Industry news

Three London councils are to set a landmark for shared services by merging all their services to create a “super-council”.

Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, and Westminster hope that the move will save them between £50m - £100m a year. Each council would keep its own identity but would share services (such as ICT provision) under the scheme.

Working groups will look at merging three areas – environmental services, family services and corporate services. The groups will feedback next February with their feedback a more detailed plan will be put out for public consultation.

The council’s leaders are hoping that the scheme will soon become the norm for local authorities who are looking to keep costs down.

A statement by Colin Barrow (Westminster), Stephen Greenhalgh (Hammersmith and Fulham) and Sir Merrick Cockell (Kensington and Chelsea) states that sharing service “is a way to reduce duplication and drive out needless cost".

The statement said: "To achieve this in the age of austerity we need to seriously examine new ways of working including sharing service provision with other local authorities to deliver more for less. That is why we have met and agreed to progress with plans to share every council service between our three councils.”

Google has said that businesses who try to get special treatment with cloud providers will not succeed instead customer service should be based on vendor selection.

Cindy Yip, legal head of Google’s European enterprise division, said: “It wouldn’t be practical for a cloud service provider to meet the demands of one customer.”

Yip stated that as cloud computing providers can offer IT services at a lower cost than traditional outsourcers due to their commoditised services and delivery from multitenant architecture – it is not in their interest to provide custom service offerings.

Yip said that customers will try to negotiate special deals regarding data security and service level agreements.

It is predicted that cloud service providers will not be negotiable as the same service is needed for all businesses. One universal and similar service for all customers will guarantee the reductions in service charges.

Yip advised that a better way for customers to ensure their demands are met is to find a provider with an appropriate SLA, and to ‘shop around’ for potential suppliers. She added that customers' time would be better spent establishing who takes responsibility in the event of a data breach than attempting to receive special security provisions.

Google’s remarks will be seen as discouraging for many businesses who are attracted to the cost savings of cloud computing but also want a tailored service due to their unique set up and requirements. Time will tell whether the option of ‘vendor selection’ will be enough for businesses wanting a specific service agreement and a business arrangement which is uniquely their own.

More than £200m will be invested by the Government in a network of elite Technology and Innovation Centres to drive growth in the UK’s most high-tech industries, it was announced today.

The centres, which were announced by Prime Minister David Cameron in a speech to the CBI today, will bridge the gap between universities and businesses, helping to commercialise the outputs of Britain’s world-class research base.

Business secretary Vince Cable said:

“We need to do more to ensure the UK benefits from its world-class research.

“These centres will help take ideas from the drawing board to the market place. They will play a key role in helping firms develop new products and processes so they can grow and prosper.

“Companies will be able to access technology and skills that would otherwise be out of reach.

“High-tech industries are the future of the British economy. Growing sectors that exploit these new and emerging technologies will help re-balance the economy and provide the highly skilled, well-paid jobs we need.

“Thanks to this major investment, British companies will be at the forefront of innovation.”

The centres, which will receive the money over the next four years, will be based on the model proposed by Hermann Hauser and James Dyson. The network will support businesses in developing and commercialising new technology.

They will allow businesses to access equipment and expertise that would otherwise be out of reach as well as conducting their own in-house R&D. They will also help businesses access new funding streams and point them towards the potential of emerging technologies.

Each centre will focus on a specific technology where there is a potentially large global market and a significant UK capability. Areas identified as possibilities by Hermann Hauser included plastic electronics, regenerative medicine and high value manufacturing.

On Friday, Hewlett-Packard announced with the Bulgarian president, Boyko Borisov, that it will be expanding its outsourcing services to Bulgaria.

There are currently 3,200 people working for HP in Bulgaria and it is hoped that the expansion will result in an additional 2,000 new job positions for engineers and qualified personnel.

Over 30 countries were competing for the investment which is a HP initiative and was not set up with the aid of any EU funding. Sasha Bezouhanova, HP public administration director for central and eastern Europe, would not announce the figures of the investment as exact expenses could not be planned. The recruitment for the centre will start immediately and the centre should start working at full capacity next year.

Borisov said: "More than 300 highly qualified Bulgarians living abroad have returned to work for the HP centre here because the salaries are better than what they have received in the countries they have been working in. After the new job positions are open, even more people will return.”

HP has announced that the development of the centre would be a good investment in education as well. At present, the company is cooperating with three Bulgarian universities for general education programs.

Nick Clegg has dismissed reports from a leading think tank that the spending cuts will hit the poorest the hardest.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said on Thursday that the cuts would actually hit the bottom half of the earners hardest and not the top tax players – as the coalition government had claimed.

Clegg responded today and stated that the report from the IFS was “complete nonsense” and that the Treasury had tried to provide more than a snapshot of tax and benefits.

The IFS said that the biggest losers from the cuts would be families with children due to the reduction in welfare. However Clegg suggested that they did not take into account such factors as public spending inputs that include children and social care.

Clegg said: “We just fundamentally disagree with the IFS. It is complete nonsense to apply that measure. The richest are paying the most.”

Clegg also acknowledged the fact that it was a hard decision to raise tuition fees as the Liberal Democrats had actively opposed such a move throughout the election.

Clegg added: “It quite understandably raises questions about promises politicians make. I signed a pledge that I have not been able to honour.”

IT services supplier Wipro is the latest Indian outsourcing company to post record financial results.

The company announced profits of $288m (£183m) for its fiscal quarter to September, a 10% year-on-year growth.

During this period, Wipro also increased its number of employees by 2,975 to 115,900.

Azim Premji, chairman of the company, said demand was fuelled by customers catching up with under-investments in IT over the previous year.

"While the macro-economic environment continues to remain uncertain, there is higher degree of confidence at the micro level," he said.

The announcement follows recent results from Tata Consultancy Services, which showed sales of $2bn in the three months to 30 September, an increase of 30% year-on-year. HCL also posted revenue growth of $804m, up 27% compared to the same period a year ago.

Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2010/10/22/243490/Wipro-latest-Indian-IT-supplier-to-post-record-growth.htm

A Cabinet Office official has said that the Directgov website needs to be simplified to increase its usage.

Graham Walker, director of digital delivery for the department, said that this is the conclusion from a review of the site launched by the government's digital champion Martha Lane Fox in August.

An official at the Cabinet Office has said that long-term IT contracts will not be cancelled early in favour of the G Cloud, while a freeze on IT projects has already made cost savings

Read more

Speaking at the Beyond 2010 conference in Birmingham, he said: "We've been doing a review of Directgov and most of government on the web. We can see that there is a need to massively simplify it, with a lot more rationalisation and to improve the user experience."

Directgov provides the central portal for citizen-facing government services. It was transferred from the Department for Work and Pensions to the Cabinet Office in the weeks after the coalition government came to power.

Walker said there are still significant barriers to getting people to use more online government services, and there is a need for some "common enablers" to overcome them.

"We are starting to talk to service owners about getting 95 percent take-up," he said. "If we are going to do that we need to provide digital support for some people some of the time."

He cited the example of the difficulty in expecting more people to apply for benefits online when many of them do not have the necessary IT skills, and said there is a need to provide the necessary support.

"If we don't do that, we will be stuck at 60-65 percent," he said. "We hope to make public progress over the next month or two."

Source: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/it-strategy/2010/10/22/official-directgov-needs-to-be-simplified-40090618/

National Outsourcing Awards 2010

21st October 10

The 7th annual National Outsourcing Association Awards was a glamorous affair, attracting the biggest names in the outsourcing industry at the Park Plaza Riverbank hotel.

The guests all mingled before the ceremony, overlooking spectacular views of London’s most striking landmarks - the London Eye, Houses of Parliament and Big Ben.

Comedian Jack Whitehall hosted the awards and helped to make the evening a night to remember. Timeout’s “Sickeningly young wunderkind” delivered a fantastic routine before introducing Martyn Hart, Chairman of the NOA, to the stage to introduce the awards.

Martyn said: “Outsourcing is on the up and the awards are a fantastic opportunity for professionals within the industry to come together and celebrate the year’s successes. Professionals have predicted high growth rates for outsourcing as the public sector increasingly looks to move contracts towards the private sector.”

The National Outsourcing Association Awards have become a landmark in helping cement outsourcing as a key business function and practice. Interest and attendees to the awards has risen year on year and winning an award is seen as a huge accolade and recognition of success.

The 17 awards all celebrated the top developments, contracts and innovation within the outsourcing space. Hundreds of applications were whittled down to a shortlist of nominees and winners were then selected by a panel of outsourcing experts.

The winners of the Awards were:

BPO Contract of the Year sponsored by Nelson Hall

Mahindra Satyam BPO & GlaxoSmithKline

IT Outsourcing Project of the Year sponsored by Cognizant

Capgemini & Welsh European Funding Office

Financial Services Outsourcing Project of the Year sponsored by Sitel

Capita & AXA

Public Sector Outsourcing Project of the Year sponsored by Alexander Mann Solutions

CSC - Department of Health

Telecommunications, Utilities and High-Tech Outsourcing Project of the Year sponsored by sourcingfocus.com

Infosys

Offshoring Operation of the Year sponsored by Buffalo Communications

Exigent

Outsourcing Professional of the Year sponsored by HML

Serco - Duncan Mackison

Outsourcing Service Provider of the Year sponsored by ITIDA

HCL Technologies

Outsourcing Contact Centre Provider of the Year sponsored by KPMG

The Listening Company

Outsourcing Advisory of the Year sponsored by The OUT Group

Olswang

Offshoring Destination of the Year sponsored by FST

Philippine Trade & Investment - Philippines

Outsourcing End User of the Year sponsored by IBM

HMRC

Award for Innovation in Outsourcing sponsored by RR Donnelley

CSC

Award for Best Practice in Outsourcing sponsored by Intelenet

Centrica

Award for Academic Achievement sponsored by NOA Pathway

Verity Billson - Capital One

Award for Corporate Social Responsibility sponsored by Fujitsu

Firstsource

Chairman’s award for outstanding contribution to the outsourcing industry

National Rail Enquiries

Martyn concluded: “It’s wonderful that these awards can recognise the innovation and developments that have taken place in the past year and look forward to the future. It really has been an incredible evening.”

Party band Madhen wrapped up the evening by taking to the stage with a high-energy performance, playing a great selection of songs that kept the guests busy all night. Overall, the awards were a fantastic night for the outsourcing industry and one which has made everyone excited about the NOA Awards 2011.

Vittorio Colao, chief executive, indicated that Vodafone may reconsider future investments in India if the country's Supreme Court upholds an earlier decision demanding that Vodafone pay capital gains tax on its $11.1bn purchase of a controlling stake in local operator Hutchinson Essar.

"The tax issue will be incredibly important for us to determine how friendly India is," Mr Colao said in a interview with India's Economic Times. "This is a concern for our investors and for other international investors."

He warned that if India continues to demand the disputed tax payment, the country's telecoms sector would be "squashed like lemon" as international investors would reconsider their Indian development plans.

Mr Colao said Vodafone has invested more than £1bn a year into India since it joined the market three years ago and has paid almost a third of its revenues in taxes to the India exchequer. He added it was "totally unacceptable" that the Indian authorities have not pursued Hutchinson for capital gains tax on the 2007 sale.

The Supreme Court will on Monday set a date to hear Vodafone's appeal. The case has been closely followed by a string of multinational companies as it could set a precedent for other cross-border takeovers in India.

George Osborne has lobbied against the tax bill on Vodafone's behalf.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/telecoms/8075999/Vodafone-warns-India-over-tax-bill.html

OpenStack, the open-source cloud management software project formed by hosting provider Rackspace, has met an initial development milestone, backers are expected to announce Thursday.

An updated OpenStack code release dubbed "Austin" will be available Thursday, some three months after the project was first announced. OpenStack includes the code that powers Rackspace's Cloud Files and Cloud Servers technology, as well as software developed by NASA for its Nebula cloud platform.

An initial component based on Cloud Files, OpenStack Object Storage, was released in July. The Austin update eases deployment, fixes bugs and adds new features, such as a statistics processor and better access control.

Cloud computing services ‘should be like consumer products’, says SAPVMware to launch cloud platform for developersMicrosoft dives into cloud with Office 365 launchG-Cloud will save us £1.2 billion a year, says government CIO.

A second component called OpenStack Compute is a provisioning engine built with code from Cloud Servers and Nebula. It is now suitable for testing and prototypes with the arrival of Austin.

OpenStack, which is available under the Apache 2.0 license, is seen by some as a potential counterbalance to proprietary cloud platforms and tools such as Amazon's public EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), as well as the burgeoning range of vendor offerings for building private clouds.

Rackspace has said it has no interest in being in the software business, preferring to win clients based on the overall quality of its hosting service. Therefore, open-sourcing its technology made sense, because the company will benefit from the community-driven development model, it says.

A NASA official expressed similar sentiments in an interview earlier this year.

Rackspace and NASA aren't going it alone. The project has support from Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, Dell, Citrix and dozens of smaller companies that develop cloud management, monitoring and other tools.

It made sense for large vendors such as AMD and Intel to join the effort, since their chips power the racks of commodity hardware commonly used to build out data centers, but the absence of software platform players from the current list is telling.

Vendors like SAP are more inclined to partner with other established players, but that could change if the right company decides to push OpenStack for building private clouds, said Redmonk analyst Michael Coté.

Meanwhile, OpenStack backers are already looking toward the next iteration, code-named "Bexar," which is set for release in January. That will be a topic of discussion during a "Design Summit" event in November.

Source: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/cloud-computing/3245083/openstack-cloud-project-is-on-track/