Industry news

The ICT jobs market in Northern Ireland is experiencing a greater skills shortage than the rest of the UK, according to e-skills UK.

E-skills UK has published its third Northern Ireland "ICT Snapshot" report.

The Snapshot shows that while fewer ICT companies recruited in 2010, they took on larger volumes of staff. Currently nine percent of ICT companies have vacancies for professionals, and professional skills shortages remain more common in NI than elsewhere in the UK.

The report also found nearly half (45 percent) of ICT companies in Northern Ireland are more optimistic about the outlook for their business than they were in mid-2010. The state of the global economy, government debt and the availability of business are the overriding factors for concern.

The recruitment outlook for 2011, although down on 2010, is still positive though, said e-skills UK, with nearly a quarter of ICT companies expecting to recruit IT and telecoms professionals over the next six months.

However, nearly one in five (18 percent) of ICT companies anticipate that recruitment over the next six months "will be difficult" mainly due to a lack of skills, qualifications and experience in applicants.

Recruitment is predominantly in the area of software development with technical skills most commonly sought after being in SQL, .NET, SQL Server, JDBC, Java, C#, PHP, JavaScript, C++ and HTML.

The ICT Snapshot draws on results from a survey of more than 300 employers of ICT professionals in Northern Ireland.

Last month, e-skills UK said the UK IT and telecoms industry needs more than 110,000 new recruits to just meet this year’s demand.

The sector skills council said that employment in the IT industry is expected to grow at 2.19 percent a year over the next decade – nearly five times faster than the UK sector average of 0.45 percent.

Cash-strapped council chiefs in Southampton are pleading with multi-million pound suppliers to slash their costs as they face a £25m financial crisis.

The council wants its major private sector suppliers to help it make savings of £65m over the next four years.

No threats have been made to renegotiate contracts but chief executive Alistair Neill and finance boss Councillor Jeremy Moulton, pictured, have requested “proposals on cost reductions and any other proposals which would benefit the council financially, while minimising the impact upon services”.

The Tory-run council just unveiled its budget plan to tackle a £25m black hole over the next year including sweeping cuts to services and staff pay, and around 250 job losses, including up to 40 senior mangers.

The council says it is having to make the record savings after up to a third of its Government funding was cut.

Cllr Moulton said: “We have written to all our major suppliers to ask them if they can find new ways of saving the council and taxpayers money, by doing things better and cutting out non-essential costs, without impacting upon the service being delivered.

“The council, its staff and members of the public are being a s k e d to find significant savings to reduce the national deficit. It is only right that we ask suppliers to do the same.”

Business outsourcing giant Capita was the council’s biggest supplier last year receiving more than £40m to provide key services and consultancy.

The council has already refused to renegotiate an early five-year extension to a £290m, ten-year contract to run council departments such as customer services, IT, human resources, property, tax and benefits departments in return for guaranteed savings of £33m.

Other major suppliers used by the council in 2009/10 include Hays Construction & Property (£2.6m), bus companies First Hampshire and Dorset (£3m) and Go South Coast Ltd (£1.7m), insurance firm Zurich (£2.6m), food wholesale distributor 3663 (£1.2m), and BT (£1m). Capita said it had been asked to consider “where services can be delivered differently to generate efficiencies”.

A spokesman said: “The next step is for the council and Capita to thoroughly review and assess what can be achieved. It would not be appropriate to comment on the possible impact at this stage.”

Other major suppliers were unable to comment on the letter last night.

Hampshire outsourcing firm Serco was last year forced to apologise for demanding rebates from suppliers in the wake of public spending cuts.

The firm – which runs prisons, nuclear facilities and ports for the Government – wanted retrospective rebates of 2.5 per cent and warned the way its suppliers responded would affect their “working relationship” in the future.

http://www.hampshirechronicle.co.uk/business/8824569.Council_pleads_with_suppliers_on_costs/?ref=rss

CSC has announced the addition of Advanced Collaboration Solutions for IBM Lotus to its existing portfolio of Business Collaboration Solutions. This set of services provides business value, adoption, and cost benefits through a CSC Business Consulting practice dedicated to IBM Lotus software, and a new Collaboration as a Service (CaaS) offering. Enterprises can rely on CSC to help create a strategic direction for collaboration within their businesses and provide a cost-effective, managed collaboration platform hosted on site or in a CSC Trusted Cloud environment.

CSC currently manages more than 1 million seats of IBM Lotus collaboration tools, and these new services expand the company’s current capabilities to help customers enhance, extend, and expand their collaboration capabilities. CSC provides the full spectrum of offerings, affording the customer significant choice and flexibility.

Gartner, Inc. has identified the Top 30 countries for globally sourced activities in 2010-2011, each one rated according to 10 criteria, and found that eight new countries have made their debut in the Top 30. Many organizations that choose to move IT services to lower-cost countries are daunted by the task of determining which country or countries would best host their operations.

“This year the Top 30 countries are exclusively emerging nations,” said Ian Marriott, research vice president at Gartner.” As the pace of change is slower in developed countries we have chosen to focus on those locations that are still maturing and developing, domestically and internationally.”

Nine countries from Asia/Pacific were represented in the 30 leading countries, compared with 10 in previous years. These included the undisputed leader in offshore services — India — and the greatest challenger in terms of potential scale — China.

Gartner's Top 30 locations for offshore services in 2010, by region, are:

Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama and Peru.

Asia/Pacific: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.

Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA): Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Hungary, Mauritius, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa, Turkey and Ukraine.

Seven developed countries have moved out of the Top 30 this year - Australia, Canada, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore and Spain. However, they should still be considered important in the context of nearshore locations whose maturity — albeit with somewhat lower cost advantage — offers significant benefits for organizations seeking a balanced portfolio of countries from which services are delivered. In addition, Uruguay has also been displaced — not because it has been performing worse over the past year, but because this dynamic market has seen other countries making more noticeable progress.

In the past 12 months, Gartner has seen considerable efforts from many countries to consolidate or grow their positions as leading locations for offshore services. Emerging nations have placed significant emphasis on IT and business process services providing a vehicle for their economic growth, as many potential trading partners are moving from recession to tentative growth. The result of this is that eight new countries have moved into the Top 30 — five for the first time - Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Colombia, Mauritius and Peru — along with three re-entrants - Panama, Sri Lanka and Turkey.

Americas

This year, eight countries from Latin America appeared in the final list of 30 compared with seven from the Americas as a whole in previous years. “This indicates the progress being made in this region, and these countries are becoming an attractive proposition for the largest buying market for offshore services — the United States,” said Mr. Marriott.

In the past, a lack of government support for offshore initiatives has restricted development by countries in the Americas. Currently Mexico and Chile are rated “very good” for government support, with Brazil and Costa Rica meriting a “good” rating. Mexico leads the ratings for labor pool with a “very good” score, and is followed by Brazil and Chile — both with “good” ratings. The region performed creditably in terms of infrastructure, with Brazil and Chile rated “best” and Argentina and Colombia “worst”. In the educational system category, Chile, Mexico and Costa Rica were the highest ranked countries with a rating of “good” while Panama scored lowest with a “poor” rating.

In the key evaluation criterion of cost, Mexico was the only country in the region to score “very good”; all others were rated “good”, although for Argentina this was a step down from last year's score of “very good”. In the rating for political and economic environment, Brazil was clearly the top performing nation with a rating of “excellent”, moving up from “very good” last year. Data and intellectual property security and privacy continued to be a weakness in the region, with Mexico the only country to exceed a rating of “fair”.

Asia/Pacific

Government support for promoting their countries as offshore service locations was strong in India, China and Malaysia, although Indonesia continues to be considered poor for government support. The combination of skills, existing scale and future scalability gave India a labor pool advantage over other countries in the region; Vietnam improved its position in this category, joining China, Malaysia and the Philippines on a rating of “good”, and Indonesia managed to improve its comparative rating from “poor” to “fair”. China and Malaysia continued to improve their positions and were both rated highly for infrastructure, while Bangladesh fared worst with a rating of “poor”. China, India, Malaysia and the Philippines again led the rankings for educational system.

On cost, there was an overall change of leader in the region, with Vietnam moving down to “very good” and Indonesia moving up to “excellent”, which is the top score across all the countries Gartner analyzed. All other countries in the region were rated “very good” for cost, with the exception of Malaysia, which was rated “good”. Overall, the cost dimension for the Asia/Pacific region continues to offer an advantage over the Americas and EMEA. In the remaining categories however, the region is noticeably weaker - the political and economic environment remains a concern for many companies when moving work to offshore locations, and global and legal maturity is still an area of weakness for the region, with only India and Malaysia reaching a rating of “good”. The category of data and intellectual property security and privacy was a particular weakness in this region, with India the only country to achieve a rating of “good” and no fewer than six nations scoring “poor”.

EMEA

This year’s final list of 30 countries included 13 from EMEA - a mix of European Union (EU) members some European nations that remain outside the EU and three African countries. Of these countries only Egypt achieved a rating higher than “good” for government support, reflecting the amount of focus still needed to create an environment that will support the drive of these nations to become a part of organizations' global delivery models. However, South Africa did improve its rating from “fair” to “good”. The labor pool ratings in EMEA were also indicative of some limitations, either in quality or in the scale of appropriate resources, as no country achieved a rating higher than “good”.

In comparative terms across the Top 30 countries, Gartner observed some deterioration in the scores for educational systems in EMEA in 2010. Russia slipped back this year from “very good” to “good”, while Hungary and Romania moved from “good” to “fair”. Furthermore, last year's leaders on cost attractiveness — Egypt, Slovakia and the Ukraine — all slipped back from ratings of “very good” to “good”, while Russia moved back from “good” to “fair”, indicating the cost pressures now being exerted by a combination of the economic downturn and increased demand on somewhat limited resources.

“Sourcing managers and service providers should use the various ratings to help determine which locations are right for their individual organizations,” said Mr. Marriott. “In this increasingly dynamic global environment, multinational providers will continue to extend their footprint in different geographies, carrying with them their expertise and maturity, while local providers will strive to become offshore providers, searching for opportunities and niches they can explore. Even though some countries are rated poorly for some categories, clients may find individual providers — global and local — whose capabilities mitigate some of the risks.”

India's authorities have supported a scheme which could lead to inmates answering calls from the UK.

The experiment is taking place in a high-security Cherlapalli prison near Hyderabad. The scheme to turn convicts into "outsourcing providers" for local firms and eventually, it is hoped, international clients.

Prisoners are being trained in basic data entry skills with jail authorities hoping that they will be able to answer calls and input data for UK services. Regulations such as the forbidding of the internet and telephone within jails are currently being overcome.

Other Indian states are watching the experiment carefully to see how the prisoners fare with the tasks and also how the international outsourcing community will respond.

The 10-year-old Cherlapalli jail is relatively new and only moderately overcrowded when compared to other Indian jails. It is hoped that around 200 workers will be trained in the scheme which should get the green light shortly.

Four days after the Egyptian government ordered Internet service providers to disconnect from the Internet, the country's last working Internet company has abruptly vanished from cyberspace.

Noor Group, a small service provider that hosted Internet connections for the country's stock exchange and other businesses, became completely unreachable at around 10:46 p.m. Cairo time (Eastern European Time), according to Earl Zmijewski, general manager with Internet monitoring company Renesys.

Renesys operates a network monitoring system that can track how connected Egypt is to the rest of the Internet. Before it disappeared, Noor was the last company running data in and out of the country, Zmijewski said. Now e-mail, Web traffic and other Internet services are unable to reach any network in the country, he said.

Other Internet observers reported Noor's disappearance too on Monday.

Thought to handle only about 8 percent of the county's Internet connections, Noor had served as a critical lifeline to the country since the government had ordered service cut early Friday morning.

Nobody is sure how Noor was able to keep operating, even as larger ISPs such as Vodafone and Telecom Egypt voluntarily cut their Egyptian networks off from the rest of the world.

As protesters in Egypt continue to march in the streets, the government has apparently ordered the country cut off from the Internet in an effort to prevent information from getting in or out of the country. Protesters had been using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to organize themselves.

Even with the Internet restrictions, Egyptians had been finding ways to connect with the outside world. After being cut off late last week, mobile-phone service is now working again. And landline telephone service has been operational throughout the crisis.

Source: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/networking/3258949/egypt-goes-dark-as-last-internet-company-pulls-the-plug/

BC Hydro, the third largest electric utility in Canada, has announced the advancement of its Smart Metering & Infrastructure Program with the selection of Capgemini, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, for the implementation of this $930 million CAD (approximately €709million) program. The three-year contract with Capgemini is worth an estimated $63 million CAD (approximately €48 million).

The Smart Metering & Infrastructure Program is a key first step in delivering a modern electricity grid for the benefit of BC Hydro customers. By reducing electricity theft, encouraging conservation, and making the system more efficient, BC Hydro is confident that the newly installed digital meters will reduce operating costs and help to reduce the upwards pressures on rates.

Digital meters will also enable customers to view their consumption in near real-time helping them to save money on their bills. “Customers will have a direct connection between their consumption and their bill,” said Fiona Taylor, acting director, Smart Metering & Infrastructure Program, BC Hydro. “Not only will customers be able to save money, their collective actions will play a key role in helping to meet conservation goals and ensuring that BC is energy self-sufficient by 2016.”

Under the agreement, Capgemini will provide system integration and project management services, helping to design and deliver a program that will see the replacement of more than 1.8 million meters in BC with smart meters, along with information technology and telecommunications infrastructure to enable two-way communications between BC Hydro and its customers.

“We have carefully designed this program to deliver a positive business case and the best possible value to our customers,” said Taylor. “We are now collaborating with Capgemini to deploy the program based on their proven industry experience, and their ability to deliver real results on time.”

“This new partnership with BC Hydro underscores the success of our collaborative approach in helping utilities develop solutions to effectively meet current and future challenges, while effectively addressing the needs of environmentally conscious consumers,” said Perry Stoneman, vice president and global leader, Smart Energy Services, Capgemini. “Capgemini’s Smart Energy Services solutions help utilities increase efficiency, and enables them to transform existing infrastructure, programs and services to fulfill regulatory requirements and meet consumer needs.”

The existing contract that sees Service Birmingham – the joint venture between the city council and Capita – provide ICT support and contact centre services will now be extended from 2016 to 2021.

As well as generating £135 million of gross savings for the council over the next ten years, the deal will see Service Birmingham improve council tax collection rates from 96.3 per cent to 98 per cent by 2017, which would represent an increased annual income of £4.8 million.

As part of the new deal, 132 revenue services employees will transfer from the city council to Service Birmingham from April this year under TUPE regulations.

Announcing the decision, Councillor Randal Brew, Cabinet Member for Finance said: “Our relationship with Capita through Service Birmingham has been a successful one, as we have begun to modernise services despite this being a huge challenge for an organisation that had previously done things in traditional ways for a very long time. We need to keep this momentum up over the coming years and the proposals will do this.”

Paul Pindar, chief executive of The Capita Group Plc, added: “We are delighted to be signing this new contract with Birmingham City Council. The long-term partnership between the city council and Capita is at the heart of this deal. We have already helped the council achieve considerable savings while improving service quality to their customers. This extension will help us to continue to do so.”

Welcoming the new deal, Service Birmingham chief executive, Stewart Wren added: “It’s a vote of confidence in the work our staff have put in to improve the council’s ICT function since 2006 and to turn the contact centre into one of the very best in local government.

“We will deliver what we promise and provide even greater service and value for money for the people of Birmingham.”

In the wake of the economic downturn, 80 percent of senior finance executives said their scope of responsibilities has expanded, with finance also now overseeing programs in other departments across the enterprise, according to findings of a new Accenture survey.

The departments where senior finance executives most frequently said they also now manage projects include: information technology (43 percent), strategy and business development (41 percent), and human resources (39 percent). They also mentioned having program responsibilities in risk and customer service (37 percent each), procurement (35 percent), marketing and sales (33 percent), research and development (30 percent), and supply chain management (25 percent).

In addition to the expanded scope of responsibilities, 79 percent of the more than 1,000 senior finance executives surveyed across Asia, Europe and North and South America, said they need more flexibility in their operations to more readily respond to ongoing market changes, and 58 percent of them said this increased flexibility would be needed across their operations for the next six to 18 months.

However, 22 percent of the executives said they would require greater flexibility in their finance operations for a longer period of time -- 18 months or more. Fewer than one out of four (22 percent) said greater flexibility would be necessary for less than six months.

“The economic crisis left the corporate finance function stretched by additional responsibilities and rapidly changing market dynamics that require nimble operations to quickly adapt to new business realities,” said Paul Boulanger, managing director of the Accenture Finance & Performance Management service line. “With corporations operating in a more volatile business environment, finance must be integrated across the enterprise and have a strong grasp of overall business objectives so they can provide guidance and early warning to the C-suite when circumstances dictate a change of course.”

Consequently, more than three out of four respondents (78 percent) said flexibility is needed in their planning and forecasting, rather than the traditional annual process. More than half of them also said they needed greater flexibility in their cost management (61 percent), transaction processing (60 percent), cash management (58 percent), performance reporting (58 percent), capital expenditure management (56 percent) and asset management (54 percent).

To enable greater market responsiveness, 84 percent of the executives said they need to update their processes, data or content (including analytics), IT systems and/or workforce centralization. Breaking that down, 63 percent of the executives said they had modified or needed to modify their financial planning and forecasting processes, and 48 percent said they had modified or needed to modify their corresponding IT systems. More than half of the executives (53 percent) also said they have expanded or are expanding their content or data (including analytics) in planning and forecasting.

The IT and BPO industry is projected to grow by 26% with export earnings estimated at US$ 390 million for 2010. Mass employment generation with more foreign direct income is being targeted by the national IT/ BPO chamber. Sri Lanka plans on building a niche focus on a few core areas in the IT and BPO industries globally to differentiate the countries offerings with other outsourcing destinations and with a vision to make the IT/ BPO industry the number one export earner for the country. SLASSCOM elected its third Board and General Council consisting of key industry leaders and decision makers to drive this vision for 2011.

Jehan Perimpanayagam- Director and Treasurer (CEO, Info Mate (Pvt) Ltd) ,Madu Ratnayake - Director and Vice President ( GM, Virtusa), Dinesh Saparamadu – Chairman (CEO, hSehid) , Mano Sekaram - Director & General Secretary (CEO, Eurocenter), Sujiva Dewaraja - Director and Vice President (EVP/Head of IT Sector, John Keels Holdings)

Nalina Wijesundara - Director(Director & GM, eCollege Lanka (Pvt) Ltd), Ashique M. Ali – Director (CEO, Talliance) , Sanath Fernando - Director (CEO, Ridgecrest Asia (Pvt) Ltd), Sandra De Zoysa –Director (Group Chief Customer Officer, Dialog Telekom PLC), Mark Webster- Director (Centre Manager, HSBC Technology and Services - Service Delivery), Jayantha De Silva – Director (VP South Asia and Managing Director Sri Lanka, IFS) , Jit Seneviratne – Director (Director, Millennium Information Technologies Limited)