Industry news

Anglian Water has signed a two-year, multimillion-pound contract with Solution 1 for the management of its communications infrastructure.

Solution 1 will work to develop a converged hosted IP platform including voice over IP and the infrastructure to support the two million calls that Anglian takes each year. The company hopes to improve service levels while increasing the efficiency of its customer management processes.

Chris Boucher, IS director at Anglian Water, commented: “The challenges we face range from the supply of connectivity services to a large number of field based staff, to ensuring we have reliable telephony connections to over 1000 treatment installations".

Capgemini has confirmed that it will acquire Getronics PinkRoccade Business Application Services BV (BAS NV), a unit of Getronics, for €255 million.

Getronics' owner, Royal KPN, said in February it plans to divest, in full or part, several of Getronics' businesses with combined annual sales of 800 million euros.

IBM has announced that it will acquire ILOG, the Paris-based software company, in a deal valued at $340 million.

The company has announced plans to combine ILOG’s software with its business process management software and service oriented architecture technology. The deal is reported to be worth approximately €215 million, a 37 percent premium on ILOG’s Friday share price.

Tom Rosamilia, General Manager at IBM WebSphere, commented: "Companies across all industries are looking for technologies to help them manage their processes with more flexibility so they can keep up with changing business conditions. ILOG's software allows businesses to more effectively manage and automate the decision making process, giving companies an opportunity to react with incredible speed and accuracy. IBM has partnered with ILOG for over a decade, and by adding ILOG's capabilities to IBM's software portfolio, this is a great combination to provide value to our clients".

Siemens has extended an existing agreement with T-Systems to operate its high-performance network in Germany and 22 countries in Northern and Eastern Europe for a further three years. The contract will be extended until September 2011 and is expected to be worth around two million Euros.

CAT Group, the worldwide provider of transport and logistics services, has awarded EDS a seven-year ITO contract to develop, integrate, deploy and support all of the company’s software applications.

This contract builds upon an existing IT infrastructure agreement CAT Group awarded to EDS in 2005. Under that agreement, which includes network management and governance and continues through 2015, EDS continues to manage CAT Group’s entire IT infrastructure, which includes 2,000 work stations at 131 sites in 19 countries.

Alejandro Forbes, CEO of the CAT Group, said: “With this new agreement, we are expecting a high level of IT cost optimization, valued at about $44 million over the next five years”.

Sparkassen Informatik’s subsidiary IZB and FinanzIT, both IT service providers for the German group of savings banks, have expanded their contract with T-Systems for telecommunications IT services until 2013. The deal is reported to be worth around three million euros.

As part of the agreement, Sparkassen Informatik and FinanzIT are entering into a technology partnership with T-Systems, the aim of which is to develop a new IP network for voice and data. It is designed to replace the previous data network provided by T-Systems.

The network will link together Sparkassen Informatik, FinanzIT and approximately 480 institutes of the Sparkassen organization in Germany. A total of 16,000 branches will access all the data and applications made available by the two IT service providers via the network for the Sparkassen organization.

The National Centre for Antarctic & Ocean Research (NCAOR), a research body dedicated to the survey and exploration of the seas, has enlisted TCS to undertake a comprehensive marine geophysical data acquisition program for the Antarctic region. The deal forms part of a national project to help understand the marine ecosystem and provide data to scientific communities to help them better understand global changes in weather and the environment.

The contract, awarded on the behalf of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, will see TCS work to make the outputs of scientific models available through web interfaces. These interfaces will then be used by scientific organisations who can retrieve data for interpretation and develop appropriate modules for their own their fields of expertise.

Rasik Ravindra, Director of NCAOR, commented: “This data is acquired through strenuous efforts by various scientific communities all over India. It is crucial to treasure this and to create an interface for researchers. I am sure TCS with its huge expertise and specially coming back from an experience of Tsunami Early Warning System for Ministry of Earth Sciences is the right partner for doing this work”.

New York City's Human Resources Administration (HRA), the US body charged with encouraging the social welfare of New Yorkers, has renewed a three-year document management contract with Affiliated Computer Services, the largest provider of BPO services in the US government sector.

Under the agreement, valued at USD $17 million, ACS will collect HRA case documents from multiple points in New York City that are taken to a central location to be inventoried, scanned and indexed. After a rigorous quality control process, the documents are added to HRA's internal imaging system for use by its staff.

"Since 2003, ACS has provided the HRA with outstanding service," said Michael Lavin, HRA's director of imaging systems and support services. "We value the commitment to quality that ACS has brought to the partnership in providing accurate and timely imaging work."

As I mentioned in a recent blog, Africa has been taking a number of small steps (if not yet giant leaps) towards being a centre for offshore BPO services. Ghana, Morocco, Egypt and Senegal are all on analysts' 'ones to watch tables', to which we can add Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. European language skills and near-European timezones are much in the continent's favour.

South Africa has been particularly vocal about its strategy: in recent years the country has stated its intention to create 100,000 BPO seats by 2009.

However, analysts at Frost & Sullivan anticipate that the total number of outsourced seats will reach just 60,000 over the next five to seven years: a long way short of the government's target, and over an extended timescale. It's estimated there are 25,000 BPO seats today, at most.

"The planned growth in the industry is unlikely to be realised under current circumstances," says Frost & Sullivan research analyst Spiwe Chireka.

"This is due to a number of factors, particularly that South Africa's value propositions are not all relevant. The country is relying increasingly on factors such as good language capabilities, favourable timezones, its advanced financial services sector and strong government support which investors are not necessarily looking for anymore." Foreign investment, of course, is crucial to the success of the programme.

Frost & Sullivan says that the number of South African call centres has risen from 450-odd in 2004 to over 1,300 in 2007. That said, the maths are simple: with a maximum of 25,000 BPO seats in total, that's a lot of small operations.

So what are investors looking for? Essentially, IT and contact centre skills, which are thinner on the ground in South Africa, and throughout much of the continent, than they should be.

"Language and timezones have become irrelevant as most offshore destinations are operating 24 hour centres and have large English speaking populations," says Frost & Sullivan's Chireka.

"Also, the largest outsourced services in the US and UK, which are South Africa's target markets, are information technology and contact centres. However, South Africa's IT and contact centre skills are limited, which is a major hindrance to its success as an alternative destination."

Into the mix we should also throw the perceived political instability of small parts of the huge African continent – particularly relevant to a US market whose grasp of overseas affairs is limited in scope and parochial in impact – and the patchy, and therefore expensive, telecoms infrastructure.

That said, India notoriously had one of the worst telecoms networks in the world until very recently, but that has been no brake on its ambitions.

Energias de Portugal (EDP), a leading gas and electricity utility in Spain and Portugal, has selected Oracle to assess and update its ageing SAP infrastructure.

The move comes in light of recent energy deregulation in the Iberian peninsula and in anticipation of the creation of the Internal Electricity Market in Europe. The ongoing process of integrating Spanish and Portuguese electricity markets has required EDP to make its existing SAP-based customer information system (CIS) more efficient in order to enhance relationships with its business customers.