Industry news

Release Consulting, an independent IT consultancy specialising in the music and entertainment industries, has this week finalised an agreement with Universal Music Group (UMG) to service its international IT digital initiatives department.

In fact, the new specialist outsourcer was spun out of Universal in February this year by its founding MD, Will Lovegrove. The ambition now, he says, is to build out into new areas from the foundation stone of music-giant expertise that he and his team have acquired.

“I was working inside Universal for five years and built what I thought was a very high-performing technology team in a media company and we've taken that team out and formed a consultancy. Our ambition is to carry on doing what we were doing for Universal but for other similar types of company. Obviously other music labels spring to mind, but also broadcasting companies and publishing companies as well.”

Release Consulting says that it offers entertainment companies the opportunity to benefit from the IT expertise behind the systems that enable Universal's international digital supply chain.

However, the real core of the new company's business is not entertainment or the media, necessarily, but intellectual- property-based organisations of all kinds, and how they digitise their assets and manage them.

“We were involved in setting up the IT systems, workflows and processes to help Universal exploit its digital audio archives,” says Lovegrove.

“So [such assets might be] sitting over here in an archive system surrounded by metadata designed for a specific purpose, but they perhaps need to be over there instead, so new metadata needs to be written, and then the material needs to be sent out over corporate systems. At the end of that process is consuming the material in an online form in an online channel by retailers or consumers.

That process and that learning and expertise that we've developed, I think could be applied to broadcasters and publishers as well, where intellectual property is at the heart of that process. ”

For many organisations, those archives may date back decades, perhaps? “Yep, absolutely,” says Lovegrove. “We understand archives, we understand incomplete data. We understand that data collected a number of years ago may not have all the things a company needs to do things with it in today's age. So we understand a lot of the issues and complexities of companies that deal with intellectual property."

In fact, Lovegrove's business is in many ways a traditional IT outsourcing one: “On the practical side, we understand international media companies, we understand how projects are governed with multiple stakeholders in multiple countries – with language barriers and time barriers,” he says.

“On that very pragmatic basis we understand how projects can work in international environments, in large companies. Where I see those kinds of indicators then I see where we can add value and have a meaningful conversation.”

Of course, broadcasters are ahead of the game in the UK, with the BBC's iPlayer and its plans announced this week to digitise its entire archive, or at least create a webpage for every programme ever broadcast.

“What happened to music five years ago is now happening to other vertical sectors today,” agrees Lovegrove. “They are making advances and tackling issues such as making their archives available and deciding whether to use their own software or other people's software, and which stage in the value chain do they want to occupy and what does that mean for their own internal resources and how they change and adapt and evolve.”

For Lovegrove, though, these conversations should happen internally before Release is called in. “What I've seen with companies that deal in intellectual property is that they are investigating as many different strategies as they can. Strategic business planning is not one of our billable services.”

Music, cinema/video and broadcasting are three industries that are being rewritten by the day by Internet-based businesses, from the original Napster – which, aside from all the noise about piracy, arguably proved both the business model and the market of online music distribution and saved the industry billions of dollars in R&D – to YouTube, Bebo, Amiestreet.com and MySpace.

Does Lovegrove have any bets of his own about what business model might succeed? “My opinions are as a consumer. I get involved where by and large a company has already set out its strategy and they want it executed.

For myself as a consumer, I like and want subscription services to prosper. I worry about advertising based services... I understand how they might work with very established, very famous high-profile stars, but the music business is also about nurturing new talent and I don't see how they would get a share of the revenue stream from advertising, when the media buyers don't understand who they are and what they do.”

For Lovegrove, then, his business is not about how innovative the strategy might be – that is down to the customer – but instead about making it work. “That is the real challenge. However innovative your business model, your back office systems must be geared to operate in a certain way. There's innovation in business models in the front office, but being able to to fulfil those is where I tend to be involved.... and how you relate those innovative ideas to a major [label].”

So the media companies may be hedging their bets up front, but Lovegrove's money is invested in the thing that never changes: the backroom; the real engine of any business.

A "damning", confidential Joint Intelligence Committee report into the security situation in Iraq, and a top-secret document assessing the weaknesses of terrorist network al-Qaeda have been found on a Surrey-bound commuter train, and handed in to the BBC.

A nationwide police hunt for the missing documents had been set in motion, only for a passenger to find the seven-page document – wrapped in a business magazine – on a train out of Waterloo. The papers belonged to a senior official.

This latest security breach is yet more evidence that private or top-secret data is being entrusted to public officials who have little regard for, of knowledge of, security protocols, and that even the most basic security measures are not being followed by the Government and its agencies in the handling of sensitive information.

The security lapse is the latest in a woeful list of preventable public-sector breaches, which have included the loss of data on 25 million child benefit claims in internal post, mislaid personnel records for the armed services, the loss of patient details by several NHS trusts, dozens of mislaid or stolen government laptops, and the mishandling of data on driving tests.

Each of these cases was preventable, and all are inexcusable. The private sector has not been immune, but the public sector is in the employ of British citizens and is entrusted by them with our national security, and our individual security.

The time has surely come for a bottom-up assessment of security and data management procedures, rather than the top-down approach favoured by a Whitehall that is fond of throwing money at projects, but which has scant regard for training, staff, and management.

Let's say it again: security is about people, not about technology; security is about policy and good management, not about the size of the deal; security is about the most junior employee in the office, not the CEO or the minister; security is about not sitting on a crowded train with top-secret documents while clinching confidential deals on your mobile... it's not about hackers and firewalls.

One can only imagine the arrogance and stupidity of the official involved, flouting conventions concerning encryption and location as he joined bankers and brokers on the train home, the document nestled in his copy of the FT like some advertising insert.

Indeed, it's becoming clear that the Government's attitude to data is akin to the City's attitude to stocks and shares: they're things to be traded, and are only of value en masse. In a portfolio of stocks, you hope to win more than you lose. It's a national scandal and until Whitehall reviews security at every level, all plans for a national ID scheme should be put on hold.

Proctor and Gamble, the consumer goods giant, has selected BT for an ITO contract worth over £330 million.

BT is tasked to provide a broad and integrated portfolio of services in support of P&G's IT requirements. This includes WAN infrastructure across more than 1,100 locations in more than 82 countries and the migration of P&G’s legacy infrastructure across to state-of-the-art, high-speed network technology. BT will also manage security, conferencing, remote access, voice and IP telephony services and Internet services.

By standardising the technology used across the business P&G hopes to benefit from greater cost efficiency and control whilst increasing quality of customer service.  The network infrastructure and associated applications are also designed to ensure compliance with numerous policy, regulatory and security standards.

ICAP plc, a major force in financial information delivery and brokering, has selected Accenture to develop and maintain its EU credit-trading platform.

The five year project will be delivered through Accenture’s Global Delivery Network, which includes over 50 delivery centres across five different continents.

James Dawson, Business Manager of credit products at ICAP, said: “This initiative is designed to increase the capabilities and cost-efficiencies of our credit-trading platform in order to continue to drive growth in an increasingly dynamic and evolving global marketplace”.

Steria, a European leader in the deployment of transport IT systems, has been chosen to deploy a large-scale taxi management system for Aéroports de Lyon.

The new system, to be delivered in partnership with IES, Representative and FTPC, aims to reduce passengers' taxi wait times significantly and give the Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport means to monitor and manage taxis much more efficiently. The airport, which caters for up to seven million passengers annually, hopes the system to play an integral part in ensuring well managed and regular taxi services for customers.

This new contract follows similar systems rolled out at the Paris Charles de Gaulle and London Heathrow airports.

Cognizant a leading provider of global consulting, technology and business process services, today announced the acquisition of substantially all of the assets of Los Angeles, CA-based Strategic Vision Consulting, Inc. (SVC), a leading management and technology consulting firm with over 60 employees serving the media and entertainment industry. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

SVC focuses on high-impact consulting and systems implementation for leading media and entertainment companies, including the major studios, broadcasters, post-production facilities and interactive media companies. In addition, SVC possesses extensive experience providing technology strategy and planning, and program and project management services.

"We welcome the SVC team to Cognizant. This acquisition will expand our consulting capabilities in the media and entertainment industry and will allow us to help media and entertainment companies respond to the opportunities brought about by the digital transformation of the industry," said Francisco D’Souza, president and CEO, Cognizant. "The combination of SVC’s strong relationships in the entertainment industry and Cognizant’s global delivery model positions Cognizant as a services leader within the fast-growing media and entertainment industry."

"We are very pleased to join the Cognizant family," said Frank Leal, co-founder and managing principal, SVC. "The combination of our market-leading consulting capability in the entertainment segment and Cognizant’s strengths as a top global services player will allow us to deliver superior services to our collective clients by providing them with a broader range of services. We found a great cultural fit between both companies in terms of commitment to unparallel client satisfaction, entrepreneurial spirit, corporate culture, and overall vision for the future of the global services industry."

China Telecom, China’s largest fixed network operator, has selected Alcatel-Lucent for a multi-million Euro contract to manage the expansion of its nation-wide IP metro area networks.

Alcatel-Lucent will provide IP routing solutions to help China Telecom deliver premium IP services to its residential and business customers in the densely populated regions of Jiangsu, Guangdong, Shanghai, Sichuan, Hubei, Guizhou, Ningxia and Gansu.

The project supports China Telecom’s initiative to transform itself into a full service operator. Once the solution has been fully deployed, China Telecom will be able to provide multiple IP-based services such as 3G wireless broadband, IPTV and virtual private network (VPN) services using a single network infrastructure.

Olivia Qiu, President of Alcatel Shanghai Bell, said: “Service providers are looking for solutions that can support the effective delivery of high-quality next-generation services. This latest win with China Telecom is another example of a tier-one operator who has chosen the Alcatel-Lucent service routing portfolio as the foundation for its network transformation project.”

Sunrise, the second largest telecommunications provider in Switzerland, has awarded Alcatel-Lucent a seven year contract to manage the operation of its mobile, fixed and data networks.

Through the deal, worth 340 million Euros to Alcatel, Sunrise hopes to ensure the long-term high quality deployment and management of the network and significantly reduce operational costs.

Under the terms of the deal, 290 employees will be transferred between the two organisations.

HSBC, one of the world’s largest financial sercives institutions, has renewed and extended its outsourcing relationship with Capgemini.

The relationship, which has existed for the last 17 years, will see Capgemini continue to support HSBC in several key strategic businesses, including Consumer Lending, Credit Cards, Group Consumer Finance and Insurance. Capgemini’s remit extends across all HSBC IT from legacy to modern Web-based systems used in: improving customer experience; launching new products; meeting compliance needs; and entering new geographies.

John Carr, chief operating officer at HSBC Technology Services, said: “Renewing our relationship with Capgemini accelerates the benefits of the global delivery model, paving the path for amplified productivity, predictability and speed.”

Through the renewal, HSBC is expected to use 4,500 man-years of Capgemini resources by the end of 2010.

The buzzword ‘outsourcing’ has been a much talked about trend in global business for decades and it’s more prevalant than ever. Faced with an increase in globalisation and the need to cut costs while ramping up productivity, organisations are moving services, processes and product development abroad – or simply out of house. One core function being outsourced more and more is application development.

For many, outsourcing development will be the best decision they ever make because it promises cost savings and increased profits. Others are not so fortunate. Roughly 47% of outsourcing projects are being cancelled before they’re completed, according to research from Diamond Technology Consultants. Once you bring in a team of outside developers and consultants to take on specific areas of your application development, daunting challenges can appear, not least of which is maintaining communications and cohesiveness among the entire development team.

Since you can’t rely on an outsourced organisation to share your IT culture or understand your rules, it’s imperative that you have systems in place to ensure everyone is communicating well and moving in the same direction. Fortunately, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions are designed to help meet this challenge. With ALM you gain control, processes, visibility and accountability at each stage of the development cycle.

DECIDING TO OUTSOURCE – THE BENEFITS

What if someone told you that you could double the size of your application development organisation without increasing cost; or that you could take advantage of a pool of skilled engineers in a wide variety of technologies without having them all on your payroll? Now more than ever, businesses understand that linking technology with best practices is the way to gain and maintain competitive advantage. Successful organisations are responding with outsourcing strategies -- understanding that evolution and adaptation of business processes are essential for survival.

Outsourcing promises a list of benefits that you could probably find on any CIO’s wish list:

• Add high skill/low cost resources to your development team

• Add new areas of technical competency

• Increase delivery predictability

• Increase productivity

• Rapidly access additional staff resources in response to shifts in demand or for specific project needs

• Increase flexibility in managing staff budget

Taking advantage of the significant benefits offered by outsourcing while maintaining communications and cohesiveness across teams will ultimately be the difference between success and failure.

DECIDING TO OUTSOURCE – THE MUST-HAVES

Keeping control in your court

Maintaining management control is a critical factor for successful outsourcing. If you lose control of the processes, the promised benefits of outsourcing will never be realised. You need visibility into the project backlog, resource allocation, and current status. You need confidence that the process you defined is enforced and automated, regardless of where the development is occurring. If you’re subject to compliance or best-practices audits, you must ensure that the appropriate tracking and reporting is in place for all development locations. All of these can be addressed by ALM.

Process visibility

One of the most important ingredients of your ALM solution is that it puts everyone involved—IT managers and developers, whether outsourced or in-house—onto the same solution. IT managers gain the much-needed visibility into the development processes—who’s doing what, how they’re doing it, how long it takes, and when goals are being met or missed. Developers gain a clear view into what they need to do next and, most importantly, what's been done by other developers, whether they’re in the next cubicle or in India. This eliminates any wasted duplication of efforts. And this visibility is critical to the management of outsourced software development processes because without it, neither process definition nor measurement can occur.

Traceability for compliance

We all know regulatory compliance is no easy exercise for organisations large or small, so when you add a team of consultants across the globe into the mix, you have a whole new layer of complexity. But with ALM it doesn't really matter. Since the outsourced team works from your ALM solution, you have a built-in, structured, repeatable, and auditable software development process. Compliance is simply a matter of setting up the appropriate processes and generating the necessary reports. The solution enforces your compliance strategy and stores the necessary historical information, regardless of the location of the users.

Managing access

ALM solutions are absolutely essential for remote, outside development teams to successfully work with the organisation. With ALM, you can carefully restrict access and ensure that only those parts of your code base that you wish to make available are accessible. A sophisticated ALM solution has both access control of software components and control for application releases. It provides the ability to grant access to a particular release of code or to create a specific release just for outside exposure. This limits exposure of the code base to outsiders and limits access to proprietary software.

In addition, a complete ALM solution can combine task management with access control and release management for efficient, managed outsourced development. A development manager can specify tasks for code that’s released to remote developers and manage geographically distributed developers as easily as in-house developers.

Milestone checking

Since outsourcing contracts typically contain service-level agreements, it’s necessary to have solutions in place to check compliance. What better way to ensure you’re getting what you paid for than to have an ALM solution tracking every project and every piece of code that’s touched by the outsourcer? IT managers can track and manage every task throughout its lifecycle and proactively manage the outsourcing relationship. The solution provides the accountability necessary to enforce the terms of the contract and to facilitate the productive use of the outsourcing resource.

INDUSTRY EXAMPLE

One of the world’s largest international insurance companies is outsourcing a significant number of application development projects, and is using the Aldon application lifecycle management technology to ensure all involved - IT managers and outsourced or in-house developers - are on the same solution. This means that the communication, coordination and visibility of the applications being worked on in different areas is manageable.

With developers knowing what they need to do next and what has been done by developers around the world, duplication of efforts is eliminated and management can define and measure progress.

Another additional benefit that this insurance house has seen is being able to track the costs of performing a particular service. The technology maintains information about the benefits that the organisation expects to receive and what they actually receive, which allays the business’ overall greatest fears – that the effort won’t pay off.

OVERCOMING OUTSOURCING FEARS WITH ALM

According to the London School of Economics, by 2012 over half (58%) of the average corporation’s IT budget will be spent on outsourcing. To ensure success, the requirement for improving the management of outsourced development is becoming more apparent. By adding an ALM solution to the outsourcing formula you can address the development needs of developers, IT managers and CIOs alike, as they embark on new development initiatives like Web 2.0 and service-oriented architecture. Appropriate use of the solution allows IT organisations to take advantage of the flexibility, productivity and cost savings offered by outsourcing without sacrificing management control. At the same time it will help organisations remain competitive in their quest to evolve with trends in the industry.