Industry news

Education specialist RM has signed a contract expected to be worth £4m to provide IT services in Southwark Council's Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.

In May last year, RM, the council, BSF Investments and construction services giant Balfour Beatty formed the 4 Futures partnership to deliver and manage BSF projects across the London borough. RM has now signed a contract covering Phase 2a of the programme, which will see projects undertaken at four schools.

The projects are just a few of the many that had been left up in the air by the government's decision to axe the BSF scheme. The signing of the contract means the deals have now reached "financial close", guaranteeing RM revenue of about £4m.

In July this year, all-new spending on the BSF project was frozen; the 14 projects that had reached preferred bidder status facing a case-by-case review. RM is among these preferred bidders.

At the time, education secretary Michael Gove addressed Parliament announced that his department was slashing its end year flexibility requirement to carry over unused budget by £1bn in 2010/11. This meant excising £156.5m from capital budgets "where commitments [were] no longer affordable".

Axing the BSF scheme meant the immediate cancellation of 715 school-rebuilding or -refurbishing projects. Projects underway or having " reached financial close" will still go ahead.

Nearly half of companies in DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) plan to increase their expenditure on CRM and ERP software, according to a recent survey conducted by Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC).

Companies are planning to mainly invest in ERP, CRM and business intelligence (BI) solutions in the period until 2011 (see figure below).

According to the survey, applications for financial accounting, enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) are among the most frequently used business solutions.

While smaller firms concentrate on introducing one application at a time, larger enterprises mostly intend to invest in several applications.

Companies with 500 to 1,000 employees are particularly interested in CRM solutions. More than half of them are planning to invest in this area by 2011 – either by purchasing a new CRM software, or by expanding an existing application.

Another finding from the survey is that CRM applications are very common among banks and insurers.

The survey interviewed around 240 IT decision makers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland hailing from a variety of sectors including manufacture, banking/insurance, retail & wholesale, public/healthcare, telecommunications & utilities, transport/logistics and services & media.

The global outsourcing market saw a 12% increase in transaction volumes with continued growth led by Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services, BFSI sector deals contributing one-fifth of overall global market activity, and North America and Europe driving three-fourths of all global transactions.

Indeed, figures released in the latest Market Vista report, produced by BPO market activity increased by 15% and 33% in transaction volumes and ACV respectively.

The BFSI sector in particular saw a 41% increase in transactions, with most contracts were signed in the banking sub-sector; volume recorded was double over the previous quarter.

As for location, offshore activity saw 32 delivery centres established in Q2, the majority of which in Asia, followed by Eastern Europe and Latin America.

The figures also revealed that centre delivery in Eastern Europe fell to nearly half the levels observed during the first half of 2009. This was mostly owed to the impact the recession and economic crises in Greece, Spain and Portugal have had on demand.

While activity in Asia has slowed down, the region appears to be recovering faster than other emerging markets locations.

China appears to be slowly establishing itself as an outsourcing hotspot, although currently its capability renders it an attractive offshore destination regionally (i.e. Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia).

However, according to Everest’s research, China still lacks the right characteristics to attract European and Northern American offshoring business. At the top of the list, sufficient numbers of experienced project managers able to deal with North American and European clients.

China is not likely to be a contender to India or the Philippines – at least not for the next five to seven years.

Alcatel-Lucent has appointed Munish Seth as country head for its Indian business, he will report to Rajeev Singh-Molares, president of the Asia-Pacific region.

Seth has 20 years of expertise and experience in the telecoms industry. Before his new role, he had been in charge of Customer Solution and Support for Alcatel-Lucent’s Asia-Pacific region.

Previously, he was chief technical officer and director Bids & Proposals for Alcatel-Lucent, India. He has been instrumental in strengthening Alcatel-Lucent position in India by introducing innovative business models, and helping service providers maximize technology investments.

Prior to joining Alcatel-Lucent, Munish was chief technical officer at Tekelec.

Seth takes over from Vivek Mohan, who now heads Alcatel-Lucent’s global services business.

A major European national lottery has awarded relationship manager Convergys Corporation a multi-year licensing, support, and maintenance contract.

The agreement will implement Convergys Smart BSS Solutions, including Convergys Rating and Billing Manager, to support the lottery’s dealer billing and commissioning.

This new Convergys client required a sophisticated billing and commissioning solution that would enable it to quickly launch new and innovative games and commissioning schemes to retain and attract new lottery agents.

With Convergys’ integrated portfolio of Smart BSS Solutions, the lottery determined that it would receive the flexibility it needed to expand its market share in the newly liberalised and increasingly competitive European gaming market.

This national lottery manages games of chance including lottery, scratch card, and sport gambling games, and sells and collects revenue through thousands of resellers nationwide.

Premier Foods, one of the UK’s largest food producers, has renewed its long-term IT outsourcing alliance with Capgemini once more.

The new contract is worth an estimated £9m for the five-year period 2014-2019 and covers the Premier Foods’ IT infrastructure including data centre and technical support for all core business systems.

Under the contract Capgemini will continue to support the IT infrastructure that underpins the many famous Premier Foods brands such as Hovis, Ambrosia, Mr Kipling, Sharwood’s, Batchelors, Quorn, Loyd Grossman, Oxo, Bisto and many others.

The agreement involves the deployment of Capgemini’s Rightshore® strategy, which makes its global resources available to customers.

Capgemini teams in the UK, Poland and India will work in collaboration with one another and with client personnel with the intent of maximising service levels and cost-effectiveness for Premier Foods.

Systems supported involve hardware at Capgemini data centres in Rotherham and Bristol, with additional support from the company’s infrastructure management command centre in Krakow, Poland, and from a Capgemini development centre in Mumbai, India.

Capgemini also provides support for a number of key applications software systems at Premier Foods under a separate long-term Applications Management outsourcing contract.

The new deal follows the announcement last year of a contract between the two companies covering the period 2009-2014 which in turn renewed arrangements dating back to 2001.

With the decision Premier Foods aims to secure improved certainty of its IT costs, quality and service levels so that essential long-term planning and budgeting activities can be done with confidence.

Deutsche Welle reports that around 250 employees of Germany's Federal Printing Works demonstrated in front of Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, in Frankfurt on Tuesday.

The protest came as the Bundesbank considers outsourcing the printing of German euro notes to printers outside Germany.

According to the German union Verdi, 180 jobs in Berlin are on the line. Meanwhile, close to 400 jobs at Giesecke & Devrient, a supplier of banknote paper with offices in Munich and Leipzig, are also at risk.

The union said the decision would also jeopardise research and development work worth millions of euros.

The Bundesbank has said it's required by German and European law to advertise the tender EU-wide.

The printing contract has been tendered across the European Union attracting interest from printers in France and the Netherlands; Giesecke & Devrient has only been awarded a part of the contract.

The awarding of the contract, initially expected 2 August, has been delayed as the Federal Cartel Office investigates the matter. A final decision is expected by the end of the month.

Transport for London (TfL) has agreed on a new contract for the future management and development of the Oyster card system and other ticketing services with Cubic Transportation Systems Limited and EDS.

The move is part of TfL's £2.4bn efficiency savings outlined last week in its ten-year Business Plan. It replaces the existing Public Finance Initiative (PFI) contract, and sees TfL get ownership of the Oyster brand.

The system was originally created, and has been maintained, via a PFI contract held between TfL and TranSys, a consortium whose principal partners are EDS and Cubic; other partners included Fujitsu Services Ltd. and WS Atkins Consultants Ltd.

TranSys was responsible for developing, installing, managing and maintaining London's automated fare collection system including the Oyster card system, on behalf of TfL.

The contract was put in place in 1998 for a term of 17 years but in August 2008, TfL gave notice to terminate the contract with the TranSys consortium; the break has come into effect this week.

Cetrica has appointed David Bickerton as its global chief information officer (CIO); he joins from British Gas, a Centrica subsidiary.

Bickerton is now heading up the development and delivery of an integrated information system strategy for the energy group.

Bickerton joined Centrica in 2004 and has previously worked for Fujitsu and ICL where he held a number of general management roles.

As the British Gas CIO, Bickerton took the company’s IT in-house, breaking ties with IT supplier Accenture in a highly-publicised legal battle over a billing system.

He then rebuilt the firm's IT department which now comprises more than 600 employees, who have delivered around 180 projects in 2009 in connection to the billing platform. An additional 100 staff hires are expected this year.

The news of Bickerton's promotion follow the release of Centrica's financial results last month - the company's profits jumped 65% to £886m in the first six months of the year, fuelled by higher gas prices and a strong performance from its US arm Direct Energy.

The Centrica CIO role had been vacant for some time; the previous CIO at Centrica was Gareth Lewis, now chief information officer at the Financial Services Authority.

British Gas has yet to find a replacement for Bickerton.

Dell has acquired 3PAR, a global provider of highly-virtualised storage solutions with advanced data management features, including dynamic tiering and thin provisioning, for multi-tenant cloud-computing environments.

The acquisition will allow Dell to lead an open and integrated approach to data management delivers increased efficiency with a goal of radically reducing data management costs and significantly streamlining operations.

These savings enable Dell customers to make room in their budgets for other strategic investments. 3PAR’s product portfolio complements Dell’s goal to make IT simpler and more affordable.

Dell plans to make 3PAR an integral part of storage portfolio, including PowerVault, EqualLogic and Dell/EMC. With 3PAR, Dell will offer systems and customer choice at every storage tier, from direct-attach to highly-virtualised, clustered SANS.

The transaction is valued at approximately $1.15 billion, net of 3PAR’s cash. Terms of the acquisition were approved by the board of directors of each company.

After closing, Dell plans to maintain and invest in additional engineering and sales capability. There are no plans to move the current operations.

3PAR was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Fremont.