Industry news

Telefonica has opened a new outsourced IT delivery centre built by Accenture to serve the applications and development needs of the Group’s Latin American and European operations.

Under the terms of the contract, Accenture is managing the development and maintenance of applications related to consumer systems, billing and collections, across 17 markets in Latin America and Europe.

The company behind the notorious comparethemeerkat marketing campaign, BGL, has signed a three-year outsourcing agreement with Sabio to manage its contact centre for three years.

Under the agreement, Sabio will support Insurance group, BGL’s voice and data networks, helping to ensure the company’s virtualised Avaya contact centre successfully operates across five major UK sites as well as BGL’s customer service centre in South Africa. Sabio's Intelligent Support operation will also provide 24 hour support monitoring, helping to cater to the company’s two million customers.

Dean Freed, senior manager, IT, at BGL Group, said, "We are committed to providing a high quality, streamlined service to the 2.2 million customers BGL Group looks after, so it is imperative that our customer service infrastructure is always available to support internet and contact centre activities. “

Telekomunikacja Polska Group (TP Group), Poland’s leading telecoms provider, has signed a three year IT outsourcing contract with CGI Group Inc.

CGI will assume responsibility for application support and services whilst working to consolidate its current multi application, multi vendor environment. The group hopes to agreement will improve overall time to market and total cost of ownership.

“TP Group is going through a major re-engineering of its IT services and is looking to the strategic CGI partnership for the leadership, skills, resources, experience as well as the delivery framework to improve productivity and quality in our products and services in the Polish market,” said Piotr Muszynski, COO of TP Group.

Nordic financial services group, Nordea, has appointed Accenture in a five-year application outsourcing contract.

Under the agreement Accenture will help Nordea improve customer service and increase cost efficiencies by developing and maintaining applications that will support the bank’s customer websites.

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The contract will be delivered from Accenture’s centres in Denmark and via its Global Delivery Network in Bangalore, India. Collaborating with Avanade, the outsourcing provider will support the bank’s 30 websites and seven million monthly visitors.

Henrik Korch, chief information officer for marketing at Nordea, said, “This agreement gives us access to skilled resources and the benefits of international expertise in web application development and maintenance, helping to ensure we have the flexibility to ramp up and down according to our demand and changing business needs.”

ITO provider, Wipro Technologies, has announced it has signed a partnership agreement with Philips to offer Blu-ray middleware and solution development services for its customers.

Wipro will enter the Blu-ray market with sub-licensing rights to offer Blu-ray middleware to its customers, which through its partnership with Philips, the company hopes to be offer a reduction in the time-to-market for its customer requirements.

Frederic Guillanneuf, Director IP Licensing, Philips Intellectual Property and Standards, said, “Philips is happy to have this cooperation with Wipro in place, Philips is strongly committed to Blu- ray Disc; the engagement with Wipro, a major supplier of embedded software, will successfully support the further development of the BD market.”

By By Dr Roger Newman, head of UK manufacturing and digital convergence relationship management at Mahindra Satyam

Cloud computing has all the attributes and potential to support a global outsourcing environment with lower infrastructure costs, lower energy costs from eliminating hardware boxes, and the scalability to provide computing resources to meet demand in an unpredictable global market. My view is that we are in a global delivery continuum, where many organisations will originally evolve from crude BPO environments (a lot of lift and shift), explore SaaS delivery to optimise that environment, and ultimately dabble with SaaS apps that can be deployed in a Cloud "plug-in" model.

It is worth noting that the Cloud is by no means a silver bullet to alleviate the challenges of all organisations, but it does represent a tool that can be quickly added to the mix of the arsenal for many. Large enterprises may have sufficient resources internally to accommodate routine business requirements. However, should a need arise to quickly ramp up a business unit or product line, the cloud delivery model becomes a valuable arrow to have in the quiver to quickly enable agility. For companies of any size that have a seasonal business or product line, having this capability is valuable to accommodate peak demand periods without having in-house servers sitting idle at other times. The signs indicate that we'll start emerging from this economic slump in the coming months ahead, and companies need to be ready to scale-up their support infrastructures in a smart fashion to respond.

Increasingly, buyers will reap the benefits of cloud delivery as more major providers enter the market. Many established providers with robust infrastructure, skilled staff and a legacy of delivering high quality services are finding their traditional markets saturated with competition. Cloud computing provides a logical, emerging market that offers opportunities for growing their business. The scramble to offer more benefits at a lower price could well rival the marketing wars we see today in the automotive industry. This can only result in brighter prospects for organisations seeking cloud cover in an economic storm. Outsourcing for the sake of cheap labour will generate some savings in the short-term, but these costs will quickly spring back if you don't follow-through with improved processes and technology that allow for a global operating model. Simply shipping out your ‘mess for less’ is never going to make much of a difference to your bottom-line, and will often end up costing you more in the long-haul. The bottom line is, when an organisation moves into a global outsourcing model, they have to transform the way their business deploys its technology platforms and business processes if they are to generate real cost-efficiencies. Embracing the new developments in the Cloud is a sure way to make an outsourcing experience work on a continual basis.

A recent study conducted by Forrester Consulting on our behalf produced some genuinely interesting findings. We had a fair amount of anecdotal evidence from our own observations that sourcing of telecommunications and network services (TNS) doesn't go to plan. But when the research findings came in we were taken aback at just how widespread the problem actually is.

The independently conducted study found that eight out of 10 TNS sourcing projects are not nearly as efficient as they should be. In fact, the average large firm was wasting the equivalent of 20 per cent of spend for each contract. In total, this wastage adds up to an annual estimated loss of £12 billion. And that's just from the top 500 global companies. Add in smaller businesses and who knows what that figure would be?

Part of the problem seems to be that TNS doesn't get the respect it deserves. According to the research findings, enterprises are spending around 20 per cent of their total IT budgets on TNS. But the amount of time, talent and resources allotted to TNS strategy, sourcing and contract governance doesn't come anywhere near that figure. As a result, businesses end up spending too much money to get too little service from their service providers.

There are, however, enterprises doing it right and we can learn from their experiences. And there are a number of best practices that organisations can follow.

The first key point may sound simplistic but it is far too often overlooked. It is vitally important to formulate a TNS strategic plan that identifies your present and future TNS needs and determines what technologies and services will best meet them. This strategic plan needs to align closely with your IT strategy, which, of course, must align with the overall business strategy. Forrester found that just 54% of organisations pay significant attention to defining their TNS strategy, suggesting that almost half of organisations currently fail to fully align their TNS needs with the future needs of the business.

Next, you need to develop a sourcing strategy. There's far more to this than simply selecting a vendor. In fact, multisourcing, whilst potentially more time-consuming and complex, generally produces better results at lower overall cost than single-vendor projects. The independent research found that most businesses greatly under-estimate the time it takes to undertake a major TNS sourcing project. That can be a huge mistake as there is a clear correlation between under-resourcing and negative outcomes.

The final tip is to bring in external expertise when and where you need it. Naturally, as the CEO of a consultancy, you'd probably expect me to say that. But the independent research backs this up. As Forrester state in the report, "With enterprises typically negotiating a major telecoms contract once every 3+ years, it is unlikely that internal teams will have the necessary experience, skills and tools to manage the process as efficiently as possible. The engagement of external specialists is key – their fees will be more than recouped due to the lower charges and better quality of service achieved." To this point, the research showed significantly higher levels of satisfaction when external help is retained, particularly when assistance was sought in the areas of service level agreement design, RFP processes, contract drafting, pricing and business case modelling, short-list selection, and negotiation.

Adherence to the basic principles highlighted above will go a long way towards positioning you in the group of enterprises who are getting it right. And getting it right has never been more important. With the convergence of voice, data and mobile services into a single unified enterprise-wide infrastructure, the reality is that to neglect the network is to neglect the business.

Uptake of clean energy in the post-Copenhagen world will be driven by national and sub-national policies and the private investment community rather than federal or international policy frameworks, according to Datamonitor.

A new report from the firm predicts that investment in the cleantech sector in 2010 will exceed that in 2009 by a margin of as much as 35 per cent, despite significant current uncertainty in US and EU carbon markets.

Alternatives to emissions cap-and-trade frameworks have emerged in the form of sub-national mandates and incentives for clean energy. Datamonitor expects progress on new global and US climate regimes will be slow and unconvincing this year, but that the race to dominate the emerging clean economy will accelerate regardless, fuelled by unprecedented quantities of green and clean stimulus funding.

Alex Desbarres, senior renewables analyst at Datamonitor, said: “Copenhagen did not deliver the low-carbon vision, clear policy landscape and regulatory frameworks that the energy cleantech investment community had hoped for.

“For all its flaws, however, the Copenhagen accord gave the cleantech community the sense that private investors will drive the transition to a low-carbon economy.”

Freelancer.com, the micro-outsourcing marketplace, has become the world’s most popular outsourcing website topping almost 1,100 jobs per day and 640,000 jobs posted to date.

On March 22nd 2010, Freelancer.com topped 1,100 jobs posted within a 24 hour period, with over 2,100 new users signing up. Around the same time, freelancer.com became also the world's #1 freelancing marketplace for web traffic, with around 0.15% of global Internet users reached, according to Alexa.

"The world is flattening and we are a catalyst for this," said Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com. "Small businesses in the US or UK can now get their brochures designed in Bangladesh, their customer support run from the Philippines, blog managed from Romania, and website developed in India- all for less than the cost of a part time employee in the United States. We are proud to be assisting small businesses increase their efficiency, grow their sales and lower their costs. We are extremely proud that we are the largest and most liquid market for small business outsourcing!" he said.

The National Outsourcing Association (NOA) has launched a survey looking into the outsourcing industry's views on green and corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues. Those readers that take part in the survey will be entered into a prize draw to win Mark Kobayashi Hillary's popular Talking Outsourcing book.

Click to take part in the 10 minute survey.

The NOA will be releasing results in the coming months and going over initial findings at the Association's Green Issues and Corporate Social Responsibility event on the 20th of April.