further two myths of HR outsourcing and dispels some commonly-held yet erroneous beliefs.

Myth 3: Don’t outsource a mess. A claim often repeated by those who have had a negative experience outsourcing, but not bought by industry insiders, it is generally better to have well-defined processes and taking out surplus head count before outsourcing, looking at why these areas have not been addressed before, and finding credible answers to why things are different now.

Too often this myth is used by HR leaders as an excuse to procrastinate. Outsourcing can provide a trigger to get things done. A better alternative to this myth would be: “Don’t outsource a mess unless you understand what the mess is and exactly what you and the service provider are going to do to correct it”.

Consider what innovation will be delivered in years three, four and five of the contract. How can the organisation ensure the outsource provider has an incentive to, for example, upgrade HR applications and processes when new capabilities become available?

There is a need to build incentives for the outsourcing provider that reflect requirement for innovation, such as delivery of better training services or streamlined leaving processes, and building in a fair way of sharing risk and reward.

Myth 4: You’ll lose control. Our research into European HR outsourcing shows that there is a ‘transparency gap’ between HR service providers and their customers – with customers believing service providers to be too opaque. It seems that the outsourcing industry defaults to minimal transparency where allowed. If this transparency gap is closed, the onus is on the client organisation to put this at the heart of its requirements and engage with the market. When done, enhanced control and better quality service will follow.

Much HR outsourcing has failed in this regard. Commonly-used procurement and contracting processes do not drive transparency. Indeed, the rhetoric of the outsourcing industry is that organisations do not need to worry about how the work is being done; ‘look instead at the end results’. But this is another myth. When an outsourcing approach is transformational - with services provided in a new way, usually from a remote location, suspicion can be fuelled. With no clarity over what is happening, who is delivering services and what skills they have, client teams understandably assume the worst. Is the provider deliberately cutting costs by downgrading skills in the offshore centre? More likely, the provider has lost staff and is struggling to recruit adequate skills. But with no transparency, who knows?

Next week, in the fourth and final blog in this series, Tim Palmer , investigates a fifth and final myth of HR outsourcing and shows how assessing the practicality and utility of sourcing for your own business, even if it is not actually pursued as a strategy in the end, can protect HR’s board-level reputation and ensure ongoing control

Higgins will say that while Intellect supports the government's technology-related initiatives, they agree with outgoing CBI director general Sir Richard Lambert that the government has so far failed to fully articulate its technology vision for the UK economy.

He will talk about the necessity of the creation of a ‘t-inclusive' economy – where the t stands for technology – "in the same way as we are creating an e-inclusive society".

He will argue that the government's drive to support UK technology startups is important but not enough, and that the coalition also needs to ensure that "technology companies, large and small, UK and foreign, are supplying services that are central to our country's growth strategy".

To kick-start the process, Intellect will stage a technology summit with key industry players ahead of the Budget to develop a growth strategy, and write to Chancellor George Osborne and Business Secretary Vince Cable to invite the government to take part.

Source: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2023685/champion-urge-government-spell-technology-vision#ixzz1Cz3re3fx

CSC have announced CSC BizCloud™, the only on-premise private cloud billed as a service currently available. By offering this service, CSC has taken the work out of implementing a private cloud and overcome many objections that security-conscious organizations have to cloud adoption. BizCloud is expected to accelerate the adoption of a private cloud by businesses and government agencies because it eliminates long-lead times for implementation and the need to budget for capital investment.

“For enterprises, it has been difficult to obtain the economic benefits of a public cloud which is delivered to them as a private cloud,” said Robert Mahowald, vice president, SaaS & Cloud Services, IDC. “CSC has been very strategic with this announcement. They engaged customers in a discussion about their business needs and developed a flexible solution that addresses those needs spot on. BizCloud and CSC's related services break new ground for IT buyers trying to navigate the road to data center transformation.”

BizCloud features CloudCompute, CSC’s new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) architecture which is deployed in the CSC Trusted Cloud Datacenters. CloudCompute delivers compute, storage and network resources as a service to support any application and is especially capable for hosting mission critical and business critical workloads. The CloudCompute infrastructure is built on the Vblock™ Infrastructure Platform from VCE, The Virtual Computing Environment Company. Vblock integrates the leading virtualization software, networking, security, computing, storage and management technologies from industry leaders Cisco, EMC and VMware. CSC's partnership

India’s flagship outsourcing sector said Wednesday it expected to post 19 percent export growth in the current financial year, as it rebounds from the global economic crisis.

Som Mittal, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), said exports were expected to touch $59 billion this financial year ending in March.

The strong recovery comes after outsourcing saw exports grow just five percent to $49 billion in 2009-10, when the sector was buffeted by the global financial downturn.

“It has been a spectacular rebound,” Mittal told a news conference.

The outsourcing group had originally forecast export revenue growth of 13 to 15 percent for the current year.

Mittal, citing “pent up demand for information technology and business process outsourcing services,” forecast the sector’s export revenues would grow by 16 to 18 percent to up $70 billion in the next financial year to March 2012.

US and other foreign firms, drawn by India’s vast, educated English-speaking workforce and labour costs that are lower than in the West, have farmed out a wide range of jobs from answering bank client calls to processing insurance claims and equity analysis.

Mittal said a recent wave of protectionist sentiment in the United States had “very little” impact as US companies needed to outsource to cut costs.

“It has been rhetoric. When business needs something, you can’t stop them,” Mittal said, noting the US share of the outsourcing market had risen by one percentage point to 61.5 percent in the current year.

Outsourcing was a particularly heated issue in the US mid-term elections last November, which wound up with US President Barack Obama’s Democrats suffering heavy defeats.

Mittal said the domestic outsourcing industry also grew strongly by 16 percent to hit 787 billion rupees ($17 billion) in the current year to March.

The Indian outsourcing sector directly employs some 2.54 million workers and accounts for 6.4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

India recently lost its crown to the Philippines as the call centre capital of the world. But Mittal said the Indian outsourcing sector was “leveraging technology” now to move up the value chain in its range of services.

India continues to lead the overall global outsourcing market, increasing its share to 55 percent in 2010, up from 51 percent the previous year, Mittal said.