Industry news

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)

Wipro Technologies, the Global Consulting, System Integration and Outsourcing business of Wipro Limited, has announced the launch of its Testing as a Service (TaaS) Portal to act as a virtual marketplace for potential customers to browse, request for quotes and purchase services online.

The portal empowers the customer to select and buy services at the click of the mouse, thereby dramatically changing the market landscape for software Testing Service providers. Wipro will continue to innovate with this portal and plans to add 20 more services and more sophisticated functionalities to the portal it in the near future.

Globally, Testing Services are a USD 56 billion market, where 10% gets outsourced to India through the traditional off shoring methods, as per third party estimates. Wipro Technologies, has been cited by independent research body, IDC Research, as a leader among Tier-1 Testing Services Providers in a report titled “IDC MarketScape : Global Testing Services, 2010 Vendor Analysis.

“Testing as a discipline has undergone a sea change over the past decade. From being a mere phase in the development cycle, it is now being increasingly accepted as a Productized Service Offering. We believe testing today needs to be business purpose driven and therefore, the highlight of Wipro’s TaaS portal is the simplicity of use that it offers from a clear service definition and a catalogue of productized services, so that customers can browse these services, choose from an array of service parameters, request for a proposal and in near future even buy and consume services online”, said Gangadharaiah C.P., Senior Vice President and Global Head of Testing Services, Wipro Technologies. He added, “Wipro Technologies has been one of the pioneers of independent testing services for global clients and continues to make significant investments in innovative offerings in this space. Based on initial feedback from the industry, the portal is being seen as a disruptive offering that has the potential to change the way business is done in the Testing Services Industry.”

When disaster strikes

Although many top executives still think it will never happen to them, a disaster can strike any company at any time, says Simon Perrin, MD of Network Centric Support. Unexpected events can have a devastating effect on a business, whether that means a dramatic incident like a fire or a flood, or a less extraordinary (but still devastating) IT failure. In some cases, even just an everyday computer 'crash' may be enough to damage important data, and therefore cause problems for the business as a result.

Any of these incidents could make it difficult – if not impossible – for a business to carry out its normal day-to-day activities. At best, this could cause unwanted disruption and a damaging loss of productivity, but in more serious cases, companies may experience significant downtime and suffer irreparable damage to their business as a result. As such, companies of all sizes need to have a disaster recovery plan in place, in order to make sure that their business-critical data and systems are adequately protected.

What is disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery (DR) is the process by which a company resumes business after any kind of 'disruptive' event. The purpose of a sound DR strategy is to make sure that steps can be taken to minimise the potential impact of unexpected incidents like these, or better still, actually prevent them from happening in the first place.

Many businesses often don't realise it until it's too late, but the business data stored on a company's main database is absolutely mission critical, not just in the long term, but on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, and even minute-to-minute basis. If applied correctly, however, a sound DR strategy should be able to help a company to pick up instantly, exactly where they left off, in the event of a disaster, without having any of its important business data lost or damaged.

Backing up key data

Backup and recovery is one of the most important aspects of a sound DR strategy, and indeed an essential part of a database administrator's (DBA's) job. Computers and office furniture can be re-purchased in the event of a fire or a flood, but company data – whether it be financial, customer-related, regulatory or any other type – is usually irreplaceable.

To be truly effective, a DR plan needs to ensure that data is being replicated to a mirror-copy of the company's main database constantly, from the moment it is created, so that the DR system is always 100 per cent up to date.

What next?

Like many security issues, DR planning ultimately comes down to basic risk management: how much risk can your company tolerate, and how much is it willing to spend to mitigate various risks? In planning for the unexpected, companies have to weigh the risk versus the cost of creating a robust contingency plan. Regardless of how big or small your next 'disaster' happens to be, it is a good idea to start preparing for it now.

If you are still unsure about whether you need a DR strategy at all, then consider the potential financial losses of not having one, should disaster strike. You should start by calculating the total losses per day that your company would face if you weren't able to recover all of your key data quickly – and then weigh that figure against the cost of taking a proactive approach to DR right now. Of all the arguments that support the need for a solid DR strategy, this one is probably the most convincing.

While some experts claim cloud computing is the next disruptive technology, others suggest it to be the technology that diminishes the role of the traditional System Integrator. Whatever description is finalised for cloud computing this year, harvesting its benefits will require the guidance and direction of a new emerging breed of Systems Integrator – the Cloud Integrator.

Up until now, the primary focus of a System Integrator has been based around planning, optimising, integrating, and managing their customers’ IT environment. At times, Integrators also take on the responsibility of plugging the gaps between the customers IT needs and the IT infrastructure available to them.

However, emerging cloud computing vendors are proving to be yet another addition to the chain in a typical Integrator business model. The good news is that the availability of a public domain computing platform allows the traditional System Integrator to extend their platform. This is carried out through lease-type agreements as opposed to capital outlay or long-term fixed costs. While certain organisations may be lured into the affordability and scalability that cloud computing offers, it is my view that only an experienced service provider with a strong cloud focus can ensure that their environment is architected in such a way as to provide clear business benefits without compromising on security.

For example, at the onset, the low cost and ready access on-demand computing offered through a cloud environment will cause businesses to rethink what is truly core to their business, and shift an increasing amount of non-core processing to a shared or cloud environment. As a result, organisations will be well served to revisit the classification of each piece of information stored and assumed to be sensitive and critical to the business. However, before companies begin to develop their cloud infrastructure based on the strategy of their business, System Integrators will need to tackle a number of barriers to help hem configure their cloud environment.

Firstly, System Integrators will need to help provide organisations with a highly secure computing environment, where business critical tasks are processed and highly sensitive information is stored securely. If they fail to do this, competitive advantage and business critical information could be lost - which could prove to be catastrophic to the business if it leads to brand damage or their trust being compromised.

Furthermore, the private cloud, which is used for developing, enhancing, trailing and testing out mission critical systems as well as carrying out critical research and development work, will also run into security issues. As such, it also requires an environment that is highly secure. Built on the principles of virtualisation, System Integrators will need to ensure that the private cloud environment is readily scalable and sharable between IT systems and applications within the organisation.

In addition to the private cloud, the public cloud represents various types of external clouds such as Amazon Elastic Compute 2 and Simple Storage 3 that could prove to be of benefit to an organisation. For an organisation to benefit, a Cloud Integrator will need configure these clouds to enable them to operate as an extension to the internal computing platform of an organisation. Due to the open nature of the public cloud, an organisation must be able to shift desktop work into the external cloud without fear of exposing or losing critical information.

There is also the issue of handling a shared environment. A shared environment represents the need to run regularly scheduled applications such as facilities management, accounting, and payroll processing. As such, this activity should be carried out at an outsourcer’s facility where the computing platform may be dedicated for the business.

In summary, sceptics who believe cloud computing to be just another technology buzz-word should remember that just a decade ago, the concept of offshoring IT work also faced strong head winds from political, business, and social fronts. However, in a global economy, the benefits of offshoring in the form of reduced cost, high availability of quality resources, and faster response time due to around-the-clock operations caused most, if not all, businesses to move over to some form of an offshore-based model.

As the IT Outsourcing industry gets used to the benefits of cloud computing in 2011, businesses will depend upon the services of a skilled and trusted Cloud Integrator as a partner to help them configure the right combination of computing environment that addresses their business needs, in the most cost effective manner without compromising on performance and security.

The last few years have brought with them a number of sizeable changes which change the way each of us work and live our lives. However, what few people appreciate is the way in which the changes in the both the economy and in technology are continuing to drive organisations to create an environment where work becomes more flexible and personal, allowing them to take a more collaborative approach.

Of course, this is a trend which will only serve to benefit those with a vested interest in outsourcing, as more and more organisations look for new ways to harmonise and integrate business processes on an end-to-end basis across their enterprises - but why are we seeing this approach?

It’s clear that the pressure brought by the global economic downturn has had a huge economic impact on organisations across the world. As a result, more organisations are finding that not only do they need to turn to outsourcing as a means of alleviating their economic pain, but are also waking up to the idea that by investing in and committing to a collaborative relationship with their outsourcing supplier, they can add even greater value. Shared services is a perfect example of how working together can help to cut costs and increase efficiency, and one which has been driven, to a large extent, by the global economic climate.

Equally, it’s true that advances in technology have helped to support a collaborative approach, with innovations such as virtualization and the cloud leading to new ways of working, managing, innovating and outsourcing together. Now that the tools are available for organisations to work together, it’s no surprise to find that more are taking the opportunity to do just that.

Many have predicted that collaboration will be one of the watchwords of the next few years, we are set to see a huge increase in collaboration between end users, suppliers, support, employees, customers, delivering a continuous business value. With this in mind, the NOA launched part one of the BS 11000 towards the end of the year in conjunction with the British Standards Institute (BSI), with a view to promoting solid and profitable relationships in business.

Part two of the BS 11000 is set to launch early next month, with a practical guide. For more information, please visit: www.noa.co.uk

The SQS team will deliver end-to-end testing of Specsavers business applications, from performance through to automated regression testing, with focus on raising quality, reducing risk and increasing the throughput of change.

John Lister, Chief Information Officer Specsavers, commented: “With over 1,500 stores and 26,000 staff, Specsavers is a fast growing business that is dependent on robust and effective technology to enable us to provide great service to our customers. It’s therefore critical that we have a software testing and QA process that helps us to deliver quality software solutions that are great value for money, quickly and efficiently.

“We decided that we needed a testing partner with the focus and offshore capability to match our growth plans, which can provide us with innovative solutions through the lifecycle of the contract and can help us ensure effective governance and independence of testing. SQS meets all those requirements and we’re very pleased to have them on board.”

David Cotterell, SQS Executive Main Board Director, added: “We’re delighted that when selecting a partner with proven off shore and on shore presence, Specsavers put so much value on exceeding customer expectations and pure play testing independence. It’s fair to say that this is probably one of the largest pure-play managed testing service contracts to be awarded in the retail sector and the service will be provided from SQS’ state-of- the–art, off-shore facility in Pune India, ably supported by our on shore consultancy presence.”

Microsoft is among the 120 companies located in Cairo's Smart Villages , an office park created in 2003 to be Egypt's "prime" information technology park. It includes a health club, swimming pool, video conferencing services, a conference center and a pyramid-shaped restaurant called the "Think Tank Caf."

Other high tech companies on the campus include Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Etisalat, HP, Huawei, Mobinil, Nokia Siemens Networks, Satyam, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and Wipro.

Egypt's move to block Internet access prompted Microsoft to respond. Asked about the situation in Egypt, Microsoft said in a written response to a query that it "is constantly assessing the impact of the unrest and Internet connection issues on our properties and services. What limited service the company as a whole provides to and through the region, mainly call-center service, has been largely distributed to other locations."

Another tech firm with a presence in Smart Villages is Hewlett-Packard, which has asked it employees to stay at home .

President Barack Obama and other administration officials are urging the Egyptian government to restore Internet services and see access as a human right. "It is our strong belief that inside of the framework of basic individual rights are the rights of those to have access to the Internet and to sites for open communication and social networking," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said at a briefing Friday.

Egypt's decision to cut Internet access was apparently intended to disrupt the ability of protestors to use social networks to organise . But hi-tech companies have similar flip-the-switch abilities and can shift services in response to a natural or manmade disaster. It is almost certain that tech companies in Egypt will respond to the current uncertainty much the same way Microsoft did -- if they haven't already.

Phil Fersht, the CEO and head of research at Horses for Sources, an outsourcing research and advisory firm, said top-tier providers rely on Egyptian resources largely for call center work and software support and development. For these firms "it's a massive, massive concern when the government shuts off the internet and all hell is breaking loose," he said in an e-mailed response to questions.

"Egypt has proven capable as a good quality resource location for the Middle East, Africa and European regions in areas such as IT, BPO and call center services and has invested significantly in promoting its capabilities worldwide," said Fersht. "The country has invested millions to promote its capabilities -- and now that investment is looking under threat."

Not surprisingly, the government agency responsible for hi-tech development in Egypt, the Information Technology Industry Development Agency, (ITIDA), has been offline. Efforts to reach officials by telephone, e-mail or through a Facebook account have been unsuccessful.

Fersht suggested that the current problems in Egypt could prompt hi-tech firms to re-think the risks they face in other regions.

"If situations, such as what is currently happening in Egypt, proliferate to other countries with sourcing support services, the first reaction of governments now seems to be to 'shut off the Internet,'" said Fersht, "You have to question how this impacts ITO/BPO services that are hugely reliant on the Internet to succeed.

"The Egypt situation is a serious blow to many of the developing nations seeking to take their share of global services [that] have potentially questionable political stability," said Fersht.

Smart Villages said that by the end of 2009 there were 28,000 professionals working at various companies in the office, and that by 2014 it expected that more than 100,000 would be working at some 500 companies.

Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9207158/Microsoft_shifts_some_work_out_of_Egypt